In a recent interview published in El País, Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, advances a thesis that is both clear and unsettling: artificial intelligence does not constitute a historical rupture, but rather the continuation—and radicalization—of what she calls surveillance capitalism, a regime whose effectiveness depends on a structural opacity that turns participation into a mechanism for capturing meaning.

Beyond its immediate relevance for thinking about contemporary technology, the interview provides a particularly fertile opportunity to address a philosophical problem that has traversed my work over the past years: the problem of participatory opacity, understood not as a technical flaw or a mere lack of transparency, but as a constitutive structure of certain systems of meaning production.

Zuboff insists that surveillance capitalism can function only insofar as its operations remain concealed. Data extraction, behavioral modeling, prediction, and the modulation of action cannot be made fully visible without losing social and legal legitimacy. Opacity is not accidental; it is a condition of possibility. If subjects were to truly understand how their experience is extracted and used, the system would enter crisis. Surveillance must present itself as interaction.

This point is decisive because it allows us to move the discussion beyond the strictly technological domain. It compels us to interrogate certain contemporary theories of meaning and cognition that currently dominate the field, particularly those that describe interaction as a process of symmetrical co-constitution, while lacking adequate conceptual tools to think asymmetry, manipulation, or the capture of the very process of signification.

Before turning to enactivism, it is worth introducing a reference that sharpens this problem even further: the work of Noam Chomsky, and particularly his notion of manufacturing consent. In the book of the same name, written together with Edward Herman, Chomsky showed how liberal democracies are sustained not primarily through direct coercion, but through the systematic production of consent via the media, interpretive frameworks, and the structural selection of what can be said. Power is exercised not first by silencing, but by shaping the very space of what is thinkable and acceptable.

Chomsky’s relevance to the current discussion is not merely historical. His analysis anticipates with remarkable clarity what reappears today, in technologically more sophisticated forms, in the surveillance capitalism described by Zuboff. Where consensus seems to emerge spontaneously, what we find instead is a prior labor of framing, filtering, and orienting meaning. Consent is not fully voluntary; it is, to a significant extent, manufactured.

This point is especially relevant because Chomsky is explicitly cited in Linguistic Bodies (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher) as a counterexample to Participatory Sense-Making. His political interventions are used to illustrate what, according to these authors, should not be done: addressing an audience from a position of authority grounded in expert knowledge and a strong normative commitment to justice. Precisely because of this asymmetry, they argue, Chomsky’s mode of intervention is not participatory.

What is proposed instead is an ideal of participatory discourse, “anti-authoritarian both epistemologically and ethically”, in a line close to the pragmatism of Richard Rorty. The point would not be to tell the truth to others, but to construct meaning with others; not to interpellate from outside, but to let meaning emerge from horizontal processes of interaction.

However, this theoretical gesture comes at a price—precisely the one Chomsky has insisted on for decades. By renouncing in advance the possibility of a word that interpellates from outside—from an asymmetrical position grounded in a critical analysis of power structures—the capacity to name the manufacturing of consent is weakened. Participatory discourse can thus become, without noticing it, the very medium through which consensus is produced, stabilized, and reproduced.

This problem reappears with clarity when we situate ourselves within the framework of enactivism. From its earliest formulations, enactivism has played a central role in the critique of cognitivist representationalism. Against the idea of a mind that processes internal representations of an external world, it proposed a conception of cognition as embodied, situated, and relational activity. Meaning is not represented; it is enacted. It is not located in the head; it emerges from the dynamic relation between organism and environment. Works such as The Embodied Mind and Mind in Life marked a decisive turn in contemporary cognitive science.

This shift was philosophically fruitful and helped dismantle deeply entrenched assumptions. Yet over time, the enactivist program consolidated a theoretical framework that became increasingly coherent and, at the same time, increasingly closed. The notion of operational closure, developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and systematized in texts such as De máquinas y seres vivos, is fundamental here. Living systems are defined as autonomous systems that produce and maintain their own norms of operation. Normativity does not come from outside; it emerges from within.

When this framework is transferred to the domain of social cognition, the theory of Participatory Sense-Making emerges, formulated by Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, especially in Linguistic Bodies. Meaning is no longer produced by individual subjects, but emerges in interaction itself, conceived as an autonomous domain with its own normativity. Meaning arises between participants, through processes of mutual coordination and breakdown. Interaction thus becomes the privileged site of the genesis of meaning.

The problem does not lie in this description as such, but in the underlying ontological assumption. Participatory Sense-Making presupposes a basic symmetry among participants. Although differences in role, competence, or skill are acknowledged, they are always subsumed within a common plane of co-constitution of meaning. Interaction is, by definition, participatory.

It is here that Zuboff’s analysis introduces a decisive fissure. What happens when one pole of the relation does not participate in a strong sense? What happens when one actor deliberately conceals intentions, orients the process toward unshared ends, exploits affective or cognitive regularities in the other, and uses interaction as a means? In such cases, interaction still exists, but its structure is no longer symmetrical. What takes place is a capture of meaning, not co-constitution.

Enactivist theory lacks clear categories to think this situation, because the opacity of the manipulating subject is absorbed by the grammar of interactive emergence. Manipulation appears as just another complex dynamic, not as an ethico-political rupture of the participatory process. Interaction becomes fetishized: it is treated as a self-sufficient entity, bearer of its own normativity, capable of generating meaning independently of the power relations that traverse it.

But opacity should not be understood only in an ideological sense, as the strategic concealment of power relations. It must also be understood in a deeper sense, referring to the opacity of the subject to itself. Meaning is not produced only under conditions of conscious manipulation; it also emerges from unthematized desires, embodied affects, fears, dependencies, and habits that operate below the threshold of consciousness. In this second sense, opacity refers to a structurally unconscious dimension of subjectivity.

From this double perspective—ideological and unconscious—Participatory Sense-Making becomes even more problematic. Meaning is not necessarily created under conditions of symmetry, nor in a voluntary manner. It can be induced, captured, or internalized without participants having full awareness of it. Even in the absence of explicit manipulation, processes of signification may be traversed by deep asymmetries that the theory is unable to thematize.

The parallel with surveillance capitalism is structural, not metaphorical. Just as digital platforms present themselves as spaces of interaction while operating through opaque capture—exploiting non-reflective dimensions of experience—certain theories of human interaction conceptually neutralize real asymmetry under the figure of co-constitution. The user believes they are interacting; the system observes, models, and orients from a non-exposed position. The agent believes they are participating; the process of meaning has already been captured.

This blind spot is not merely theoretical. It has profound ethical and political implications. A theory that cannot think structural opacity runs the risk of legitimizing forms of domination that present themselves as participation. Violence no longer appears as external imposition, but as emergent dynamics. The victim disappears as a category, replaced by the language of coordination.

It is here that the critique from the philosophy of exteriority, especially in the work of Enrique Dussel, becomes decisive. Against any ontology of closure—representational, systemic, or participatory—Dussel insists on the priority of that which cannot be integrated without residue: the exteriority of the other, the negativity of suffering, the victim as the starting point of all ethics. Judgment does not emerge from interaction; it irrupts from outside, interrupting the totality.

From this perspective, opacity is not merely a cognitive problem, but a primary ethical question. Where theft, manipulation, or the expropriation of meaning cannot be named, theory contributes—whether intentionally or not—to their normalization.

In recent years, my work has consisted precisely in tracing this critical path: from cybernetics and autopoiesis to enactivist social cognition, showing how overcoming representationalism is insufficient if it comes at the cost of a new form of closure. A closure that no longer excludes through negation, but through absorption; that no longer silences the other but integrates them at the cost of obliterating their constitutive exteriority.

The reading of Zuboff, in dialogue with Chomsky, thus functions as an unexpected confirmation—coming from other fields—of a central philosophical intuition: not every interaction is participation; not every shared meaning is just; not every emergence is innocent. Where opacity is structural—whether as ideology or as unconscious—participation can become a sophisticated form of domination.

In the coming months, a study will be published in which I develop this critique of enactivism in a systematic way, based on my doctoral research at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. This is neither a minor adjustment nor an internal polemic, but an attempt to reopen a question I consider decisive for our time: how to think meaning, life, and our relation to the other without closing off that which addresses us from outside.

Zuboff’s interview reminds us that this question is not abstract. It traverses our technologies, our forms of life, and our theories. Thinking opacity is, today, an inescapable philosophical task: without a reflection on opacity, we cannot think power; and without thinking power, we cannot thematize care.

Bibliography

Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2019). Miseria planificada. Derechos humanos y neoliberalismo. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2024). Mente y política. Dialéctica y realismo desde la perspectiva de la liberación. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2026). La vida en la historia. Más allá de la biología, la fenomenología y las ciencias cognitivas (en prensa).

Di Paolo, E., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity between life and language. MIT Press.

Dussel, E. (1998). Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y la exclusión. Trotta.

Dussel, E. (2006). 14 tesis de ética: Hacia la esencia del pensamiento crítico. Trotta.

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1973). De máquinas y seres vivos: Autopoiesis, la organización de lo vivo. Editorial Universitaria.

Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Harvard University Press.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

Zuboff, S. (2025, December 15). La IA es el capitalismo de la vigilancia continuando su expansión. El País.
https://elpais.com/ideas/2025-12-15/shoshana-zuboff-filosofa-la-ia-es-el-capitalismo-de-la-vigilancia-continuando-su-expansion.html