Freedom and Justice between Humanism and Posthumanism: Existential Cultural Aspects

Abstract

The article analyzes the profound social transformations of the late 2010s–2020s triggered by the simultaneous action of several irreversible processes: the mass adoption of neural interfaces and genome editing, the total algorithmization of behavior management, the collapse of the anthropocentric climate model, and the transformation of platform capitalism into the dominant form of labor and exchange organization. These processes are destroying the foundation of the modern social contract, which was built on the figure of the sovereign, bodily bounded, rational individual as the sole legitimate bearer of rights, freedoms, and moral responsibility.
In a world where a significant portion of social decisions is made by opaque algorithms, consciousness can be distributed between the biological brain and cloud servers, and spe-cies boundaries become a matter of designer choice, the traditional categories of freedom and justice lose their regulatory power. Freedom - whether understood as negative protection of privacy or positive self-determination - ceases to function in a reality where the subject is originally distributed. Justice as equality among autonomous individuals and the fair distribu-tion of resources becomes meaningless when the social network includes actors lacking classical subjectivity (AI, genetically modified organisms, climatic hyperobjects) yet possessing real agency and vulnerability.
Justice is undergoing a transition from a distributive model to an ontological one: its task is no longer the distribution of goods among already-existing subjects but the maintenance of the viability of the entire expanded network, including future generations, algorithms, ecosystems, and the climate. Four dominant collective affects of the current social transformations have been identified: ontological anxiety over the loss of the human center, euphoria of mor-phological freedom, zoetic guilt toward the nonhuman, and the strange calm of flat ontology, when humanity ceases to be the measure of all things.
The research findings have direct practical relevance for understanding and managing on-going social transformations, creating a foundation for an affirmative politics of immanence capable of overcoming the dichotomy between reactionary bio-conservatism and uncritical techno-accelerationism.