Mass Consciousness Manipulation in the Digital Age: An Ontological Turn

Abstract

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of mass consciousness manipulation in the context of the “ontological turn”, which is gaining critical importance in the context of global hybrid challenges. Mass consciousness manipulation, which in the Modern era acted as an instrumental addition to political or economic domination, is transforming into a total ontological turn in the first third of the 21st century. The global data infrastructure creates a new ontological reality. Humanity no longer uses digital devices simply as tools. It already exists within an algorithmically generated world, and reality itself acts as a managed service. In this context, manipulation ceases to be an episodic influence and turns into a constant background of human existence, which largely determines the structure of our experience. It can be stated that "being-in-the-interface replaces Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, where the world appears as an array of data suitable for cognitive design. The study also touches on issues of total digitalization, the epistemology of simulacra, and the prospects for neohumanist resistance in the context of hyper-algorithmization.

The purpose of the study is to carry out a philosophical analysis of the manipulation of mass consciousness through the prism of the ontology of the interface, criticize predictive models and substantiate the ways of returning to authentic subjectivity. The study is based on the methodology of “deep immersion”, content analysis, which provides an opportunity to represent the ontological deconstruction of the world, the anthropological radicalization of the concept of “death of the subject”.

The results of the study confirmed that manipulation is possible when the subject loses the ability to verify reality, his social presence. The transformation of manipulative strategies from classical ideological processing to modern mechanisms of “predictive models” and the concept of “surveillance capitalism” is analyzed. The concept of “ontological turn” and the strategy of the existential act of restoring human autonomy and authentic subjectivity are substantiated. It is proven that modern manipulation is not only a psychological influence, but an ontological operation that requires an ethical response.

The conclusions determine that the ontology of the interface replaces real experience with simulation. Manipulation becomes all-encompassing, but not obvious to the subject who perceives the code as reality. In the process of manipulation, the colonization of reality by artificial intelligence occurs, where a person gradually becomes only a source of entropy, subject to order by the code. Gradually, human existence becomes only an addition to the algorithm. It can be stated that the digitalization of the life world gradually leads to what is called the “epistemic disappearance of the world”.

Therefore, the restoration of ontological sovereignty requires a break with the logic of the interface, requires a return to embodied experience that resists digitization, requires the return of the reality of the body and things. The question of where the algorithm ends and the person begins becomes a question of the ontological survival of the subject as a free being in the era of total surveillance. Manipulation is not only a lie about the world, it is the creation of the world. Post-truth is being created as a structural element of reality. For post-truth, truth interferes with the process of controlling the subject's behavior. Each act of the subject's consciousness is only a line in the code of the neural network of domination. Resistance to ontological destruction begins with a return to the presence of the "here-and-now" and the recognition of the unknowable depth of the Other. Only by abandoning algorithmic comfort can we hope to restore human dignity in the digital world.