Technorationality of the Digital Society

The article examines the prerequisites for and contemporary transformations of the discourse of technorationality. The relevance of the topic stems from the transition from technology understood as a set of means to a digital environment in which contexts of action, criteria of efficiency, and intermediate goals are formed. The aim of the study is to identify changes in the structure of rational activity arising from the interaction between human beings, social institutions, and technical systems, as well as to determine the normative significance of communicative rationality under the conditions of Society 5.0. From a historical and philosophical perspective, the study considers the origins of rational construction, the critique of instrumental reason in the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas’s principles of communicative rationality, the actor-network approach, and constructivist orientations in cognitive science. Drawing on systems and activity-based approaches, the article traces changes in the structure of rational action and in the relationship between goals and the means of achieving them. It is argued that rational action in digital networks can no longer be adequately described as an act performed by an isolated subject; rather, it takes place within a sociotechnical system of relations. Agentic systems reinforce this tendency by incorporating task interpretation, planning, tool selection, and corrective operations into a technically organized cycle. At the same time, the functional rationality of a technical system does not imply that machine agency is equivalent to human reason, intentionality, or responsibility. As a result, a form of distributed goal-setting emerges, whose configurations depend on platform architecture, institutional norms, user actions, and system feedback. The philosophical problem is whether the digital environment can preserve the conditions necessary for the reproduction of the human being as a subject capable of autonomous action when its internal criteria increasingly reshape social space. The article concludes that the principal normative challenge of digital technorationality lies in preserving a social environment in which human beings are able to formulate goals, relate appropriate means to those goals, and subject the grounds of action to discursive examination.

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