THE INVISIBLE LORDSHIP Infrastructural Power, Captured Agency, and the Politics of the Tripartite Structure

This treatise develops a theory of infrastructural power as the most determining form of domination in the age of artificial intelligence: a power that neither prohibits nor commands but configures the conditions within which agents exercise their agency, systematically displacing them from Mode 1—full First Cause, where the tripartite structure of suspension, evaluation, and commitment is completely instantiated—toward inferior modes of agency. The argument unfolds in seven parts. Part I constructs the category of infrastructural power through a critical confrontation with the three major traditions of power theory—Weber, Foucault, Lukes—and shows that none can see the form of domination this treatise diagnoses. Part II analyses the simultaneous triple capture of the agent’s action, knowledge, and language as what qualitatively distinguishes infrastructural power from all prior forms of lordship. Part III presents the table of 8 modes of agency—formally derived from the combinations of presence and absence of the three operations of the tripartite structure—as the central diagnostic instrument of the system. Part IV identifies the five mechanisms by which infrastructural power produces modal displacement: option reduction, substitution of judgement, automation of signature, simulation of debate, and, as meta-mechanism, the invisibility of the mechanism itself. Part V confronts the system with its principal adversaries: technological libertarianism, Zuboff, Han, Pasquale, Habermas, Mouffe, and Arendt. Part VI presents the four-step analytic of agency as a method applied to concrete institutions. Part VII formulates five questions contemporary democracies must answer to preserve the conditions of their citizens’ agency.