Ashot Gevorgyan

This article examines contemporary forms of algorithmic governance through a biopolitical framework grounded in Michel Foucault’s analysis of security, risk, and governmentality. Rather than treating algorithmic systems as a rupture with earlier modes of power, the article argues that they intensify a security-based rationality already oriented toward probabilistic reasoning, anticipatory intervention, and the indirect regulation of conduct. Governance increasingly operates by organizing environments in advance, shaping the conditions under which action becomes possible rather than correcting behavior after the fact. Situating transhumanism within this framework, the article approaches enhancement-oriented projects not as speculative or external developments, but as an extension of biopolitical governance from the regulation of life toward its optimization and redesign. Human capacities become objects of assessment and intervention, shifting the biopolitical subject from a bearer of risk to an upgrade-eligible profile oriented toward projected futures. To conceptualize the form of subjectivity produced at the intersection of algorithmic prediction and transhumanist optimization, the article introduces the heuristic figure of Homo virtualis. This figure describes a form of subjectivity in which individuals are approached through predictive profiles rather than stable identities, and responsibility shifts toward managing expected outcomes rather than accounting for past actions. By examining these shifts, the article contributes to debates on algorithmic governance by clarifying how biopolitics, prediction, and subjectivity are reconfigured as futures become increasingly organized in advance. This article adopts a descriptive and analytical approach rather than a normative one.

In the digital age, the mechanisms of power and control have evolved beyond Foucault’s disciplinary societies, giving rise to a new paradigm of algorithmic governance. This study critically reinterprets Foucault’s concept of the human subject in light of contemporary digital surveillance, big data analytics, and algorithmic decision-making. The paper looks at how technology, biopolitics, and subject formation interact. It says that algorithmic control changes people’s choices in ways that have never been seen before through predictive modeling and real-time behavioral modulation. The study starts with a comparison of early Foucauldian frameworks and more recent theories of digital governance. It uses a method that combines philosophy, media studies, and political theory. The results show that while disciplinary societies relied on institutionalized norms and body regulation, algorithmic control works through data-driven anticipatory mechanisms, which make subjectivity less clear and more broken up. This shift raises ethical and ontological questions about autonomy, resistance, and the very notion of the self in a hyper-connected society. The study concludes that rethinking Foucault’s insights in the digital era is essential for understanding and contesting the pervasive influence of algorithmic power on human subjectivity.

Historiography regularly encounters a crisis. This is mainly due to methodological reasons. History is not a representation of the past based on some archival materials because, firstly, the past is not available, secondly, the past, and therefore the present and the future, cannot be thought anew, and the historical research will not find new facts. New methods are needed to rethink the idea of the past. Recently, indicators of the development of science are in academic journals. Therefore, their analysis will allow through comparison to highlight the lacks of the historiography’s current state and identify the perspectives of their correction.

The article touches upon one of the most topical and controversial issues of the sphere of modern scientific research: the review, control and guidance of the effectiveness of the scientific activity of the authors through scientometric mechanisms. Drawing parallels between various historical periods and particularly highlighting the importance of the issue in the 20th century, the indirect but important influence and role of the Internet is emphasized. Some proposals and guarantees are also put forward which can slightly alleviate the frequent inequality and inadequacy in the field of assessing and evaluating scientific researches and researchers.