Political news and information is increasingly accessed through online media platforms, as opposed to being accessed via direct engagement with news publishers. The Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report, drawing on a survey of nearly 95,000 respondents across 47 countries, found that 22% of online news consumers now identify a news website or app as their primary source of news, a figure that has fallen ten percentage points since 2018, with the majority, 78%, finding their news through social media, search engines or aggregators (Newman et al., 2024, p. 10). Matched against the 5.24 billion people connected through social media infrastructure globally, 63.9% of the world’s entire population (Kemp, 2025), this indicates that approximately four billion people are receiving political news and information primarily through an architecture they did not design and whose curation logic remains opaque to them. This is not to say that four billion people are actively engaging with political content: posting, sharing, activating. Survey data indicates that 34% of social media users regard the platforms as important to them personally for expressing political opinions, and 42% consider them important for getting involved with political or social issues (Pew Research Center, 2025). These figures are themselves an approximation. As the Reuters Institute cautions, findings of this kind are best understood as representative of the online population rather than the population as a whole, with near-universal coverage in much of the developed West but a considerably wider gap between online and total population in less affluent nations (Newman et al., 2024, p. 6). What can be said with confidence is that in much of Europe and the United States the online figure is approaching saturation, with a consequent scale of potential impact that may give cause for concern when considering noumenal erosion specifically and the quality of democracy in general. Figures for less developed nations point to rapid and closing growth: social media users grew by 4.1% globally in the year to January 2025, adding over 200 million new users, with the majority of that growth concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where platform adoption continues to accelerate (Kemp, 2025). The numbers are striking. Approaching two thirds of the world’s population now connected through social media infrastructure, growing at over 200 million new users annually, with saturation approaching in the developed West and rapid acceleration continuing elsewhere. But scale is not the argument.

Considered through a noumenal lens, the reach of platform infrastructure establishes these systems as the primary public sphere through which the conditions for political agency are now formed for the majority of the world’s citizens. This is not because four billion people are actively deliberating within them — they are not. It is because the platforms constitute the architectural environment within which political identity is shaped, the sense of what participation means is formed and the understanding of what is contestable is determined, before any deliberation begins. Where Weber’s iron cage operated through an explicit hierarchy, a many-to-one structure mediated by the street-level bureaucrat who retained at least a residual space for human judgement, the digital cage presents the phenomenal appearance of its opposite: a many-to-many public sphere of horizontal connection, peer exchange and shared community. It is this appearance that makes the constraint invisible. As Pagano (2025) argues, the digital cage organises perception itself, determining what is measured and what is passed over, what is surfaced and what is blocked. The four billion who receive their political news and information through platforms do not experience this as a constraint. They experience it as connection, community and access. That is precisely what noumenal power, in Forst’s sense, does: it occupies the space of reasons not by blocking participation but by pre-determining the conditions under which participation becomes thinkable at all. The paradox with which this section is concerned — participation at its phenomenal peak, democracy at its lowest point in decades — begins here.

Democratic backsliding has become one of the central preoccupations of contemporary political science — discussions concerned with diagnosing the conditions under which democracies deteriorate, identifying the mechanisms of decline and exploring the prospects for democratic recovery. The question raised by the scale of platform reach documented above is whether that body of work possesses the analytical tools to address what is happening. The argument of what follows is that it does not, not because it is wrong, but because it is looking in the wrong place. The wrong place is the institutional surface. The right place is the architectural conditions that determine what kind of democracies we arrive at.

“Democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps” — so Levitsky and Ziblatt describe the process by which democracies deteriorate in the twenty-first century (2018, p. 3). When considering the quality of democracy and how it may be assessed, the phrase captures something important. Democratic decline is not a binary event. Erosion is a gradual process, which means that measuring it requires not a simple present/absent classification but a framework capable of tracking quality and degree of erosion. The V-Dem Institute provides such a framework. Its five core indices — electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian — treat democracy not as a single condition but as a set of linked principles, each measurable on a scale, each capturing a dimension of democratic life (Nord et al., 2026, p. 7).

These five indices can be consolidated into two registers, each capturing a distinct layer of democratic life.

Where Register 1 measures the procedural conditions of participation, Register 2 measures the institutional architecture through which democratic participation is made accountable and rights are formally protected. Rule of law and horizontal accountability are normative principles, the noumenal conditions that precede and exceed their reduction to measurable outcomes. Accountability and the rule of law are not created by democratic institutions but are foundational conditions that democracy requires in order to operate. When treated as measurable outputs rather than normative grounds, they become vulnerable to precisely the erosion this section addresses.

The two-register framework provides a lens through which democratic erosion can be tracked with some precision — whether assessed across the narrower electoral and liberal platform or the fuller five-index rubric. It does not, however, explain the mechanisms of that erosion. The democratic backsliding literature has developed as a scholarly response to the observable deterioration of democratic conditions globally, making the mechanisms of decline from within its central concern.

Bermeo’s typology charts the principal ways in which contemporary democratic breakdown occurs (2016). She identifies what makes contemporary backsliding so difficult to detect and measure (2016, pp. 5–6). Where earlier democratic failures tended towards binary changes — military coups, executive seizures of power — Bermeo observes that twenty-first century backsliding characteristically operates through legal means: executive aggrandisement, strategic harassment of opponents and the gradual dismantling of institutional constraints. Elected leaders retain democratic legitimacy while systematically undermining democratic substance. The process is legal in form. It is open to challenge through existing institutional channels but corrosive in effect. It leaves the procedural surface of democracy largely intact while weakening the accountability architecture beneath. It is, in the terms Levitsky and Ziblatt capture, erosion in barely visible steps (2018, p. 3).

Levitsky and Ziblatt build on Bermeo’s analysis. They argue that current democratic breakdown is driven not by external assault, but by the erosion of two informal norms: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. Their guardrails argument rests on a distinction between de jure and de facto democratic protection (2018, p. 102). Written constitutions establish the formal architecture of democracy, placing de jure constraints on executive power. What actually protects democratic substance in practice is the de facto observance of informal norms by political actors who could, legally, choose to violate them. This argument applies equally to democracies such as the United Kingdom, which relies almost entirely on convention and precedent observance for its democratic protections, rather than written constitutional guarantees. When those norms erode, the formal institutions of democracy remain but their protective function is lost. Elected leaders can exploit constitutional ambiguities and subordinate independent institutions, all within the formal boundaries of democratic procedure.

The United Kingdom provides a vivid illustration of how the absence of a codified constitution creates vulnerability to precisely this form of norm erosion. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament for five weeks in 2019, ruled unlawful and void by the Supreme Court as an unjustified interference with parliamentary sovereignty (Miller v Prime Minister, 2019), deployed a formal prerogative power for the improper purpose of curtailing parliamentary scrutiny of government policy. The same government threatened judicial consequences following the Supreme Court ruling, with ministers characterising lawyers and judges who ruled against the government as “lefty” obstacles to democratic will. This conduct the International Bar Association condemned as showing a disregard for the principles of international law and constituting part of the government’s wider attack against the rule of law (IBA/IBAHRI, 2020). The UK’s experience is not unique. As McMillan (2022) documents in a survey of the global assault on the rule of law, the delegitimisation of judges and lawyers by elected governments has become a defining feature of contemporary democratic backsliding across multiple jurisdictions. Both actions in the UK are formally legal in origin. No statute was broken before the courts intervened. They represent the kind of norm erosion Levitsky and Ziblatt identify as the mechanism through which democratic substance is hollowed out while democratic form is preserved. Democracy dies, in their terms, not at the hands of generals but of elected leaders, those who subvert the very process that brought them to power (2018, p. 3).

Bennett and Livingston represent the point at which the backsliding literature comes nearest to the noumenal argument this article develops (2025). They integrate institutionalist accounts — the focus on elites, norms and power structures found in Bermeo and Levitsky and Ziblatt — with analysis of how digital platforms organise and mobilise the extremist networks that accelerate democratic erosion. In doing so, they update how we should conceptualise the relationship between platform architecture and democratic erosion in the twenty-first century. Their connective action framework shows how scattered extremist factions are drawn together online into quasi-organisations that challenge party gatekeeping and reshape the boundaries of mainstream politics (2025, pp. 2, 15) — providing, in their own terms, “incomplete yet complementary clues” that neither purely institutional nor purely technological accounts can supply alone (2025, p. 1). This synthesis operates at the level of observable outputs: the measurable spread of disinformation and the traceable organisation of extremist networks. They argue that a technology driver exerts persistent influence, capable of usurping the traditional framework of political party organisation and in turn destabilising democratic institutions. What is missing from their account is the prior question of agency: how a platform supplants genuine democratic participation whilst amplifying marginalised extremist voices into instruments of democratic dismantling. That supplanting operates at the noumenal level. It operates beneath the observable outputs, reshaping the conditions under which individuals form the capacity for democratic agency itself. It is to that layer that the analysis now turns.

The connective action dynamic Bennett and Livingston identify in the United States has a mirror in the United Kingdom, though operating through a different executive and party political architecture. The trajectory from UKIP through the Brexit Party to Reform UK represents precisely the kind of progressive organisational coherence of formerly scattered right-wing factions that Bennett and Livingston describe. Fringe elements are brought into greater alignment through shared memes, digital networks and the connective action of social media platforms, until they become sufficiently organised to reshape the boundaries of mainstream party politics. Hayton (2025, p. 388) analyses the relationship between Reform and the Conservative Party, arguing both now represent what he terms “populist conservatism” with their dynamic competition reinforcing its dominance across the right of British politics. Beyond Reform, the emergence of Restore Britain, drawing support primarily from former Reform and Conservative voters, illustrates the further fragmentation and radicalisation dynamic Bennett and Livingston identify. When extremist factions are not fully absorbed by a party, they generate new organisations further along the spectrum, pulling the entire political field rightward. Critically for the argument this article develops, these movements are driving democratic erosion from outside institutional power. They restructure the discursive conditions of political competition without needing to hold office. The consequence is visible in the Labour Party’s progressive rightward movement on immigration and cultural policy, not because its own institutional norms have changed but because the architectural conditions of political discourse have shifted beneath it (Kippin, 2025, pp. 15–16; Hayton, 2025, pp. 393–395).

Bennett and Livingston represent the closest existing point of meeting between the backsliding literature and the argument developed in this article (2025). Their analysis of the technological and institutional roots of democratic backsliding in the United States identifies the informational environment — restructuring of media ecosystems, rise of disinformation, fragmentation of shared knowledge foundations — as a primary driver of democratic deterioration. They place technological change within an institutional analysis of backsliding, moving the literature closer to the architectural conditions this article addresses. Their account remains anchored in observable and quantifiable events such as content of disinformation, nature of media consumption and decline of institutional trust. The architectural question — the conditions under which we form the capacity to participate in democratic life at all — remains, in their framework, just beyond the analytical horizon.

The distinction matters. Whether democracy is assessed across five indices or concentrated into two registers, what the spectrum reveals is that erosion can occur at the procedural surface while the deeper qualitative conditions of democratic agency remain unmeasured — or can erode at the qualitative level while procedural indicators remain apparently intact. It is precisely this second form of erosion that the argument of this section addresses.

Democratic backsliding did not arrive unannounced. Its symptoms were observable to scholars, practitioners and citizens long before the indices confirmed them — discernible in the texture of political culture, in the changing conditions of public discourse, in the erosion of norms whose absence becomes visible precisely because they are no longer operating. The literature that grew up around this phenomenon reflects that visibility: sophisticated, empirically grounded and increasingly urgent in its diagnoses. By the time the V-Dem Institute’s 2023 report confirmed that advances in global democratic quality made over the preceding thirty-five years had been effectively reversed — that the average world citizen in 2022 enjoyed a level of democracy equivalent to that of 1986 — scholars had already been documenting the mechanisms of decline for the better part of two decades (Papada et al., 2023). What the literature had not resolved, and what the indices could not capture, was why the deterioration proved so resistant to correction — why the electoral road to breakdown remained, as Levitsky and Ziblatt put it, “dangerously deceptive,” with people still voting, leaders maintaining the veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance, and the process remaining at every incremental step just below the threshold of democratic emergency (2018).

The standard accounts locate the causes of this resistance in the institutional and behavioural layer of democratic life. For Bermeo, backsliding is best understood as a series of discrete changes to the rules and informal procedures that govern elections, rights and accountability — incremental, legal, and in each individual instance defensible, but cumulatively corrosive of the democratic order (2016). Levitsky and Ziblatt identify the mechanism more precisely: the erosion of the unwritten norms of mutual toleration and institutional forbearance that sustain democratic culture beneath the level of formal constitutional rules, driven by elite actors who exploit institutional weakness and the unwillingness of political parties to enforce the guardrails that once constrained them (2018). In Tyranny of the Minority they extend this analysis to the systematic deployment of counter-majoritarian constitutional devices — minority veto powers, supermajority requirements, anti-democratic electoral structures — that insulate minority rule from democratic correction and make the recovery of majority governance structurally difficult even where the popular will for it exists (2023). Runciman approaches the same deterioration from a different angle: not the abuse of institutions by elites but the complacency of citizens in mature democracies, the progressive hollowing of democratic forms whose procedural shell persists while their animating substance drains away, producing a kind of democratic zombie — the outward appearance of self-government without its substantive reality (2018).

These are consequential and well-evidenced diagnoses. The institutional deterioration they document is not in dispute here, and the mechanisms they identify — norm erosion, elite complicity, constitutional manipulation, civic complacency — are demonstrably operating in the cases they examine. The argument of this section is not that these accounts are wrong but that they share a structural limitation that prevents them from seeing the full picture. Each operates at the phenomenal surface of democratic life: observing and theorising what is visible in the behaviour of elites, the erosion of norms, the manipulation of institutions and the decline of civic engagement. The public sphere through which citizens form political identities, encounter democratic norms, and develop the capacity for political agency appears in all three accounts as background — a given environment within which the institutional drama they are describing takes place. It is not itself theorised. The question of what happens to the conditions of democratic agency when that public sphere is restructured by privately governed architectural systems, operating at the scale documented in the preceding section and beyond the reach of any justificatory standard that citizens could meaningfully contest, is simply not a question these frameworks are designed to ask. It falls outside the field of vision that phenomenal analysis provides.

The most ambitious recent attempt to bridge this gap is Bennett and Livingston’s account of the technocentric and institutionalist paradigms of democratic backsliding (2025). Their argument is that institutionalist approaches — Levitsky and Ziblatt, Bermeo and their interlocutors — have had, in their own assessment, “little to say about media and communication processes in general and social media in particular,” while technocentric approaches, focused on algorithmic amplification and individual cognitive effects, have largely ignored the broader institutional, historical and economic conditions that shape how digital networks operate politically (Bennett and Livingston, 2025, p. 4). Their synthesis, built around the concept of digitally constituted organisations — fluid, nonhierarchical, leaderless formations that cohere online around shared political content and resist the gatekeeping mechanisms that once moderated democratic politics — represents a genuine advance on either paradigm taken alone. It moves the level of analysis from the individual to the organisation, and from the technological to the socio-institutional.

Yet even this synthesis operates within the phenomenal register. The digitally constituted organisations Bennett and Livingston describe are observable entities — their activities can be tracked, their content analysed, their effects on institutional politics measured and, in principle, regulated. What their framework does not reach is the layer beneath: the architectural conditions under which the public sphere itself is constituted, within which political identity is formed before it ever coheres into an organisation, and within which the very capacity for the kind of democratic agency that institutional accounts presuppose is shaped or eroded. To theorise that layer requires a different analytical vocabulary — one capable of addressing not just what people do within platform environments but what those environments do to the conditions under which democratic subjectivity is formed. That is the vocabulary of noumenal analysis, and it is to its application to the backsliding paradox that this section now turns.

Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit and the V-Dem Institute each produce annual indices, applying expert assessment and survey data to track the condition of democracy globally (Freedom House, 2025; Economist Intelligence Unit, 2024; Nord et al., 2026). Their findings converge. Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2025 records the nineteenth consecutive year of democratic decline, with the balance between free and not-free countries shifting steadily against the former (Freedom House, 2025, p. 1). The EIU’s Democracy Index 2024 indicates that fewer than half the world’s population now live in a democracy of any kind, with only 15% of polled countries classified as full democracies (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2024, p. 17). V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2026 reports that the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen has returned to the levels of 1978, erasing approaching fifty years of democratic progress (Nord et al., 2026, p. 8).

The three indices confirm the decline of democracy. There may be disagreement between their respective rubrics, but in aggregate they measure what has happened and provide a degree of convergence in their findings. They cannot reach why it is happening in the way the noumenal erosion argument requires. The limitation becomes visible the moment one examines what the indices actually ask. The EIU’s methodology, for example, poses the question: “Do ethnic, religious and other minorities have a reasonable degree of autonomy and voice in the political process?” (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2013, p. 34). The question is directed at observable institutional conditions. This makes it quantifiable and, by extension, usable as a qualifier. What the EIU indicators cannot do is examine the architectural conditions that determine whether minorities, or any other group, have the capacity to exercise that voice before they arrive at the process at all. Answering ‘High’, ‘Moderate’ or ‘Low’ to the EIU indicator “Extent to which adult population shows an interest in and follows politics in the news” (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2013, p. 35) might provide an avenue to follow. A low score raises a question about participation and the conditions that inhibit it. The indicator goes nowhere towards answering whether the decision not to follow politics is itself a product of the architectural conditions through which political information is received. It records an outcome. It cannot reach its source. As the preceding analysis has established, platform architecture occupies the space of reasons before the individual arrives at any measurable act of participation (Forst, 2017; 2024). Bennett and Livingston illuminate the consequence from a different angle. Their connective action framework demonstrates how the same platform architecture that registers as disengagement in mainstream democratic participation simultaneously draws scattered extremist factions into alignment, amplifying marginalised voices into organised political forces (2025, pp. 2, 15). These are two faces of the same architectural condition. The EIU indicator can record the first effect. It cannot see the second, and it cannot connect them.

The paradox identified above — participation at its phenomenal peak, democracy at its lowest point in decades — demands an explanation the existing measurement frameworks cannot supply.

The most significant regulatory responses to platform power are the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, 2018) and, in the United Kingdom, the Online Safety Act (OSA, 2023).¹ Both represent serious and consequential attempts to hold platforms to account. Neither reaches the noumenal conditions the platform shapes.

GDPR recognises platforms as collectors and processors of personal data. Its central concern is the lawfulness of data acquisition and use: whether consent is meaningful, whether processing is proportionate and whether individuals retain rights of access, rectification and erasure. In this sense, it places the individual at the centre of the legal process as a data subject provided with transactional rights. However, this leaves untouched the conditions under which political agency is formed — the space of reasons. By the time an individual encounters a consent button, accepts terms of service or seeks deletion of their data, the platform’s curation logic has already shaped what is seen, chosen what is relevant and how the individual can participate — removed the individual from the process before they arrive. GDPR regulates the exchange of data after the fact; it does not reach the prior architecture through which participation itself is constituted. In Forst’s terms, the noumenal dimension of participation — the space of reasons and justificatory power within which agency becomes possible — remains beyond the reach of the framework. The result is that GDPR can constrain informational practices. It cannot dismantle the structural conditions that produce the democratic subject it presupposes.

The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (2023) addresses platforms as hosts and distributors of content. Its central concern is the management of content risk: illegal content must be removed, harmful content must be assessed and mitigated. Ofcom is empowered to enforce these obligations against platforms operating in the UK. The OSA places duties of care on platforms. Those duties are framed entirely around what platforms host and distribute, not around what their architecture does to the conditions under which users form political identity and capacity. By the time Ofcom identifies harmful content, requires its removal or levies a fine, the curation logic that determines what reaches the user has already operated. The OSA, like the GDPR, arrives after the architectural fact. It addresses the platform as an institutional actor with content obligations. It cannot reach the platform as an architectural condition shaping the prior conditions of democratic agency. The addressee of the regulatory framework and the source of noumenal erosion are not the same. The space of reasons remains beyond the reach of both.

Weber’s rational-legal order produces exactly this form of institutional response: procedurally rigorous, enforceable in its own terms, and constitutively unable to reach the conditions it does not recognise as its object. In Weber’s model the street-level bureaucrat, however constrained, retained a residual space of human judgement. They possessed an irreducible point of contact between the system and the individual through which justificatory exchange remained at least theoretically possible. Ofcom occupies that structural position in the regulatory architecture of the OSA. It cannot perform that function. As a proxy for the individual’s justificatory claim against the platform, Ofcom acts on behalf of a generalised public interest rather than the specific justificatory standing of any individual citizen. Its remit is defined in content terms that do not correspond to the noumenal harm being done. In substituting itself for the citizen’s direct justificatory relationship with the platform, the regulatory framework does not merely fail to reach the noumenal level. It forecloses the possibility of that relationship by design. The citizen is not empowered to demand justification from the platform. Ofcom demands compliance on the citizen’s behalf. The space of reasons is not just beyond the reach of the framework. It has been institutionally replaced.

Zuboff’s reconstruction of surveillance capitalism’s normative logic identifies why this structural limitation is not incidental. Her two constitutive declarations — that human behavioural data is a free resource available for extraction, and that the governing logic of that extraction is proprietary and beyond external scrutiny (Zuboff, 2019, p. 178) — establish the platform as an actor whose defining operations are vaulted from the reach of justificatory challenge. Regulatory frameworks that address the platform as a legal person with content obligations leave that vault intact. They can require transparency reports, mandate flagging mechanisms and impose fines for illegal content. They can empower Ofcom to act on the individual’s behalf. What they cannot do is require the platform to submit its curation logic to the justificatory standard that Forst’s framework demands. If we are to address the erosion of participation, we must address the problem requiring the architecture shaping political agency to be accountable to those it shapes. The proprietary exemption is not a gap in the regulatory framework. It is the condition the regulatory framework was not designed to address. The noumenal dimension of platform power remains, in Zuboff’s terms, claimed as private property, and that claim, not its consequences, is where the democratic harm originates.

Analysing the impact of digital communications in 2005, Jodi Dean was prescient in identifying what she termed ‘communicative capitalism’ — the condition in which the very tools conceived as democratic are structurally depoliticising (Dean, 2005, p. 55). Dean identified a paradox, long before platforms achieved the algorithmic power they do today, that is core to this section. Our present day ‘communicative abundance’ coincides with the collapse of ‘democratic deliberation’ (Dean, 2005, p. 54). Her analysis points to networked communications providing the arena for a structural transformation in the basic unit of political communication. This arena has generated a shift from the message to the contribution. It will benefit us to unpick what this means. A message is directed: it has a sender, a receiver and an obligation of response. A contribution is different. It circulates and adds to the flow of content. For Dean, the content, sender and recipient are all irrelevant, agency is stripped from the participation. What matters is circulation itself (Dean, 2005, p. 58). The exchange value of the message overtakes its use value. The consequences of this structural shift are visible in the digital mobilisation around Gaza in 2023–24. A UK parliamentary petition calling for a ceasefire gathered 268,882 signatures — well over the 100,000 threshold required to trigger a parliamentary debate, which took place on 11 December 2023 (UK Parliament Petitions Committee, 2023). In parallel, a YouGov poll commissioned by Medical Aid for Palestinians found that 71% of the British public supported an immediate ceasefire (Medical Aid for Palestinians and Council for Arab-British Understanding, 2024). The message was not only circulating in multiple media — it represented a clear majority position. The government acknowledged the message’s existence, but did not respond to it. The message was delivered but, in Dean’s sense, was not received. The parliamentary petition mechanism functioned exactly as legally required, providing the impression that vertical accountability operated. A formal response was issued. However, the message was not received as an obligation. The substantive connection was severed. The question, here, is not whether the government was right or wrong. What is being asked is ‘was the message received as a claim requiring justification, or as content requiring acknowledgement?’. In Dean’s framework, as in Forst’s, only the former constitutes a genuine democratic response.

From this structural shift Dean creates her account of the fantasy of participation. Contributing to circulating content produces what she calls a registration effect — the subjective sense that your action matters, that you have been heard — we come to mistake the performance of participation for its substance. Drawing on Žižek’s concept of interpassivity, Dean argues that platform activity functions as a technological fetish: something else acts politically in our stead, relieving us of the obligation to engage in the harder, riskier work of actual political organisation. The platform is political for us, enabling us to understand ourselves as active while remaining, in the precise Žižekian sense, passive (Dean, 2005, p. 63). Clicks, shares, likes and petition signatures constitute the visible record of democratic engagement. They do not constitute democratic engagement.

Dean’s account is a useful analysis of the phenomenology of participation. Individuals believe they are politically active while democratic institutions deteriorate. This is supported by the earlier data on platform numbers. However, communicative capitalism frames a sense of capability that is structurally divorced from political effect. Dean’s framework operates at the level of political economy and communicative practice. Its object is what individuals do on platforms and what that doing means politically. In her analysis, individuals are not participating in the way they might believe they are. Dean’s framework points towards the noumenal conditions of participation without fully theorising them. The fantasy of participation Dean identifies is itself a product of the noumenal conditions the platform has established. An individual arrives at the platform already formed — already inclined to understand clicking as acting, sharing as speaking, liking as endorsing — because the platform’s curation logic has pre-determined the space of reasons within which those gestures acquire their, apparent, political significance. Dean was writing when the internet was still in its infancy. The conditions she identified have since been architecturally strengthened by algorithmic systems she could not have anticipated. Dean describes the performance. Noumenal erosion explains the architectural conditions under which that performance comes to feel, to the individual, like the real thing.

In his exploration of digital platforms, and search engines in particular, Eli Pariser identifies three dynamics that together constitute what he terms the filter bubble — the algorithmically constructed personalised information environment within which each user increasingly operates (Pariser, 2011, pp. 9–10). His analysis provides a valuable insight into how individual agency is shaped by platform architecture. Pariser approaches the architectural level at which the noumenal erosion argument operates. The three dynamics are:

First, each user inhabits a personalised information universe. Content delivered to you differs from the content delivered to me, shaped by algorithmic inference of individual preference.

Second, the bubble is invisible. We do not know what is being withheld, what bias is built into the selection or how extensively the algorithm has narrowed the informational world we inhabit.

Third, and most significantly, we do not choose to enter the bubble.

The third dynamic is a direct consequence of the first two. If your informational universe has been individually constructed and its construction is invisible to you, you cannot choose not to inhabit it. This is the point at which Pariser’s argument comes closest to the noumenal level. The bubble cannot be perceived as a bubble from within it — you cannot opt out of a frame you cannot see. Platform architecture is shaping what you see before you have any opportunity to consent to or contest the terms of that shaping.

Whilst useful, the third dynamic approaches the noumenal argument without quite reaching it. Pariser’s concern is a content argument. He focuses on what the algorithm delivers, what it withholds and how personalisation narrows the environment delivered. The filter bubble is a diagnosis of the phenomenal surface. It examines the content layer of democratic participation. What reaches you is distorted but the source of that distortion is not explained. Content withheld from you is hidden. These are real and serious harms to democratic thinking. The noumenal erosion argument operates at the prior architectural level. It is not concerned with the content of what is delivered. The concern here is with what the architecture does to the conditions under which we form the capacity to receive, interpret and act as democratic agents. The filter bubble shapes what you see. Noumenal erosion shapes the individual who does the seeing — before any content arrives.²

What Pariser describes from within the individual experience, Habermas theorises from without, as a structural transformation of the public sphere itself. Together they map the same condition at different levels of analysis. Both provide a means of assessing what is happening and how we could raise objections to what is happening through social media. They also reach the same limit. Habermas’s account of the new structural transformation of the public sphere identifies the platform as a systemic force that has radically altered the previously predominant pattern of communication in the public sphere, not just its content (Habermas, 2022, p. 159). Where his earlier work theorised the communicative conditions of rational-critical debate, his later diagnosis recognises that the platform has not simply populated the public sphere with bad content but has restructured the sphere itself. The algorithmic logic of engagement maximisation drives communication networks centrifugally outward while simultaneously condensing them into circuits that seal themselves off from each other (Habermas, 2022, p. 160). The emancipatory promise of the early digital public sphere has morphed into what Habermas terms the “libertarian grimace of world-dominating digital corporations” (Habermas, 2022, p. 160). These are structural transformations, not content problems. In this respect Habermas’s framework reaches further than Pariser. It provides a means of considering the conditions of communication rather than just the phenomenal layer of what is communicated. His insistence that maintaining the inclusive and deliberative character of the public sphere is not a matter of political preference but a constitutional imperative (Habermas, 2022, p. 168) provides the normative ground on which the argument of this section rests.

Habermas reaches a structural limit. His concern is with the communicative conditions of the public sphere: what happens to the quality of deliberative exchange when its structural prerequisites are dissolved. This is a diagnosis at the level of communicative output. What his framework does not fully theorise is the prior condition: why the deliberative remedies his own theory prescribes are structurally insufficient, why the space of reasons cannot be reconstructed from within the platform logic. The measurement frameworks cannot reach the architectural level. As we have seen with the GDPR and OSA examples, the regulatory frameworks cannot address it. The communicative capitalism diagnosis approaches it without crossing it. The platform does not only degrade the quality of what individuals say to each other. It shapes the conditions under which they become the kinds of political agents capable of saying anything that reaches the threshold of democratic significance at all. As we have seen, the agency that remains is real in appearance but illusory in substance. We are witnessing the phenomenal performance of democratic participation whose conditions have already been architecturally set.

The paradox at the core of my argument in this section — participation at its phenomenal peak, democracy at its lowest point in decades — has its explanation. It is not that individuals are receiving the wrong content, or that their messages are circulating without response, or that the regulatory framework has failed to impose the right obligations on the right corporate or administrative actors. It is that the architectural conditions under which democratic agency is formed have been systematically occupied, in Forst’s sense, by systems accountable to no justificatory standard that citizens could meaningfully contest. Counted, in the precise sense Dean identified twenty years ago, but not heard. As Dean predicted, the consequence of that foreclosure is not only political passivity. More corrosive to democracy, it is the progressive figuring of the political other not as an opponent to be engaged but as a threat to be destroyed (Dean, 2005, p. 54). That is the condition Section 3 addresses.