To many active citizens, there is no more pressing problem in politics today than the role of the internet in our shared public life. Whether it is the large-scale troll farms and hacking interference that have come to characterize election years across developed and develo** democracies, the monopoly-grip of a handful of plutocrats over the means of digital discourse, or the looming erasure of the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ in a world of fake news and deep fakes, the digital revolution threatens to undermine the very foundations of modern political participation.

As the magnitude of the disruption caused by the globalized digital public sphere has become increasingly clear, one of the most incisive and important statements on the internet and liberal democracy to date has now arrived from Jürgen Habermas. Astonishing though it may seem, the ninety-four-year-old philosopher continues to publish new work. And as if to sum up the two major modes of his rich and varied oeuvre, Habermas’s slim new book, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, manages to address both the most essential philosophical questions (the nature of political liberalism) and the most current political dilemmas (the advent of social media platforms and their consequences for participatory democracy), without slighting either (it also includes two shorter pieces about deliberative democracy that I will not discuss here).

In my brief review, I want focus on two interrelated problems that reflect important unresolved issues within Habermas’s re-evaluation of his original Structural Transformation thesis (Habermas, 1989). Habermas’s earlier work on the public sphere gave an account of the way in which Enlightenment forms of publicity, from the literary public to the political news, were carriers of the emancipatory potential for political participation, and ‘not merely ideology’, because of, and not despite, the liberal market contexts in which they functioned. The earlier work went on to situate twentieth-century shifts in publicity in the age of mass media within a broader context of the ‘depoliticized’ consensus politics of the welfare state at the height of its powers. Given this background, two major areas of possible comparison between the old Structural Transformation and the new one are (1) the novelty of the current transformation in digital media vis-à-vis earlier moments, like those addressed in Habermas’s first work; and (2) the possibility of substructural tectonic shifts in late-modern society that supervene on the development of the new digital public sphere.

First, a note about the structure and aims of Habermas’s recent intervention. Although it was written in response to a symposium on the idea of a ‘new structural transformation’, Habermas begins his consideration of the problem by reaffirming and recommitting to the theory of political liberalism laid out in Between Facts and Norms (Habermas, 1996). If we are to understand the ‘disruptions’ of the internet age, Habermas seems to want to say, we must begin with the ideal form of the structure that has been disrupted, the medium of ‘binding constitutional law constructed out of subjective rights’ (p. 6).

Consequently, Habermas has placed his present-day analysis on a decidedly different foundation from that of the original public sphere project, with political liberalism in place of the mid-century Marxist background of the older book. This shift raises an obvious question for Habermas’s project: Is the new object of analysis as distinct from the old as the new theoretical framework is? Is digital media itself different in kind or only in degree from Structural Transformation?

At first blush, Habermas seems squarely on the side of the novelty of the internet age, placing it in a series of epochal information-shifts dating back to Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type (p. 33). But if we look more closely at the actual ways in which media forms impact political life, from citizen engagement in politics, to attentional shifts (including attention deficits), to discursive fragmentation, and finally to the collapse of the capacity for mediation between public and private, the differences between what social media threatens, and what legacy media like cable television have already delivered, begins to shrink considerably. In everything from the consumerization of political information (news programs’ race for ‘ratings’) to the ever-shrinking length of the average camera shot in television programming, the patterns of the ‘new’ structural transformation are equally present in the old.

In an impressive show of his continued commitment to the critical-theoretical project of integrating theory and empirics, Habermas himself surveys the available data and suggests that ‘for the time being’ legacy media continue to function, and ‘are providing reliable and sufficiently diverse political information’, according to a large-scale EU study (p. 43). Social media can be implicated only secondarily or even tertiarily in the destabilization of democracies by far-right authoritarian populism: It is Fox News which enables Trumpism, and other, more local forms of legacy media, which serve figures like Orbán and Netanyahu. The one area where an indisputable qualitative and not merely quantitative shift has clearly taken place between broadcast media and digital platforms is the personalization of content, or as Habermas calls it, ‘singularization’ (p. 51).

The second question that emerges from this new structural transformation is the role of broader systematic imperatives in transforming the form and function of the media. In this new ‘structural transformation’ Habermas hints at two possible substructural forces at work behind the outsized threats that liberal democracies now face, but he is less explicit about how they act on the public sphere.

The first of these is the political dynamics behind far-right authoritarian populism itself. At several points, Habermas suggests that events like the 6 January 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol would not have happened ‘if the political elites had not for decades disappointed the legitimate, constitutionally guaranteed expectations of a significant portion of their citizens’ (p. 9). Elsewhere, he notes that the stabilizing relationship between democratic participation and social status ‘will function only as long as democratic elections actually rectify substantial and structurally entrenched social inequalities’ (p. 25). Here, Habermas reaffirms his commitment to a radically egalitarian form of redistributionist democratic theory, but he leaves himself open to the charge that his has misinterpreted the internal dynamics of far-right populism. In any case, the development of the contemporary authoritarian threat to liberal democracies brings us back to the first question, as many of the tools of far-right authoritarian populism, from the cult of personality to the exploitation of politics-as-entertainment, rely on patterns that predate the internet (and even explicitly depend on the tropes of television performance).

The second possible substructural cause, and one that fits more comfortably with Habermas’s theory about the angry and neglected underclasses across the democratic world, is the question of political economy. Habermas devotes a few pages to a discussion of the neoliberal political economy of marketization, and the increasing inroads that market systems have made on the lifeworld in developed societies (pp. 26–28). Although Habermas does not say so explicitly, the fragmentation and even personalization that characterize the digital public sphere are not unique to the online world, rather they reflect broader economic trends of precaritization and de-collectivization across the global economy.

The light footprint left by political economy in The New Structural Transformation is one of the largest lacunae in Habermas’s analysis. The commercialization of media forms was a major theme of the original Structural Transformation book, and the new commodification of attention and connectivity suggests that there may be equally close links between the macro-level political economy of neoliberalism and the micro-tendencies of the new digital media platforms.

The original analytic of the old Structural Transformation should remind us that it is impossible to understand the democratic potential of new media landscapes without understanding how new forms of valorization are expressed in them. Different sectors within the digital media world, whether social media, cryptocurrencies, or AI, have different, though related logics of accumulation, relying on the surplus capital stored in venture capital firms and the banking sector, and each requires its own concrete analysis. But in every case, economic inequality and inequality of voice are inextricably tied up with the possibilities of profit in the digital economy. This is perhaps most relevant in the case of AI, whose development is driven by the putative market success of its algorithms. It goes without saying that there is not necessarily any sort of direct correlation between pro-social outputs and profit, and indeed the correlation may in fact be negative. The critical analysis of the relationship between the form that code takes, and the circulation of the capital invested in and earned by that code, is rarely thematized by Silicon Valley itself, which makes the relationship between valorization, forms of digital consumption, and communicative blockages even more important for critical social science to pursue.