VISIBILITY AS AN AUTONOMOUS WEAPON OF CYBERCAPITALISM
il y a 1 heure
4 min de lecture
Liviu Poenaru
May 2026
Autonomous weapons begin with a brutal operational sequence: detect, classify, track, select, strike. In military discourse, this refers to systems capable of operating with varying degrees of autonomy in the absence of direct human decision at the moment of action (United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs n.d.). Cybercapitalism has transferred this logic from the battlefield into the field of perception. Visibility now operates as an autonomous weapon: it detects faces, bodies, gestures, crises, mistakes, desires, sexual images, humiliations, and vulnerabilities; it classifies them through platforms; it ranks them through metrics; it amplifies them through feeds; it strikes through exposure. The target is no longer only the body. The target is the image, the reputation, the unconscious, the social bond, and the subject’s capacity to remain unseen.
The governing formula is now visibility + virality + autonomous weapons. Visibility exposes. Virality accelerates. Autonomy removes ethical hesitation. Together, they rule societies globally by deciding what appears, what disappears, what becomes scandal, what becomes desire, what becomes shame, what becomes political truth, and what becomes disposable noise. This is the contemporary form of the spectacle: not simply a world of images, but a social order governed through images (Debord 1967). It is also the operational logic of surveillance capitalism, where lived experience is converted into data, prediction, and behavioral modulation (Zuboff 2019). The image no longer needs to be true, dignified, legal, or consensual. It only needs to circulate. The system does not ask: is this ethical? It asks: does it move, provoke, retain attention, and generate engagement?
Societies, individuals, and their unconscious lives are now ruled by autonomous weapons. These are not only drones, missiles, or robotic systems. They are perceptual weapons, sexual weapons, reputational weapons, affective weapons, algorithmic weapons. They govern attention, but also shame, envy, fear, imitation, desire, paranoia, identification, and self-image. The unconscious is no longer outside the market; it is one of cybercapitalism’s main territories. Platforms are not passive containers of communication; they are infrastructures of extraction, circulation, and control (Srnicek 2017). In communicative capitalism, circulation itself becomes a mode of capture: expression is absorbed into feedback loops, metrics, and drive (Dean 2010). A person’s face can be turned into synthetic pornography. A child’s humiliation can become entertainment. A psychiatric collapse can become content. A victim’s pain can become a viral asset. UNFPA identifies technology-facilitated gender-based violence as including deepfakes, image-based abuse, doxxing, impersonation, cyberstalking, and online harassment; this is where visibility becomes weaponized against the subject rather than used to represent them (UNFPA 2024).
The ethical problems are severe, and they remain under-discussed in both political and academic realms. Consent collapses because people are made visible without choosing the terms of their exposure. Dignity collapses because the person becomes optical material. Truth collapses because synthetic or decontextualized images can produce reputational reality even when they are false. Accountability collapses because harm is distributed across platforms, anonymous accounts, recommendation systems, advertisers, users, archives, and jurisdictions. Repair collapses because deletion rarely cancels circulation. Political debate usually splits the issue into privacy, pornography, misinformation, cybercrime, child safety, platform regulation, or AI governance. Academic debate often fragments it across media theory, law, psychiatry, feminist theory, criminology, psychoanalysis, and AI ethics. What remains insufficiently named is the system itself: visibility as an autonomous weapon. Directive (EU) 2024/1385 is relevant only at this precise point: it provides a legal frame for cyberviolence, including non-consensual intimate images and digitally manipulated sexual material, but it does not fully theorize the wider regime of visibility, virality, and cybercapitalist exposure (European Parliament and Council 2024).
The mental forecast is direct: the central political struggle will be over exposure. Societies are no longer ruled only by states, laws, markets, police, armies, or institutions. They are ruled by autonomous systems that organize visibility, virality, emotion, and the unconscious. Whoever controls visibility controls social reality. Whoever controls virality controls collective emotion. Whoever controls autonomous systems controls the speed at which judgment is bypassed. Against this regime, ethics must begin before circulation, not after harm. The right not to be exposed, the right not to be made viral, the right not to be synthetically sexualized, the right not to have trauma converted into content, and the right to disappear from hostile visibility must become central political rights. Without this shift, cybercapitalism will continue to sell exposure as freedom while using visibility as punishment, extraction, discipline, and attack.
REFERENCES
Dean, Jodi. 2010. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Debord, Guy. 1967. The Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel.
European Parliament and Council. 2024. “Directive (EU) 2024/1385 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 on Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence.” Official Journal of the European Union.https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1385/oj/eng
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