Philip Ademola OLAYOKU, PhD
…and we, can all make a change
So I’m told, but I haven’t seen the change unfold
I’ll keep hoping, please…
…But I know that I will always continue to grow
As long as I lead, and never follow in no one else’s shadow
There will never be another me, and that I can guarantee
That’s why the f*** I remain s***** free
To this day, the game will never be the same
No matter how much fame and success they attain
There will never be another me
And no matter what they do, there will never be another you
You can search, but you’ll never find
You can try to rewind time, but in your hearts and your minds
We will never die, we are forever alive
And we continue growing, one day at a time
One Day at a Time (Tupac ft Eminem and Outlawz)
Technological developments in the 21st Century have been characterised by major advancements in science and technology, arguably on a scale that has yet to be witnessed by humanity. From architecture, through transportation, to information and communication technology, humankind has continued to build on the foundations of philosophical inquiry by advancing our understanding of the universe using the principles of science (episteme), and initiating the continuum of conquering it through innovations (techne). In particular, our age has most recently been defined by the shift from machine automation to its autonomy, which has generated new debates on the evolution of knowledge, its application, and implications for the present and future of humankind.
From the techno-scopophilic commodification of human attributes through simulation in machines for economic benefits and pleasure (see Soukup, 2009), the evolution of agentic Artificial Intelligence is creating a logic of realism that was hitherto considered utopic, especially as we increasingly see the blurring of lines between human existence and machine operations. As an aside, this enduring aspiration feeds off the obsession of techo-bourgeoisie controlling big corporations, and partly betrays the self-indulgence of modern-day oligarchs in their insatiable quest for immortality. A recent expression of this made its way to the deliberative public as a private conversation between President Xi Jinping and President Putin, who spoke about the affordances of living till 150 years based on developments in modern medicine, while on their way to the Beijing military parade in September 2025. Earlier in 2024, Kremlin was reported to have ordered scientists to research on advancing immune functions as well as reversing osteoporosis, cellular aging, cognitive and sensory disorders. The Russian government has also maintained keen interest on 3D bioprinting for medical interventions. Similarly, the billionaire Russian media mogul, Dmitry Itskov, also launched a project to transfer human consciousness into computers in an attempt to transcend the bodily limitations of fatality (Croft, 2024). Today’s technological developments have thus continued the agelong inquiry into the material and the ethereal composition of the universe, though the Platonic utopian ideology is increasingly being overshadowed by Aristotelian hylomorphism (hule – matter / form – morphe) through the assertion of the primacy of matter that seeks to evade meta-realism.
In the midst of these developments, the church, which bred influential individuals during the Enlightenment Era that foreshadowed the dominance of scientific and technological development as obtains today, also continues to serve as the moral conscience of the world through its teaching on man’s existential reality pertaining to his essence. During his Wednesday General Audience of December 10, 2025, the Holy Father focused on the reality of death and human existence by reiterating that pondering on the mystery of death is an important step in defining our existence. He touched on the attempt of technology to prolong human life within a transhuman aspiration through his profound questions, which should constitute the core interests of philosophical inquiry in our age: “Could death really be defeated by science? But then, could science itself guarantee us that a life without death is also a happy life?” (de Carvalho, 2025). Beyond the Papal theological proposition of Christ’s resurrection in accentuating the liminality of death as a passage to something more glorious in the afterlife, our task as philosophers is to explore how the effervescence of biotechnology, in its most literal and broadest sense, redefines the meaning of life and human relations to life itself.
Techno-Biopolitics and the Antimoral Digital Public
The value of living itself, an age-old question that threads through the Roman legal category of rights, was theorised by Giorgio Agamben in his exploration of Foucaultian biopolitics. Using the Homo Sacer’s bare living – as the paradox of eligibility for killing and not sacrifice- as a paradigm, Agamben (1998) observed the emptiness that characterised individuals subjected to the biopolitics of exclusion with the experience of the deprivation of fundamental and political rights as was the case in concentration camps during Nazism, and subsists today in detention camps, war torn communities and refugee camps. This political ordering was furthered by Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics ‘the politics of death’ within today’s context where structural determinants are instituted to undervalue living as well as regulate dying and the dead (Mbembe, 2019). In today’s global politics, one considers it safe to attribute the same Foucaultian biopolitical logic of truth to the disruption of the hitherto pretext of a postwar rule-based order. Suffice to mention that the United Nations (UN), paling into irrelevance with displacement threats from the newly formed exclusive Board of Peace, had been founded on the same ill-logic of injustice as the League of Nations. The League was a racialised entity to the extent that it refused Japan admittance despite its heroics during the Great War, and this was inherited by the UN through permanent membership of its security council and exclusive ownership of veto powers. What is emerging today as a Board of Peace, currently led by the logic of transactionalism for peace enforcement, has not deviated from but rather reinforced the principles of exclusivity.
The paradox of restriction amidst freedom reflects today in the emergence of despots looking to amass territories from independent nations, as in the invasion of Ukraine, enforced regime change in Venezuela for political and economic control, external determination of governments of independent states as experienced in Taiwan, or even enforced security collaborations as in the case of Nigeria. Today, sovereignty is assuming a new meaning with a potential regression into the Hobbesian state where might is right. As it were, transactional politics is the bane of political sovereignty in today’s international relations. Vulnerable states, most of which ethically adhered to the principles of non-alignment and pushed for non-nuclear proliferation (see Prashad, 2007), are conditioned to yield their resources in return for protection to the detriment of the already precarious present and blighted future of their citizens by the nuclear powers. Indeed, economics has become the important determinant of political sovereignty and its guarantee amidst the implosion of a previously concocted rule-based order.
Perhaps, the founding members of the UN did not envision the transcontinental rise of despots with aligned orientation and interests fossilised by the ambition to be unanswerable to the checks and balances that have kept global peace in the last decades. This omission has led to border violations as we experience them today, either through physical invasions or remote assault. Within national borders, racial hierarchies, which had hitherto been subtly used for disenfranchisement, have been legally installed for displacement through criminalisation. The rise of far-right politics, often disguised as movements for salvaging civilisation, national culture and security has regulated the lives of immigrants whose freedom has come under scrutiny, including with threats of revocation of permanent resident permits and citizenship. The calamity, based on Foucault’s observation, is not that the dehumanisation of a section of the populace within national territories is taking place, as despicable as this is. It is that the voices of endorsement are drowning the moral conscience of the globe. It is alarming how different religions, across various contexts and through various media, have been deployed to serve impunity, whether by terrorists in their puritanical agenda, or politicians pretending to return their nations to divine will and providence. This opium continues as a great undoing of the masses.
To be clear, every nation has protective mechanisms in place to safeguard its borders against the threats and vulnerabilities of illegal migration, and rightly so; but the weaponisation of legal frameworks for Aryanist propaganda is a blight on the national conscience of its perpetrators. Today’s immigrants are no different from the Homo Sacer, whose disrepute is in the delegitimization of their labours and those of their forebears, as they are only objectified as entities of transaction subjected to relocation and displacement, at times stateless. The joke is on the transacting perpetrators’ heritages, far from the land on which they claim ownership having inherited the shame of their ancestral displacements of indigenous populations, who have also been condemned to geographical, and by implication, economic fringes of their land. Their lives are often themes of national propaganda on drugs and crimes, in the bid that they never recover from the enforced oblivion despite their efforts at resistance. Mbembe’s necropolitics, though contesting imperialist legacies, infiltrates the neo-imperialist enforcement of silence; from injecting whistleblowers through sending pagers and drones to terrorists, to subtler measures of denying access to healthcare and quality life for immigrants, the nature of dying and death is being predetermined at far away distances from their locations of occurrence. This regulation of life and death, characterised by restricted freedoms, leads us back to the questions around the existence of humans and whether efforts at conquering death through longevity would guarantee happiness.
The search for answers ought to be the object of today’s academy amidst the challenge of endorsement that is the bane of majority rule, especially within the ideologies of populism (see Tushnet, 2019). The contradiction in today’s world is the deployment of technology against the intellectualism that produced it. The false logic of independence in the illusion of a post-truth era has misled individuals to ascertaining multiple opinions as truth, a simplification of an age-long puzzle that has defied epistemological consensus. If, for instance, we consider the pragmatic conception of truth as ‘the end of inquiry’ as practicable (see Misak, 2004), we would find value in the push for the resuscitation of the deliberative political public sphere by Habermas (2023); particularly from the comatose imposition of digital oligarchs pretending to the harbingers of truth by constituting the reference point for argumentum ad verecundiam on digital platforms. Peirce’s opening statement in ‘The Fixation of Belief’ revealed the morbidity of knowledge resulting from mob mentality founded on individualised canons. In his words, ‘Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already’ (Peirce, 1887: 1).
The abuse of the deliberative nature of the public sphere by technology, today, is muddled in some complexities acted out by perpetrators with dissimilar characteristics. The cry that birthed fake news, through attacks on the legacy media, has evolved into their official boycott to create a despotic voice leveraging populism for national governance. The debilitating nature of endorsement, as observed by Foucault (2004), is often inflicted by an uncritical mass of average citizens with diverse identities bonded together by a string of propaganda, often for personal gains at the detriment of the commune. This mass jumps on the bandwagon with claims to protect the truth, and emerge as factcheckers while ironically proliferating multiple truths based on elite technological rationality (Marcuse, 1941). The self-acclamation as truth professionals again undermines the complexities of the debate for facts amidst shifting global political dynamics of might becoming right and power-controlled narratives. Technology itself has been implicated in the emerging chaos of an age where human development has been jettisoned for improvement in machines. While a discussion on the arms race for global domination with unimaginable investments in war technology is a little beyond the purview of this discussion, the wonder of advancements in information and communication technology has also been contrasted with the potential of agentic AI for evil when in the wrong hands. The shift from machine automation to autonomy has continued to generate controversies on human-machine relations, and this would only become further complicated when more independence is guaranteed machines to assume more agency. The simulation of human senses, while it could further enhance the bioprinting interventions in medicine, also introduces a dynamic of the dispensability of humanity as we know it, especially since machine replacements are being muted by technology oligarchs with a Darwinian orientation.
On the Antimoral Digital Public
In less sophisticated contexts, the moral autonomy that has been assumed by citizens of a new digital public, who hide behind devices connected to the internet to exert independence, has led to the evolution of an antimoral digital public that transcends the passivity of Ekeh’s (1975) amoral civic public. This new public actively seeks to expunge whatever values are left of the primordial public. Netizens who belong in this category defy civil deliberations with toxic intolerance for alternate views as they latch on to the false sense of a post-truth era. The illogicality of this new ethics is laid bare if we follow Peirce’s (1877) proposition of triangulating different individual opinions through comparable experiences in order to arrive at an agreeable fact. Albeit this endeavour is not a conclusive experience, it is one with the potential to lead to further truth. The idea of a post-truth era thus becomes inconceivable because truth is a continuum that cannot be apprehended. The direction to go, I contend, is not the way of multiple truths that leads only to chaotic associations as we experience today, but that which considers the generic nature of truth in a Hegelian dialectical fashion, where deliberations lead to further discovery of truth. Within the African context, this new public follows a logic of authorising endorsements by leveraging a mass culture of consumerism, as new media platforms become courtrooms to temporal and permanent jury and judges giving arbitrary verdicts on cancel culture. The sometimes fleeting nature of association, often initially founded on misguided populist principles of asserting individual rights to the detriment of the commune, resonates with Arendt’s (1961) theorisation of mass consumption as the devaluing of taste.
The desire for the ephemeral to satisfy individual cravings in the immediate becomes superimposed on the essentials of the commune, which is embedded in the primordial public. It is noteworthy that the primordial public itself has become infested with the greed of those who ought to be custodians of tradition but sacrifice cultural integrity on the altar of foreign exchange. In new media courtrooms, the uncritical antimoral digital public is unable to distinguish between but muddle up religion and spirituality, wealth and obsession, the biological and the social, rights/freedoms and impunity, security and witch-hunt, charity and showboating, love and lust, dignity and shame, work and fraud to mention but a few. The evil of endorsement has become mutually beneficial, with the oligarchs validating trending favourable pro-administration posts, including through economic rewards, social awards, and/or political positions to retain their oppressive stronghold on power; and the new generation of content creators setting the agenda for their massive audience on aligning with elite rationality, even when essentially damaging to individual and communal rights. On our continent, populist agenda have ossified collaborations between the lumpenbourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat who appropriate social interaction platforms for political machinations with close coordination by their foreign collaborators. In the antimoral digital public, the gravest danger of our age is not the danger of consensus among perpetrators of perpetual enslavement, but that of enslaved bystanders who rationalise the former’s action for public endorsement. The enslaved bystanders’ identity, it must be said, remains a complication of victimhood and greed-induced disillusionment of privilege. There has indeed been a persistent attack on the intelligentsia, globally, as the academy is being punctured both from within and outside in the active bid of its displacement by the new digital public. From defunding, through prebendalist staffing, to sex for grades, plagiarism, and unmerited degree awards, mediocrity has been installed as the norm within the academy, thus blighting the hope for an ideological reversal of the antimoral digital public.
One must mention that it is not all doom and gloom if the positives of the proactive professionalisation of content creation by China are considered. In alignment with Habermas’ (2023) call for accountability within the deliberative political digital public sphere is the regulation by the Cyberspace Administration of China that was released in October 2025. The regulation demanded that only professionals are allowed to serve as influencers on critical topics such as finance, health, medicine, law, and education. To speak on any of these topics authoritatively within the digital space, relevant professional credentials such as university degrees, recognised trainings, licenses, and/or certifications are required. Platforms are obligated to verify these credentials, delineate AI-generated content from research-based utterances and tag advice (Sneha, 2025). This is indeed a victory for the academy in an age where ‘school has been considered a scam’ by some because ‘it no longer guaranteed economic success’. This effort at countering misinformation by China thus restores hope that the academy indeed has a vital role to play in the reorientation of the antimoral digital public. What is more, the unconventional synergy of purpose between the East and the West, as shown in the trend of legislations on the minimum age to use social media at various stages in countries like the UK, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Greece, Australia and New Zealand, is testament to the realisation of the dangers of the antimoral digital public, not just to the present, but also the future (Lockwood, 2026). Similarly, the bellwether trials on the complicity of social media platforms in exposing users to harm, including mental health challenges and addiction, without providing safeguards, affirms the urgency of confronting cyber and cyber-enabled challenges. Though garnering momentum four years after documents wear leaked from Meta by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, they signal that accountability by big tech companies is being taken more seriously than ever before (Duffy, 2026). On the side of the tech companies, Anthropic’s refusal of unrestrained access to its AI models for classified operations of the US military citing the danger of unethical domestic surveillance and deadly deployment without human control deserves commendation. Sadly though, this led to a ban by the US government and replacement by OpenAI within hours of disengagement (Ramkumar, 2026).
It is thus on this note that I refuse to end my submission by rescinding into pessimism. At the beginning, Tupac’s verse on the need for change speaks to the existential reality within the African communal paradigm, where everyone is imbued with the potential to create change. The principles of Ujamaa, Ubuntu and Asuwada emphasize that communal change can only be realised and sustained by individual contributions, while self-actualisation becomes a mirage without the development of the commune. Akiwowo’s (1980) exploration of the Yoruba epistemology of birth creates a teleological temporal paradigm of shared destiny by members of a commune actualised by becoming an Asuwada. The template of Asuwada, therefore, portends that the actualisation of the self, while contributing to that of the commune, is derivative of the commune. Therein lies Eminem’s prophecy of an enduring legacy where the imprint of the individual remains indelible on the community. The task of collective remembering cannot, therefore, be successfully carried out without landmark individual contributions, including those of intellectuals on whom the actualisation of communal destiny is largely dependent. The 21st Century academy is thus tasked with developing individuals equipped with the theory and praxis of reinserting humanity back into technological sanity from a world obsessed with its reinvention through machines. To be clear, this cannot be achieved without reverting to the primordial context of epistemology as founded on the tenets of Philosophy as the mother of all disciplines.
This, my friends, is the challenge before us as students of Philosophy. To help humanity retrace its steps by leading it to ask fundamental questions on humans, and their enduring relations with nature. The philosopher has the role to retrieve global epistemology from the shackles of mediocrity, where expertise has been based on the morbidity of the mob who install and instil elite agenda through the authority of wealth and fame. Technology’s affordances, my friends, include the democratisation of access for public scholarship. The academy must thus leverage this access, with philosophy taking the lead to bridge the gap between the town and gown, while jettisoning the philistinic isolationist approach that cedes epistemological leadership to self-acclaimed experts, who leverage mob endorsement for pecuniary leadership. This task is an onerous one beyond a miracle, but of rebuilding, one step at a time.