The article addresses Habermas’s recent critique of the digital age, and in particular the risks digital technologies pose to the systemic interaction between speakers within a democratic public sphere. For Habermas, a virtual bubble that exposes the citizens to unstable communication and post-truth narratives has been created. The article also discusses the architecture of discourse ethics by analyzing diverging foundational claims advanced by Apel’s and Habermas’s readings. In specific, these divergences regard: the notion of truth within a consensualist paradigm; the relationship between universal and contextual aspects; the question of justification from an epistemic perspective. The article argues that these divergences test the validity of the discursive approach in relation to the dematerialization of intersubjective relationships, as well as the communication with non-human entities.
