Technology as an Anthropological Lens: The Amplification of Civilizational Structures in the Age of Digitalization

This study advances a counter-hypothesis to the classical globalization discourse dominant in the 1990s, which assumed that digital technologies would function as a cultural melting pot producing a homogeneous global subject. It argues instead that digital technologies have not dissolved civilizational differences but have operated as an anthropological magnifying glass, amplifying deep-seated symbolic and cognitive structures within each civilization and equipping them with new operational, defensive, and offensive capacities. Through a comparative analysis of three major civilizational models—China, the Middle East, and the West—the study demonstrates how identical digital technologies are interpreted, legitimated, and operationalized through divergent frameworks of authority, legitimacy, and meaning. These dynamics have given rise to “digital tribes” that coexist infrastructurally yet remain interpretively incompatible. The paper concludes by proposing an interpretive framework for understanding contemporary global disorder as the outcome of a structural mismatch between future-oriented technological instruments and inherited cognitive–anthropological frameworks sedimented over millennia.