Digitaism and the Nootransition: Cognitive and Algorithmic Capital and Civilizational Choice
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Digital transformation is viewed as a phase of civilizational Transition associated with the changing role of knowledge in production, ownership relations, and in public administration. Digitalism is defined as an emerging social system where data, algorithms, software code, and artificial intelligence (AI) models form cognitive and algorithmic capital (c_k). The genesis of digitalism is linked to the social origins of knowledge and its private-monopolistic appropriation, the phenomenon of implicit labor, digital Taylorism, the algorithmic subsumption of human activity, and the recursive cycle of accumulation. Two interrelated contradictions of digitalism are manifested in the expansion of productive capacity while simultaneously narrowing the robust demand capabilities formed by earned income, and in the concentration of power over the information environment, taking the form of an algocracy. A comparison of the theories developed by S.D. Bodrunov – the New ndustrial Society of the Second Generation (NIS-2) and Noonomy – with S. Bellucci's idea of digitalism reveals a complementary understanding of the modern civilizational Transition: NIS-2 characterizes its material and technological stage, while digitalism shows the concentrated private-monopolistic trajectory of appropriating new cognitive productive forces, and Noonomy – a promising non-economic way of satisfying reasonable needs (nooneeds) and the noocivilizational focus of the Transition. The identified contradictions of the digital age lead to the question of transforming relations of ownership of cognitive and algorithmic capital. The interaction of scientific and technological progress, the diffusion of ownership, socialization, and solidarism defines the societal focus of the nootransition and determines the nature of civilizational choice, where knowledge in algorithmic form can serve either to concentrate control over human behavior or to expand the space for free creative human activity, cultural development, and reasonable management of the technosphere.
Authors: Bodrunov, S., Bellucci, S.
Institution: University for Peace
Language: Russian
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213617546