From the “World at Home” to the “Disabling World”. the New Dominant Logics Hidden behind Infrastructure.

Surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) governed by online platforms allows the emergence of a “world at home” that offers experiences and products directly to people’s homes. The fast and pervasive availability of every good supports the need for comfort. The logic of the “comfort zone” programmed by the platforms implements a progressive process of “disablement” in terms of a) decrease in the human capacity to make choices without being supported by the platform; b) decrease in the human capacity to elaborate subjective creative contents without using digital tools. This specific infrastructural connectivity determines “the welding between the infrastructures of things” and the “infrastructures of experience” (Borghi, 2021, 2) but hides a progressive process of cognitive disabling of “unpredictable human decisions” (D’Alessandro, 2023). From this point of view, the concept ‘infrastructure’ must be interpreted not only as material power to connect and consume quickly, but above all as "cognitive power to disable" alternative choices to the logic of platforms. Through the concept of infrastructure, we can observe what is presupposed by the new spirit of capitalism: an addiction that depowers human reflexivity and transforms the social actor into a socio-technical actant programmed to act and consume in an automatic and pre-reflexive manner. This evident reversal between the active agency of the platform governed by A.I. and the disabled agency of the human actant transforms the imaginary of society and goes beyond Boltanski and Chiapello's (2014) theses. We will explicate the characteristics of ‘disabling’ by examining: a) Enshittification, a process through which a platform, initially useful and of quality, becomes less and less useful and frustrating for users (Doctorow, 2022); b) The process of content generation by a chat bot on the basis of a prompt that, in the long run, triggers unusual forms of content pathology (Berry and Stockman, 2023; Floridi, 2024).