Just so you can’t say I didn’t mention the clouds 107 A vile post could kill What could be salvation? What cloud, if there’s no space, nor time, no “yes”, nor “no” Yes, nor no. (Author’s translation) In this weary and disillusioned atmosphere, the entire set of infrastructures and applications, once viewed with uto- pian optimism, has now become a truly autocratic empire. When considered on a planetary scale, it constitutes what Couldry and Mejías (2019) and Lehdonvirta (2021) refer to as “the empire of the cloud”. Far from the utopian “infoways”, more and more we use control metaphors like “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019), more aligned with Foucault’s biopolitical prophecies, with their own dynamics of life and planet management. The contemporary being finds itself caught inside a game of continuities and discontinuities in the clash between the dark interiori- ties of algorithms and the efficient exteriorities of platforms. Two constitutive models of the relationship between visibility and subjectivity are in conflict: on the one hand, the panoptic spectacle of the all-seeing data cloud, and on the oth- er, the media spectacle that exploits us as pawns and places us within a media fog that obscures reality. How did we end up in this hall of mirrors? And how are we going to escape from this fog? As Heidegger (1949) reminds us, we cannot directly control natural, economic, or tech- nological resources; we can only control the way we orient our- selves, think, and act in relation to them. My aim in this essay is to offer some planetary reflections on mediatization, seeking to understand the role and effects of the complex of information and communication technologies on the planet’s habitability during the Anthropocene – the geological era in which humans exert significant influence on life on Earth. To guide this inquiry, I will use a neo-materialist perspective for mediatization with an ecological orientation, which integrates a broader move- ment emphasizing the importance of technological materiality – sometimes referred to as the “material turn” – in media and communication research (Reichert and Richterich, 2015). The
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