The Digital Mysterium: Non-Knowledge, Algorithmic Opacity, and Power in Digital Cultures

Abstract

The dominant narrative in the digital era promotes complete transparency and knowledge as intrinsic values, while portraying anything that is not known, opaque, or excluded as a deficiency that needs to be eradicated. This article challenges that paradigm. We argue that within contemporary digital ecosystems, non-knowledge has been fundamentally reconfigured from a passive lack into an active, structural and productive force, constitutive of digital cultures themselves. The very technologies like opaque algorithms, immense data sets, and pervasive surveillance infrastructures that aim to eliminate uncertainty designed to eradicate uncertainty paradoxically generate profound, systemic forms of non-knowledge. This condition, which we term the “Digital Mysterium,” is characterized by epistemic opacity and automated decision-making that exceeds human hermeneutic capacity. Through a conceptual analysis drawing on Foucault, Luhmann, and critical digital studies, we examine key manifestations of this Mysterium: the opacity paradox of platforms, the rise of “strategic non-knowledge” in data governance, and the commodification of knowledge into sterile “traces.” Our findings, illustrated by the case of “Information Tailors” within data economies, demonstrate that power now operates less through the accumulation of knowledge and more through the strategic orchestration of the unknown. Consequently, we contend that critique must evolve from a hermeneutics of suspicion to an immanent practice capable of navigating and challenging these regimes of non-knowledge. Understanding this shift is essential for rethinking agency, accountability, and epistemology in 21st-century digital society