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Ontological capture: AI, childhood, and the algorithmic governance of becoming
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DOI：10.1007/s00146-025-02807-8.png)
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Abstract
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This article interrogates how algorithmic infrastructures and AI reshape social life through childhood, civic identity, and education. Drawing on Anders’ account of Promethean shame, Baudrillard’s notion of simulation, and Debord’s critique of the spectacle, we argue that predictive platforms do not merely mediate experience but reconstitute its ontological conditions. Attention, temporality, and civic judgement are increasingly compressed into machinic rhythms, producing what we term the algorithmic citizen: a subject habituated to obedience by design. Situating this analysis within debates on digital citizenship, anticipatory governance, and stratified civic subjectivities, we extend prior research on compliance and exclusion into the terrain of ontological capture. In response, the paper develops a stewardship model of leadership, foregrounding silence, ecological embeddedness, and arts-based practices as forms of ontological repair. We conclude by outlining practices of resistance (non-instrumental play, embodied storytelling, and pedagogies of wonder), that sustain civic imagination against algorithmic capture. Our intervention reframes AI in education not as a technical matter but as a societal and ontological problem: what kinds of subjects and futures are being produced in algorithmic societies?
Keywords:
Algorithmic governance
Ontological capture
Childhood and AI
Algorithmic subjectivity
Digital citizenship
Educational leadership
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