The Cultural Destruction of Democratic Agency

Abstract

This article develops a cultural sociology of the destruction of democratic agency under platform autocracy. Alongside accounts that locate democracy’s crisis in institutional failure, ideological polarization, or economic grievance, I argue that platform-autocratic formations shape democratic life by reorganizing cultural infrastructure in ways that can erode the collective capacity for action. Democratic agency is progressively hollowed out as the affective conditions that sustain meaning-making, civil solidarity, and mobilization are captured and depleted. This process is theorized through the concept of anaesthetic publicity, which explains how communicative saturation drains and redirects the emotional energy upon which democratic life depends. In such environments, more communication can yield less collective capacity to act, as interpretive clarity weakens, and engagement gives way to collective fatigue. Drawing on the aestheticization thesis, civil sphere theory, and the sociology of interaction ritual, and combining comparative-historical analysis of 6 cases with survey data from 48 countries, the article makes 3 contributions. First, it introduces anaesthetic publicity as a cultural mechanism linking communicative saturation to the weakening of democratic agency. Second, it develops a typology of autocratic communication organized around three forms: (i) closure, (ii) capture, and (iii) saturation. Third, it theorizes the oligarch-platform sovereign as a new configuration of power shaping contemporary public life.