Against the Metaphysics of the Digital

Ontology, understood as the study of being qua being, has historically concerned itself with questions of what exists and how existence itself is to be comprehended. Yet the computational transformation of contemporary life poses distinctive challenges to ontological inquiry. When being itself becomes increasingly mediated through computational infrastructure, when existence finds its primary modes of disclosure through algorithmic systems, when what is comes to be determined by what can be computed, ontology confronts a situation without historical precedent. However, there is a danger that the digital is claimed not simply a new domain of beings amongst other beings, but might rather represents a transformation in how being as such discloses itself.

This articulation, what I call the flight into a metaphysics of the digital, is becoming increasingly commonplace in both popular and academic discourse about technology. It proposes that computation transforms existence at its root, that platforms constitute new grounds of what is, that digital mediation produces reality rather than merely representing it. They tend to obscure the material conditions and power relations that shape computational systems by elevating these systems to metaphysical status. The question is not whether digital technologies matter, they manifestly do, but whether the metaphysical frame helps or hinders critical understanding of computational capitalism.

The strangeness of the pandemic moment revealed this question with brutal clarity. In 2020, physical existence, the ground of human life for millennia, became suddenly dangerous, prohibited, perhaps even impossible. Bodies could not occupy the same space without risk of contagion and death. The virus transformed proximity itself into threat, making the most basic aspects of human existence, sharing air, touching, gathering, problematic in new ways. Into this void rushed computational platforms and within weeks, existence migrated into digital infrastructure. Zoom, a relatively minor videoconferencing service in 2020, became the apparent ground for work, education, social life, even funerals and weddings by April. Life itself seemed to relocate from physical space into computational mediation, not as choice but as necessity.

Yet to describe this shift in terms of being, as though existence itself migrated into platforms, obscures what actually occurred. Physical reality did not become less real or less primary. Bodies remained the locus of suffering and death. The material conditions of housing, internet access, domestic labour, and economic security determined who could maintain continuity of work and social connection. What changed was not the ground of what is but the infrastructure through which certain social practices temporarily occurred. This is a question of mediation, not existence as such.

When we claim that platforms constitute grounds of being, we elevate commercial infrastructure to metaphysical status, naturalising what should be understood as contingent, constructed, and contestable.1]  Zoom did not become the ground of education. Rather, institutions chose, often with minimal deliberation, to continue operating through inadequate digital mediation rather than pausing, restructuring, or imagining alternatives. This was a political and economic decision masquerading as necessity.

The metaphysical framing serves the interests of platform corporations who benefit from narratives that present their services as grounds of being rather than commercial products. If existence itself occurs through Facebook, if reality discloses through Google, if what is requires computational mediation, then these corporations occupy positions of enormous power, not through market dominance or political influence but through metaphysical necessity. This naturalises their control whilst obscuring the material infrastructure, exploited labour, and extractive business models that actually constitute platform operations.

Look at the actual conditions of pandemic platformisation. Amazon's wealth increased by tens of billions whilst warehouse workers risked infection for poverty wages. The ground of commercial existence did not shift to platforms. Rather, existing inequalities intensified as those with economic security ordered goods delivered by precarious gig workers. Zoom's stock price soared whilst educators struggled to teach through inadequate interfaces designed for business meetings, not pedagogy. The platform profited from institutional desperation, not from providing genuine solutions to educational needs.

The unevenness of digital access during the pandemic revealed the material rather than metaphysical character of computational mediation. Students without adequate internet connections faced not exclusion from being but exclusion produced by poverty, by lack of public investment in infrastructure, by decisions to treat connectivity as commodity rather than public utility. Workers lacking appropriate domestic spaces for video calls found their work compromised not because existence itself had become digital but because employers refused to accommodate realities or provide adequate support. The homeless became invisible not through some shift in what is but through existing social abandonment intensified by the pandemic.

These are questions of political economy, not metaphysics. The elderly in care homes, prohibited from physical visits, depended entirely on video calls for connection with families when staff had time and devices to facilitate them. Many residents spent months without contact not because their social being required computational mediation but because care homes were understaffed, underfunded, equipped with inadequate technology, operating under conditions that prioritised profit over care. 

The weirdness of the pandemic was real. Physical reality, supposedly solid ground of existence, revealed itself as contingent, dangerous, unreliable. Meanwhile computational platforms, previously understood as supplementary or virtual, became primary infrastructure for work, education, social connection. This change occurred with incredible speed. Within weeks, life on Zoom became more consequential for maintaining employment and education than increasingly rare physical encounters. Friends who met outdoors, masked and distant, experienced the meeting as strange and attenuated compared to video calls that felt normal, habitual, constitutive of actual friendship.

Yet this experience does not establish that being itself shifted ground. Rather, it reveals how effectively platforms captured infrastructure and practice during crisis conditions. The metaphysical narrative mistakes this capture for necessity concerning what is, treating contingent arrangements as though they revealed essential truths about contemporary existence. This is precisely the mystification that critical analysis should resist rather than reinforce.

The question is what gets obscured when we claim that computational platforms constitute grounds of being. For example, the material infrastructure disappears. Data centres consuming vast electrical power or cellular networks requiring constant maintenance, yet material systems vanish behind claims about digital existence. However, this infrastructure remains physical, located in specific places, controlled by specific corporations and states, dependent on energy, labour, and resources. Metaphysical talk makes this materiality invisible.

Additionally, the labour that produces and maintains computational systems disappears. Content moderators in the Philippines screening traumatic material for poverty wages, warehouse workers racing against algorithmic quotas, delivery drivers risking accidents to meet platform demands, software engineers working excessive hours under precarious conditions, all this labour vanishes when platforms are treated as grounds of what is rather than commercial enterprises dependent on exploitation.

Lastly, the business models and profit motives driving platform development disappear. Facebook does not constitute social reality out of metaphysical necessity but out of calculated extraction of attention and data for advertising revenue. Google does not determine what exists through power over being but through algorithmic choices designed to maximise engagement and ad clicks.

The metaphysics of the digital obscures these material realities by raising platforms to philosophical status. This serves platform interests. If computational mediation concerns being rather than commerce, if platforms constitute what is rather than provide services, then resistance becomes not political but impossible, a rejection of reality itself. The metaphysical turn has the danger of disarming critique by suggesting that what should be contested must instead be accepted as ground.

When Instagram is unavailable, through an outage or shutdown, friendship does not cease to exist. It continues, though mediated differently or not mediated at all. This reveals that the platform was infrastructure, not ground. The metaphysical claim confuses dependency on infrastructure with production of what is. We depend on roads for transportation, on electricity for lighting, on water systems for sanitation. These dependencies are real. Yet we do not claim that roads constitute the being of travel, that electricity produces the existence of visibility, that water systems ground what sanitation is. Infrastructure enables practices without somehow constituting being.

The same logic applies to computational platforms. They provide infrastructure for communication, commerce, social connection. This infrastructure shapes how these practices occur, what forms they take, what becomes possible or impossible. Power operates through this shaping as corporations control infrastructure to extract value. These are political and economic questions demanding political and economic analysis, not metaphysical speculation about grounds of being.

If being itself is platformised, if existence is algorithmically mediated, what possibilities remain for modes of life that resist or exceed computational determination? The metaphysical approach suggests resistance becomes impossible. Yet resistance actually persists, demonstrating that platforms exercise power rather than constitute what is.

So critical analysis must pay attention to power. The computational shaping of social life is not neutral or universal but serves specific interests and reproduces existing hierarchies. Platform organisation is designed for data extraction and engagement optimisation, shaping what can occur toward commercial imperatives. Algorithmic systems encode biases that determine whose existence is recognised, valued, permitted. Computational infrastructure concentrates in the hands of a few corporations and states, creating asymmetries in power over infrastructure, who can determine what occurs and how it appears.

The question facing critical thought is not whether these transformations will occur, many are already underway, but whether computational platformisation must remain the sole infrastructure for contemporary life. Can spaces be preserved or created where social practices unfold through non-computational means? Can we recognise that whilst digital mediation enables certain activities, it also forecloses others? What would it mean to maintain infrastructural pluralism, multiple modes of organisation rather than submission to a single computational system?

The flight into metaphysics serves power by naturalising what should be contested, elevating contingent arrangements to necessary grounds, treating constructed infrastructure as though it revealed essential truths. Against this flight, materialist critique insists on the political and economic character of computational systems, the labour and resources they depend on, the interests they serve, the alternatives they foreclose. Only through such materialist analysis can we begin to question whether computational infrastructure represents the sole possible organisation of contemporary life, or whether different infrastructures, different distributions of power, different modes of organisation might yet be imagined, fought for, and instantiated.

Bibliography

Berry, D. M. (2014) Critical Theory and the Digital, Bloomsbury. 

Heidegger M (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper Perennial.

Srnicek N (2017) Platform Capitalism. Polity Press

Zuboff S (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs