Neoliberalism Against Society? Spontaneous Order and Governance of Desire in Digital Societies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical scholarship often argues that neoliberalism has caused the ‘crisis’ or ‘destruction’ of society. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of power as ‘productive’ and focusing on digital societies, we argue that neoliberalism seeks not to dismantle society but to create societies that govern desires through market freedom. We explore Friedrich Hayek’s idea that a free society is not based on social well-being or equality, but on spontaneous norms arising from the market order. Digital societies, we contend, are neoliberal but not spontaneous; they emerge from the market order yet are shaped by algorithmic codes that intercept, manipulate, amplify, and promote the voluntary self-exploitation of individual desires. The article combines the latest critical scholarship on neoliberalism with a fresh interpretation of Hayek’s thought and recent work on digital societies and algorithmic governance, highlighting the often-overlooked role of desire in the neoliberal governance of the digital age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".