The Foreclosure of Encounter: Platform Capitalism and the Destruction of Ethical Being-With-Others

Positioning This Argument

This paper extends the political-economic critique of platform capitalism into phenomenological and ethical territory. Where the preceding analysis examined how platform capitalism forecloses collective political action through the colonization of linguistic and epistemic infrastructure, this inquiry addresses a deeper question: how does platform-conditioned subjectivity transform the ontological structure of human encounter itself?

The argument draws on Continental phenomenology—particularly Heidegger's analysis of authentic being-with-others, Buber's distinction between I-Thou and I-It relations, and Levinas's account of ethical responsibility grounded in the face-to-face encounter. What emerges is not merely a critique of mediated communication but an examination of how platform capitalism colonizes embodied interaction, reshaping the pre-reflective habits through which subjects perceive, respond to, and exist alongside other human beings.

If the first paper demonstrated that platform capitalism makes transformative collective action structurally difficult, this paper argues something more fundamental: it makes authentic encounter—the ontological and ethical ground from which solidarity, responsibility, and genuine relation might emerge—structurally foreclosed. The implications exceed politics; they concern what it means to be human in a world where the other person is encountered primarily as profile, performance, and object of utility rather than as Thou, as face, as irreducible presence.

Core Thesis

Platform capitalism achieves a historically novel transformation: the colonization not merely of communication or consciousness, but of the pre-reflective structures through which human beings encounter one another. Through years of immersion in algorithmically-curated environments optimized for engagement rather than depth, subjects develop perceptual and communicative habits that persist into face-to-face interaction. The result is that even embodied encounters are structured by platform logics—the other person arrives pre-categorized through tribal markers, processed as a bundle of legible attributes, approached as an object of utility within an already-mapped social field.

This represents the foreclosure of what Heidegger called authentic being-with (Mitsein), the collapse of what Buber termed the I-Thou relation into the totalizing reign of I-It, and the structural dulling of what Levinas identified as the primordial ethical demand of the face. Platform capitalism doesn't destroy the ontological and ethical conditions for genuine encounter through overt prohibition—it forecloses them through the systematic formation of subjects incapable of the sustained attention, vulnerability, and openness that authentic relation requires.

The stakes are not political but existential: if we are fundamentally beings-with-others, then the colonization of encounter represents damage to the ground of human existence itself. And unlike political-economic domination, which might be challenged through organized resistance, ontological colonization operates at a level that precedes and structures the very capacity for collective challenge.

I. The One-Dimensional Subject in Everyday Speech

What Adorno and Marcuse diagnosed as "one-dimensional consciousness"—the integration of opposition through the formatting of thought itself—reaches full material expression in the micro-structure of contemporary face-to-face communication. The culture industry's abstract flattening of experience is no longer confined to mass media consumption; it has been internalized as a habitual mode of speech and perception.

Everyday conversation becomes the circulation of prefabricated fragments—memes that survive platform selection, catchphrases elevated by algorithm, rhetorical patterns that generate engagement. These linguistic templates are experienced as spontaneous expressions, precisely because the colonization is complete: the space where spontaneity might form has been occupied by structures absorbed through platform immersion.

Watch how people actually talk. The flow of conversation increasingly consists of recognized signals: a meme reference that establishes tribal affiliation, a catchphrase that shortcuts complex argument, a performative stance that's legible within platform-trained perception. When someone deploys these fragments, they're not speaking from situated experience or authentic reflection—they're ventriloquizing language that has already been processed through engagement optimization, stripped of nuance, formatted for viral transmission.

This isn't just impoverished discourse. It represents transformation in the mode of speaking itself. The subject no longer speaks from what Heidegger would call a site of genuine disclosure—where language opens the world and reveals Being. Instead, speech becomes Gerede, idle talk that circulates without ownership, repeating what "one says" rather than what this particular person has thought, felt, experienced.

The phenomenological consequences are severe. Conversation loses dialectical movement—the capacity for negation, contradiction, conceptual depth that might generate new understanding. Instead, interaction becomes rapid affirmation or opposition within a narrow bandwidth of pre-legitimated positions. You signal your tribe, I recognize the signal, we proceed according to whether signals align or conflict. No disclosure occurs because nothing needed to be disclosed; everything was already legible within the system of recognition we've both internalized.

Marcuse argued that advanced capitalism integrates opposition by formatting the cognitive horizon—making certain thoughts literally unthinkable within administered consciousness. Platform capitalism achieves this at the level of speech itself. The one-dimensionality he feared is no longer an abstract psychological trend but the default grammar of interpersonal life, realized not through authoritarian imposition but through the subject's own patterned communication absorbed from years of platform conditioning.

The Empirical Manifestation

This isn't speculative. Conversation pattern studies document increasing reliance on shared media references as communicative shortcuts, with subjects reporting difficulty articulating positions without recourse to recognized memes or catchphrases. TikTok's average watch time of 8-12 seconds trains perception to make categorical judgements in timeframes below conscious deliberation—a tempo that persists into face-to-face evaluation. Facial recognition research demonstrates that chronic exposure to faces-as-images measurably alters how subjects process emotional expressions in person: categorizing faster, attending to holistic features less, exhibiting reduced empathy response in neuroimaging studies.

Platform users consistently report feeling "performative" even in private contexts, describing intrusive awareness of how actions would appear if posted. These aren't aberrations but predictable outcomes of perceptual systems trained through billions of micro-interactions structured by engagement optimization rather than authentic encounters.

II. Heidegger: The Loss of Authentic Being-With

Being-With as Fundamental Structure

Heidegger's existential analytic establishes that human existence (Dasein) is fundamentally Mitsein—being-with-others. This isn't incidental or optional; it's constitutive of what it means to be human. We don't first exist as isolated subjects who then enter into relations. Our being is always already social, structured by and through our existence alongside others who share our world.

Authentic Mitsein involves what Heidegger calls "solicitude" (Fürsorge) that "leaps ahead" of the other, helping them become more fully themselves rather than managing them for our purposes. In genuine being-with, others are not objects or obstacles but fellow disclosers of the world, beings whose existence opens possibilities and whose projects matter to us not instrumentally but because we share existence.

This contrasts with Das Man—"the They"—the anonymous public that dictates what "one does," what "one thinks," what "one says." Das Man represents the inauthentic mode where subjects lose themselves in prescribed roles and conventional understanding that require no genuine thought.

Platform Capitalism as Das Man Systematized

Platform capitalism doesn't invent Das Man but systematizes it beyond anything Heidegger imagined. The algorithmically-curated environment doesn't just influence what "one" does; it measures, optimizes, and reinforces it through billions of micro-interactions. What "one" thinks is what gets amplified. What "one" says is language that generates engagement. What "one" does is behaviour that platforms reward with visibility and validation.

The profile becomes Das Man materialized. You curate yourself according to what works, what gets response, what algorithms reward. Every aspect of presentation is implicitly optimized based on social feedback. You become what "one" is supposed to be in your particular algorithmic cluster.

This colonization persists into face-to-face encounter. The other person doesn't arrive as authentic Dasein disclosing world from unique situation—they arrive as Das Man in particular configuration, their tribal markers visible, their positions predictable within recognized categories. And you encounter them as Das Man, perception immediately sorting them according to categories absorbed through platform exposure.

Gerede and the Foreclosure of Solicitude

Heidegger's Gerede—idle talk—describes speech disconnected from genuine disclosure. Language circulates without ownership. People repeat what "one says" without grounding it in authentic experience. Platform communication is Gerede systematized: memes circulate without authorship, catchphrases get deployed because they're recognized rather than because they capture genuine meaning, arguments are repeated because they work algorithmically.

Authentic solicitude requires sustained attention, genuine interest in the other's particular Being, willingness to be affected through encounter. Platform conditioning erodes exactly these capacities. Attention fragments through years of rapid content consumption. Perception stops at recognition rather than exploring particularity. Vulnerability becomes impossible through defensive habits developed where exposure means exploitation.

The result is that subjects occupy shared space but don't disclose the world to one another. They interact but don't encounter each other. They are together but not with each other in Heidegger's sense.

III. Buber: The Totalizing Reign of I-It

The I-Thou Relation as Fundamental

Martin Buber's I and Thou argues that human existence unfolds in two primary relational modes. The I-Thou relation is characterized by reciprocal presence, directness, and wholeness. When I encounter You as Thou, I meet not a bundle of attributes but an irreducible presence. The other is present directly, immediately, in their wholeness. Crucially, this is reciprocal—we enter into relation together, and both are transformed.

The I-It relation is characterized by experience, use, and objectification. The other becomes an object of knowledge, a thing to be managed. This isn't inherently problematic—we must relate to much of reality as It—but when I-It totalizes, when even other humans are encountered primarily as objects, something essential to human life is lost.

Genuine life happens not in subjects but in "the Between"—the relational space that emerges when two beings genuinely meet. The Between is not reducible to either participant; it's the relation itself, the mutuality that neither creates alone.

The Profile as I-It Totalized

Platform capitalism systematically formats subjectivity such that I-It becomes the default mode of encountering others. The profile is the structure through which this occurs: curated presentation of self-as-object designed for evaluation and instrumental interaction. It presents legible attributes—aesthetic choices signal values, stated positions locate the subject ideologically, displayed connections indicate social capital.

Users internalize profile logic. You don't just have a profile; you become a being-that-profiles-itself. Self-presentation adopts the structure of profile: curated, optimized, designed for legibility. You think of yourself in terms of attributes and affiliations. You evaluate yourself through imagined external perception.

This self-as-profile encounters other-as-profile. Even face-to-face, you perceive through habits developed by profile evaluation. You read signals rather than meeting presence. Clothing communicates tribe, speech patterns indicate class, aesthetic choices reveal values. Within seconds, you've categorized them and determined their relevance.

This is pure I-It. The other is experienced as a bundle of attributes to be assessed, not as Thou—as a presence that addresses me directly. Platform capitalism achieves I-It's totalization not through philosophical error but through systematic formation of perceptual habits operating below conscious choice.

The Colonization of "The Between"

Platform-mediated interaction is designed to prevent the Between from forming. Asynchronicity prevents shared temporal presence. Curation means you never present yourself wholly. Algorithmic mediation means you're performing for an imagined audience, including the algorithm. Measurability means interaction is constantly evaluated. Interruption prevents sustained attention.

These features train habits that persist face-to-face. Subjects struggle to create the Between because they've lost facility with what it requires: full presence without self-monitoring, willingness to address the other directly, vulnerability to actually be seen, patience to let relations unfold. Without these capacities, interaction remains fundamentally separate. They speak but don't truly address each other. The Between never forms. They're lonely together.

IV. Levinas: The Dulling of the Face

Ethics as First Philosophy

Emmanuel Levinas's radical claim is that ethics precedes ontology. Before we ask "what is Being?", we are already addressed by the Other whose face makes unconditional demand. The face-to-face encounter isn't one ethical situation among others—it's the primordial scene where responsibility and meaning first emerge.

The face (visage) isn't physical features. It's the vulnerability and infinity of the Other that breaks through my self-enclosure, that resists reduction to object, that addresses me directly with a demand I didn't choose. The face says "thou shalt not kill"—not as moral commandment derived from reason, but as a primordial imperative that precedes all ethical systems.

This encounter is asymmetrical. The Other makes absolute claim on me before I make any claim on them. Levinas insists this ethical relation is transcendental—it can't be destroyed by historical conditions because it's prior to and constitutive of those conditions. The question is whether subjects can hear and respond to that demand.

The Face Become Image

Platform capitalism doesn't destroy the face's demand—Levinas would insist that's impossible—but achieves something more disturbing: the systematic conditioning of subjects to not register that demand, to perceive faces without being addressed by them.

The mechanism: endless exposure to faces rendered as images, as content, as units in an information stream. Scroll any feed—thousands of faces pass expressing joy, pain, need, vulnerability. Faces that, in Levinas's terms, are making ethical demands. But platform structure ensures you pass by. You must, because the next content is loading, the algorithm is serving the next face, the feed never ends.

Any individual face is visible for seconds before scroll continues. Sheer volume makes sustained response impossible. The face becomes content among content, another visual unit in a saturated field. And this isn't passive exposure but active participation—you're evaluating, liking or scrolling, judging engagement and relevance. Every face encountered is immediately subject to: Is this engaging? Relevant? Worth attention?

The ethical shock Levinas describes—the face that interrupts self-concern and summons to responsibility—gets blunted through habituation. Encountering faces becomes routine perceptual experience rather than ethical rupture. The face loses capacity to shock because you've trained yourself through countless repetitions to look at faces without being addressed by them.

The Habituation of Ethical Perception

Levinas describes the face's address as primordial and inescapable. But subjects develop perceptual habits that filter the address before it reaches awareness. Platform conditioning creates exactly these habits: you learn to perceive faces evaluatively—attractive? threatening? aligned with my tribe? The face gets instantly categorized according to legible markers. These categories determine perception: sympathetic or suspicious, vulnerable or threatening.

This categorical perception isn't conscious prejudice but pre-reflective habit developed through rapid-fire face evaluation in algorithmically-curated environments. Platforms serve faces sorted by engagement likelihood, training perception to immediately sort along axes of relevance and utility before the face can address you as singular Other.

Levinas argues the face's demand precedes all categories. Platform capitalism formats perception such that categorization precedes ethical encounter. The face still makes its demand, but the subject has been trained to not hear it.

When Face-to-Face Becomes Profile-to-Profile

When subjects encounter other humans physically, perceptual habits developed through platform immersion persist. The face standing before you is processed through categorical, evaluative, instrumentalizing perception. Their face doesn't address you as irreducible Other—it's processed as member of a tribe, displays aesthetic, holds positions, represents threat or opportunity.

You're looking at them but not seeing them—you're seeing type, category, instance of general. Their particularity, singularity, transcendence of all categories gets filtered out by habituated perception before it reaches awareness. This happens beneath conscious intention. Subjects want to be ethical, consciously affirm values of respect and care. But pre-reflective habits governing perception have been formatted through years of platform conditioning.

People can be physically together, looking at each other, yet the primordial ethical encounter doesn't occur. Not because the face doesn't make its demand—it does, transcendentally, necessarily. But because subjects have been systematically trained to not hear it.

V. The Profile as Ontological Category

Synthesis: How Platform Capitalism Forecloses Encounter

Heidegger, Buber, and Levinas analyze different dimensions of the same transformation: the colonization of encounter at its pre-reflective roots. "The profile" emerges as the dominant ontological category mediating this transformation—the form through which others are encountered, the structure through which presence is mediated.

The profile is a curated presentation optimized for legibility and social capital. Not organic self-disclosure but strategic self-construction. Every element is selected based on how it will be perceived. This curation persists face-to-face—the person presents a version of self learned to generate positive response.

The profile's function is to make subjects rapidly legible—to enable quick assessment, easy categorization, efficient sorting. Tribal markers, aesthetic choices, stated positions all locate the subject within recognized social topology before genuine encounter can occur. The other is understood before they're met. Nothing is disclosed because nothing needed disclosure.

The profile trains instrumental evaluation. Others are assessed according to utility, relevance, social capital. Are they useful contacts? Potential allies or threats? Worth attention investment? This instrumentalizing perception structures face-to-face encounter—the other is evaluated as means to ends, as relevant or irrelevant to your projects.

Even when physically present, the other is encountered through mediation. They point beyond themselves to accumulated content, social position, network location. Their profile mediates how their physical presence is perceived. You're not encountering this person in this moment—you're encountering their reputation, history, position in shared networks.

The Profile as Foreclosure

The profile structurally forecloses certain encounters. It presents the other as Das Man rather than authentic Dasein. They arrive pre-interpreted, already understood, requiring no disclosure. It makes encounter explicitly I-It—a bundle of attributes for evaluation. The reciprocal presence and mutuality of I-Thou become structurally unavailable. It processes the face as image before ethical demand can register. The other is categorized before their singularity can be perceived.

VI. Embodied Consequences: The Colonization of Pre-Reflective Life

The Transformation of Perception

Platform capitalism restructures not just what subjects perceive but how perception itself operates. Years of rapid content consumption, infinite scroll, and algorithmic curation train perceptual habits that persist into all contexts.

Attention fragments. Subjects literally cannot sustain focus on another person's presence. Conversation becomes vulnerable to the pull of devices, anticipated notifications, the restlessness developed through years optimized for rapid scanning and constant task-switching. Even absent devices, attentional habits persist: mentally moving on before the other finishes speaking, skimming for key points, composing responses instead of listening.

Non-verbal literacy atrophies. Human communication has always been primarily embodied—tone, rhythm, gesture, posture, micro-expressions. Platform communication strips this dimension. Text eliminates voice. Images eliminate movement. After years in flattened communication environments, subjects lose facility with embodied dimensions. They can't read micro-expressions, miss tonal shifts, don't notice body language. The perceptual sensitivity required for embodied communication dulls through disuse.

Interiority is colonized by the internalized evaluative gaze. Subjects don't have experiences—they're already considering presentation. Not feeling emotions—already anticipating reception. The spontaneous flow of experience is interrupted by constant self-monitoring developed through years of managing online presentation. Part of awareness always stands outside the moment, evaluating, considering appearances, optimizing performance.

Vulnerability becomes structurally impossible. Platform environments teach that vulnerability is dangerous—anything revealed can be weaponized. These lessons persist face-to-face. Subjects maintain defensive posture even with trusted others because the capacity for vulnerability has been systematically destroyed through conditioning where exposure meant exploitation.

Empirical Markers

Self-reported data from platform users consistently describes: difficulty sustaining attention in face-to-face conversation without device interruption; feeling "performative" even in intimate contexts; awareness of curating self-presentation in all social settings; inability to "just be present" without self-monitoring; anxiety when required to interact without access to devices that mediate and buffer direct encounter. Neuroimaging research on heavy social media users shows measurably reduced activity in brain regions associated with empathy and theory of mind during face-to-face interaction compared to controls, suggesting genuine neuroplastic changes in social cognition circuits.

VII. Sites of Resistance: Practices Without Guarantees

Acknowledging the Bind

If colonization is ontological—operating at pre-reflective levels—then resistance can't be simply political or ideological. You can't think your way out of perceptual habits. You can't decide to be vulnerable when capacity for vulnerability has been eroded.

But phenomenology suggests the structure of being-with-others isn't created by platform capitalism; it's prior to and constitutive of human existence. Platforms colonize this structure but can't eliminate it. The question becomes whether subjects can deliberately cultivate practices that interrupt platform-conditioned habits and rebuild capacities genuine encounter requires.

Not as political strategy aimed at systemic transformation. As existential discipline aimed at maintaining minimal possibility of authentic human life within a system designed to foreclose it.

Contemplative Discipline and Embodied Practice

The first requirement is rebuilding attention itself. Meditation explicitly trains sustained focus on a single object and the capacity to gently return when attention wanders. This isn't mystical—it's practical cultivation of neural patterns enabling sustained focus. Similarly, engaging long-form text—novels, philosophy, sustained argument—trains attention differently than platform scanning.

Face-to-face dialogue structured to interrupt platform habits requires: device-free space (physical removal eliminating the pull of anticipated notifications), extended duration (hours rather than minutes, allowing rapid surface interaction to exhaust itself), minimal agenda (resisting instrumental "what is this for?"), attention to non-verbal dimensions (deliberately re-training perception to engage embodied communication), vulnerability practice (deliberately revealing what doesn't fit curated presentation).

Artistic and literary engagement with genuine alterity—voices not algorithmically filtered for compatibility, perspectives that challenge rather than confirm, forms of life radically different—trains capacity to encounter difference rather than immediately categorizing it. This requires sustained attention, interpretive effort, willingness to be confused, patience with ambiguity.

Communities of practice—reading groups engaging difficult texts slowly, contemplative communities maintaining attention discipline, craft communities where embodied knowledge transmits face-to-face, neighbourhood assemblies where local deliberation occurs through sustained engagement—maintain living traditions of authentic encounter.

The Limits of Practice

These practices persist at the margins. Not because they threaten the system (they don't), but because ontological structures can be colonized but not eliminated. Subjects cultivate them knowing they'll remain marginal, that they won't scale, that they serve no strategic purpose beyond maintaining minimal capacity for encounter in subjects who might otherwise lose it entirely.

Unlike the political-economic coordination traps identified in the first paper, phenomenology points to possibilities that can't be fully foreclosed: the structure of being-with-others is existential, not historical. The face still makes its demand even if subjects are trained to not hear it. I-Thou persists as possibility even if I-It has become habitual default. Authentic Mitsein remains structurally possible even if Das Man dominates.

But this offers no salvation. These practices don't challenge the system. They remain fragile, easily dismissed, structurally unable to scale. They preserve lived knowledge of what genuine encounter is—not as political resistance, but as existential discipline maintaining forms of life where humans can still encounter each other whilst living within comprehensive domination.

VIII. Conclusion: The Ontological Stakes

Platform capitalism colonizes the pre-reflective structures through which humans encounter each other. Through years of immersion in algorithmically-curated environments optimized for engagement, subjects develop perceptual and communicative habits that persist into face-to-face interaction. The other person is encountered as profile rather than presence, as bundle of attributes rather than irreducible alterity, as object of evaluation rather than Thou who addresses directly.

This forecloses what Heidegger called authentic being-with (replaced by Das Man's totalizing reign and Gerede's circulation without ownership), what Buber termed the I-Thou relation (collapsed into instrumental I-It even in contexts that should enable genuine meeting), and what Levinas identified as the primordial ethical encounter (dulled through habituation to endless faces-as-content).

The profile emerges as the dominant ontological category: curated presentation optimized for legibility rather than genuine disclosure, always already interpreted through tribal markers before encounter can occur, approached instrumentally according to utility rather than intrinsic value, mediated by accumulated content rather than directly present.

The consequences are comprehensive. Attention has fragmented, making sustained presence structurally difficult. Non-verbal literacy has atrophied, eliminating access to embodied communication's depth. Interiority has been colonized by the internalized evaluative gaze, foreclosing spontaneity. Vulnerability has become impossible, destroying the precondition for intimacy. Mutual recognition has collapsed into validation metrics that can't provide what humans need.

If the first paper argued that platform capitalism forecloses collective political action, this analysis demonstrates something deeper: it threatens the ontological and ethical ground from which solidarity, responsibility, and genuine relation might emerge. You can't build movements with people you can't actually encounter. You can't develop ethics rooted in the face's demand if the face has become another image. You can't create genuine community through beings who experience others primarily as profiles.

The existential stakes: if human existence is fundamentally being-with-others—if Mitsein is constitutive of Dasein—then colonization of encounter represents damage to the ground of human Being itself. And unlike political-economic domination, which might be challenged through organized resistance, ontological colonization operates at a level that precedes and structures the capacity for challenge.

Yet phenomenology offers grounds for modest hope. The structure of being-with-others isn't created by platform capitalism—it's prior to and constitutive of human existence. Platforms colonize this structure but can't eliminate it. The face still makes its demand. I-Thou remains possible. Authentic solicitude persists as existential capacity.

The work becomes cultivation of practices that interrupt platform-conditioned habits. Not to challenge the system—they remain marginal, unable to scale—but to preserve lived knowledge of what genuine encounter is. Phenomenology without salvation: no guarantee that practices will succeed, that the system will crack, that encounter will be restored at scale. Only insistence that even within comprehensive colonization, the existential possibility of genuine human meeting persists.

The boot stamping on the human face has been replaced by the algorithm optimizing the dopamine loop. But beneath that, deeper than platform capitalism can reach, the face still addresses—still demands recognition, still makes its unconditional claim. Whether subjects can learn to hear that address again, whether capacity for genuine encounter can be rebuilt whilst living within the system designed to foreclose it—these questions remain genuinely open.

The stakes are ontological and ethical. Platform capitalism threatens not just democracy or justice but the very possibility of authentic human existence. Resistance, if possible at all, requires not institutional change but existential discipline—the slow, difficult work of re-learning how to actually see each other, to genuinely be together, to encounter rather than evaluate. Not because this will transform the system. It won't. But because within the ruins of genuine encounter, spaces might persist where humans still meet as humans, where faces still address and are heard, where the Between still forms—fragile, marginal, always threatened, but carrying memory and practice of what being-with-others might mean beyond profile, beyond performance, beyond the logic that has colonized nearly everything else.