The Dark Gaze
Essay on Knowledge, Non-Human Agency, and Ontological Dread in Digital Infrastructure
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32776/arcsh.v12i24.592Keywords:
Necro-information, satanology of information, dark Gaze, Algorithmic opacity, Ontological dreadAbstract
Digital infrastructure is analyzed as a social reconfiguration that transcends AI, exploring how necro-information, algorithmic opacity (satanology), and hardware materiality produce an "ontological dread" by blurring the lines between the living, the dead, and the technical. The "Dark Gaze" is proposed as a methodological stance to track non-human agency. This method is articulated through three axes: Temporality, the friction between algorithmic immediacy and geological time; Agency, the decentering of the human subject in the face of autonomous systems; and Materiality, tracking the physical chain from mineral extraction to toxic waste. It concludes that the network operates as an "active cemetery" and a "devouring machinery" that converts the biosphere and bodies into spectral data. Algorithmic opacity acts as a structural adversary that erodes the capacity for choice. Resistance lies in "sovereign unveiling," using the Dark Gaze to fracture the transparency of the interface and reclaim political and epistemic autonomy from the Global South.
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