Cyberism: A Four-Layer Disciplinary Framework and Research Agenda

In recent years, Cyberism has developed from an initial doctrine into a comprehensive research agenda organized around four disciplinary clusters: perception and interaction, society and civilization, cognition and security, and existence and meaning. This article presents the internal logic of that framework. The four layers are not a parallel taxonomy of topics, but an ontological ladder: beginning with embodied perception, moving through collective order, proceeding toward mental autonomy, and ultimately arriving at questions of meaning. Each layer is both enabled by the preceding layer and constrains the one that follows. The article maps the disciplines of each layer, specifies examples of research hypotheses, and discusses representative cases. Methodologically, it proposes a three-level agenda for Cyberism, consisting of engineering and technological research, empirical social science, and philosophical reflection, and clarifies how these methods correspond to the four disciplinary layers. The article then examines Cyberism in relation to classical philosophy of technology and identifies its irreducible contribution: Cyberism does not merely describe how technology mediates existence; it diagnoses how existence itself is reconstructed when technology becomes the interface of being. It therefore marks Cyberism's transition from a named doctrine to a disciplinary framework, and from there to a stage of disciplinary institutionalization.