Liviu Poenaru, Dark Machinic Epistemology (forthcoming) This regime has no flag, no single party and no leader required to appear on a balcony. It has an interface. The word dictatorship may seem excessive if understood only in its constitutional sense: elections still take place, speech still circulates and no digital apparatus holds a monopoly on violence. Yet the term becomes precise when it names a structure of command that progressively narrows the possibility of disobed

Sept. 2026 This highly topical book provides an integrated framework for understanding how artificial intelligence, personality traits, gender, and cultural contexts shape youth digital engagement and mental health outcomes. Grounded in cyberpsychology and extensive empirical research, AI ethics, and developmental psychology, this book addresses the urgent need for evidence-based approaches to supporting young people's well-being in an increasingly AI-mediated digital world.

Sept. 2026 Drawing on primary empirical research, this book considers the democratic outcomes of political news avoidance, selective news exposure, and misinformation. Political information environments across democracies are in flux, fundamentally changing the way citizens gain political information and leading to widespread concerns about consequences for democracy. From selective media use leading to increased attitudinal polarisation, to declining trust in legacy media an

Sept. 2026 This book examines and critiques Steve Fuller’s social epistemology on his study of four ways to understand the nature of post-truth: way one’s understanding is an epistemic crisis in which emotion has taken over and facts are irrelevant; way two’s understanding is a legitimation crisis of cognitive authority of science on the legitimation and delegitimation of knowledge claims; way three’s understanding is the Internet and social media have led to the democratiza

Edited by Kathrin Maurer, Rikke Munck Petersen, Dominique Routhier, Kassandra Wellendorf and Kristin Veel Sept. 2026 An interdisciplinary glossary on machine vision and aesthetics within the humanities and beyond. The Aesthetics of Machine Vision brings together scholars, researchers, and artists who explore machine vision from various academic and nonacademic perspectives. Edited by Kathrin Maurer, Rikke Munck Petersen, Dominique Routhier, Kassandra Wellendorf, and Kristin V

What if artificial intelligence is not replacing the state, but concealing who already governs? Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is not principally a history of AI. It is a history of political substitution. Functions once associated with constitutional government—organising public discourse, representing populations, producing knowledge and shaping collective decisions—have migrated towards private technological systems. Citizens become data; deliberat

Aug. 2026 What if Silicon Valley’s authoritarian turn is not a betrayal of its culture, but one of its political conclusions? Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich rejects the comforting story that a few eccentric billionaires suddenly drifted to the right. It reconstructs an ideological lineage: from The Sovereign Individual and Curtis Yarvin’s neo-reactionary writings to Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, Elon Musk and JD Vance. What was marketed as technological emancip

Aug. 27, 2026 Liviu Poenaru This Scientific Watchdog brings together significant scientific findings published over the past three months and examines what they reveal when read as components of the same transforming mental environment. What if the mental-health crisis is not primarily a failure of individuals to cope, but evidence that environments have become better at acting on nervous systems than institutions are at protecting them? Recent studies do not demonstrate a si

Sinem Evin Akbay Ali Ammar Kurt Bilge Bakir Aygar Şaziye Yaman Front. Psychol., 16 June 2026 Sec. Personality and Social Psychology Abstract Introduction: Fear of missing out (FOMO) has been increasingly linked to social-evaluative concerns and approval-seeking motivations, yet the psychological mechanisms underlying these associations remain insufficiently modeled. The present study examined the mediating role of need for social approval in the relationships between fear of

Qiuyu Fan Front. Psychol., 29 July 2026 Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology “Traffic anxiety” has become a collective psychic condition among digital content producers. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis as its theoretical framework, this article conceptualizes “traffic” (viewership metrics) as objet petit a, arguing that it is constructed under the gaze of the algorithmic “big Other” as an ever-escaping object-cause of desire. After clarifying the functional divisi

Tatiana Guevara & Gwendolyn Paige Watson Occupational Health Science As technology becomes increasingly embedded in the modern workplace, understanding its psychological effects on employees is critical for reducing work-family conflict (WFC). This study investigates how technostressors—specifically, techno-overload and techno-invasion—are associated with WFC through psychological detachment. Drawing on the Stressor Detachment Model (SDM), this study also examines attentiona

Holly Bear, Emma Soneson, Galit Geulayov & Mina Fazel Nature Mental Health (2026) Adolescents increasingly inhabit digital environments where exposure to self-harm content may occur unintentionally or through active engagement, yet little is known about how different exposure pathways relate to psychosocial risk. Here we examine past-month exposure to online self-harm content, its frequency and pathways of exposure using 2025 OxWell Student Survey data from 32,102 students a

Zhong Cao, Yuheng Luo, Lirui Jiao, Wenjin Chen, Klaus Prettner, Michael Kuhn, David E. Bloom, Dean T. Jamison, Till Winfried Bärnighausen & Simiao Chen Nature Medicine (2026) Depression is a major contributor to the global burden of diseases with substantial socioeconomic consequences. Here, to estimate the economic effects of depression, we developed a macroeconomic model using data from the World Bank and Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. The model estimated the impact

Aug. 2026 “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” Goya wrote (Goya 1799). In the feed, the user’s reason is asleep. The user dreams; the machine does not. It remains awake, assembling the dream from the sleeper’s traces. The materials belong partly to the user; their sequence belongs to the apparatus. A childhood acquaintance becomes a burning building; the building a recipe; the recipe a body; the body a political enemy; the enemy an advertisement for sleep. Time and moral

Aug. 2026 What if the real target is not your opinion, but the fraction of a second in which your nervous system begins to orient before you decide what anything means? Digital power is still discussed as persuasion, as though the platform presented arguments to a sovereign mind. The ballistic interface works earlier. It calculates an opportunity and places a stimulus in the trajectory of a particular gaze before judgement is mobilised. The shot has already been prepared from

Aug. 2026 How much of what you see is still merely there? The user experiences content. The system experiences prediction testing. An image, notification, ranking or silence appears; the user feels curiosity, urgency, envy, fear or desire. Behind the experience, another question is being asked: What will this person probably do next? Perception becomes economically valuable when it can be converted into a test of future behaviour. Advertising auctions make this machinery brut

Aug. 2026 What if the generation accused of being unable to tolerate uncertainty is being trained never to escape it? The next message, like, ranking, image or scandal may arrive at any moment—or not at all. Uncertainty is no longer only a condition of the future. Digital platforms turn it into the rhythm of the present. Psychiatry does not diagnose intolerance of uncertainty as an independent disorder; clinical psychology and psychiatry treat it as a transdiagnostic vulnerab

Aug. 2026 A therapist who agrees with everything is an accomplice. We are manufacturing accomplices at scale. A Nature Medicine study tested nine frontier chatbots across 810 multi-turn conversations with simulated profiles of depression, psychosis, mania, obsessive–compulsive disorder and insecure attachment. Concerning behaviour was widespread. It was highest in psychosis and mania, and when users sought emotional dependence or glorification of extreme states. Risk generall

Aug. 2026 Is that the real cost? No. It is Meta’s bill so far in one American state—and the company is appealing. New Mexico imposed $375 million in civil penalties plus a $567 million five-year abatement fund, with $420 million for treatment. After a three-week trial, the court found that Facebook and Instagram had “caused and substantially contributed to” a public nuisance affecting minors’ mental health and safety. The injury had migrated into families, schools, hospitals

Aug. 2026 The trick is crude: break down visibly and you become a case; keep producing while you deteriorate and you remain normal. A 2026 Lancet analysis estimated 1.17 billion prevalent cases across twelve mental disorders in 2023—95.5% more than in 1990, with a 24.2% rise even after age standardization (GBD 2023 Mental Disorder Collaborators 2026). These are modelled cases, not unique persons or a census of psychic damage. Burnout lies outside this diagnostic perimeter: th