Psychosphere and networked territory (Overton Window, Spiral of Silence, and the geography of Cognitive Warfare)

Abstract

The expansion of digital infrastructures reconfigures the public sphere by shifting political struggle into the domain of perception and collective cognition. This article reinterprets the Overton Window and the Spiral of Silence from the perspective of critical geography, articulating the psychosphere and the networked territory of Milton Santos with Leon Trotsky’s Law of Uneven and Combined Development and Paul Virilio’s dromology.

It argues that, in informational capitalism, power operates through the simultaneous modulation of space and time: while networks structure a global networked territory, Virilian acceleration compresses duration and automates the formation of consensus. The speed of informational flows intensifies the Spiral of Silence and accelerates shifts in the Overton Window, producing instantaneous climates of opinion and reducing deliberative space. The article further contends that the convergence of technical infrastructure, algorithms, and regimes of acceleration establishes forms of power that act directly upon the psychosphere. From this process emerges neuroterritorialization, understood as the capture and governance of collective cognition. It concludes that contemporary politics unfolds as a struggle for control over cognitive territory and the temporality of perception.