INFORMATIONAL VULNERABILITY AND ALGORITHMIC RATIONALITY

dimensões técnica, subjetiva e epistêmico-coletiva

Abstract

This essay investigates informational vulnerability as a central structure of subjective and collective experience in digital societies. Far from being a mere byproduct of technology, vulnerability is understood as a systematic effect of algorithmic rationality, which reorganizes the conditions of agency, recognition, and deliberation. The analysis unfolds across three complementary layers. At the technical level, it examines how algorithmic devices, particularly recommendation, filtering, and prediction systems, structure behavioral control environments through continuous data feedback. At the subjective level, drawing on Self-Determination Theory, it discusses how the frustration of the basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness shapes subjects who become dependent on social approval, responsiveness, and performative recognition. At the collective-epistemic level, it analyzes the fragmentation of the public sphere, cognitive closure, and the formation of echo chambers, which undermine the bases of mutual understanding and democratic reason. The essay concludes with an interpretation that integrates these three dimensions, showing how the contemporary algorithmic regime produces subtle and interwoven forms of subjection, in which freedom is converted into prediction, identity into profiling, and public life into isolated enclaves.