THE CYTOPOLITICS MANIFESTO

Addiction as Cytopolitic Imposition: The Occupation of the Cellular–Hormonal Ground, the Destruction of the Practical Efficacy of Truth, and the Accelerated Age

Hakkı Tan
Independent Researcher | Sociology | Critical Theory
ORCID: 0009-0008-8582-3132
Genre: A foundational political and philosophical manifesto and an evidence-based proposal of a mechanism
Date: September 2026

Founding proposition: Addiction constitutes an imposition at the cytopolitic level when the conditions of exposure that produce and sustain it are institutionally imposed.

Abstract

Power does not merely intervene in the options available to the subject. It also helps constitute the bodily conditions under which those options are encountered. It does so through production, formulation, price, access, working time and digital stimuli. This manifesto develops Cytopolitics as a concept for understanding how institutionally organised exposures become political through addiction, metabolic regulation and the capacity to act.

Cytopolitics asserts a sharp break with biopolitics in its context and central claim. Its focus is a transformation in the exercise of power: from public authorities bound by a responsibility to govern and sustain life towards corporations that act under imperatives to exploit and expand, making subjects the targets of their operations at scale. The break concerns a change in actor, purpose, mode of intervention and allocation of responsibility. The power to shape life and responsibility for life as a whole are concentrated neither in the same actor nor at the same scale.

The central problem cannot be reduced to ignorance of alternatives. A subject may know that an alternative exists and recognise its benefits, yet find it difficult to adopt because of addiction and material barriers. Recording this difficulty as individual choice or inadequate willpower can obscure the responsibility of those who organise exposure. Bodily, economic and moral costs are then displaced onto the subject.

The argument connects agricultural commodity infrastructures to sensory design, reward learning to cellular and hormonal regulation, and the distinction between knowing and being able to act to self-spectatorship. Selected studies from the United States, Europe, China, India, Russia and Africa address different parts of these relationships. Corporate documents concern the organisation of exposure; human experiments investigate specific causal links; observational studies identify associations; and policy evaluations examine the scope for institutional change. These sources are not equivalent instances establishing an entire political chain.

Urbanisation, the need to earn a living through wages and corporate employment decisions help determine the material conditions for disengaging from exposure. Expanding employment entails including people in work; expanding profit does not necessarily entail preserving their employment. Corporate success and workers’ livelihood security can diverge. Fear may become a condition governing everyday life without ever being openly declared. Economic dependence and clinical addiction remain distinct concepts; the question is under what conditions they reinforce one another.

Reality is not destroyed. The practical efficacy of truth can, however, be disabled when the conditions through which knowledge becomes action are eroded. Here, ‘destruction’ denotes the systematic erosion of the capacity to initiate and sustain action consistent with what the subject knows and with the aims they endorse. It does not mean the disappearance of all consciousness or agency.

Keywords: Cytopolitics; biopolitics; theoretical rupture; corporate power; capital accumulation; exploitation; cytopolitic imposition; addiction; urbanisation; vertical dependence; wage dependence; employment; profitability; job insecurity; digitalisation; dopamine; reward learning; metabolic a priori; cellular–hormonal ground; sensory design; bodily substitution cost; practical efficacy of truth; self-spectatorship; accelerated age; metabolic cost transfer; Onopticon; Homovictimus.

Reading Map

This text brings together a foundational political and philosophical manifesto and an evidence-based proposal of a mechanism. Its argument proceeds as follows:

The diagram in Section 7 brings the proposed relationships into a single model. The glossary provides concise definitions and section references. All sources are collected in the reference list.

1. From Biopolitics to Cytopolitics: The Bodily Level of Imposition

Cytopolitics names a relation of power constituted through three connected processes. Institutional exposures participate in cellular, hormonal and neural regulation, producing or sustaining addiction. The bodily cost of moving between options increases. Behaviour occurring under these conditions is then recorded as individual choice.

‘Cytopolitic’ is not a decorative synonym for ‘biological’. It identifies a specific relation of power: the capacity to design and sustain exposure and the obligation to bear its consequences belong to different actors. Bodily change is political by virtue of its role within this asymmetrically constituted relationship.

At the centre of the break lies the divergence between a responsibility to govern and sustain life and an imperative to exploit and expand. Corporations are this manifesto’s central institutional agents. In providing products and services, they exercise power over the options subjects encounter, the tempo of repetition and the bodily consequences of those encounters. The human being becomes both a subject whose needs are to be met and a target whose needs and addictions can be made to secure commercial continuity.

1.1. Corporate growth and the subject’s capacity are different measures

A state’s responsibility to govern and sustain life is not a description of how states invariably behave. It supplies a legal and political standard against which violations can be identified. The corporate imperative to exploit and expand, by contrast, is a political-economic proposition concerning firms’ structural position within competition and capital accumulation. Marx describes competition as imposing the pressure to accumulate upon individual capitals as an external necessity (Marx, 1867/1887, Chapter 24, Section 3).

The form of exploitation examined here binds the subject’s vital capacities to institutional value production while leaving the subject and society to bear its bodily, psychological and economic costs. Growth measured through sales, time spent using a service and repeated consumption can coexist with addiction, lost time and an eroding capacity to refuse. Where addiction sustains commercial continuity, the subject’s inability to end the relationship secures income for the corporation.

Growth in corporate scale is not growth in the subject’s capacity to act. What the subject experiences as failure may be precisely what the corporation measures as success. Cytopolitics connects this divergence to the constitution of bodily conditions and the allocation of responsibility.

1.2. Employment and profit: where the worker stands in the assessment of success

Employment across society is a matter of public responsibility. Corporate profitability does not, in itself, entail an obligation to sustain that employment. Employment includes work in private firms and self-employment. The ILO defines it in terms of productive activity undertaken for pay or profit (ILO, 2016). The distinction therefore concerns neither exclusive ownership of a concept by the state nor its exclusive ownership by the company. It concerns what institutions count as success and for which outcomes they are held responsible.

ILO Convention No. 122 requires ratifying states to pursue full, productive and freely chosen employment as a central policy objective. United Nations Target 8.5 likewise brings productive employment and decent work for all into the same framework (ILO, 1964, Article 1; United Nations, n.d.). These instruments establish grounds for demanding public responsibility; they do not show that states actually protect employment. A corporation’s obligations towards its employees differ from responsibility for sustaining the livelihoods of an entire population.

Employment may be exploitative, yet it still includes a person in work. An increase in profit requires neither more workers nor greater security for them. Employment alone guarantees neither high wages, secure conditions nor a large workforce. Expanding employment does, however, entail keeping or bringing people into a working relationship. Profitability can, under certain conditions, increase through workforce reductions. This distinction does not deny the causal relationship between labour and profit. It identifies the absence, within the profit indicator itself, of a necessary commitment to keeping people employed.

A single decision may appear as a cost reduction in company accounts, a loss of livelihood in the worker’s life, and unemployment or a need for social support from the public standpoint. Each outcome requires its own assessment. An improvement in company finances does not establish that the decision’s full social costs have been met.

When the state treats corporate profitability as a sufficient measure of social achievement, this divergence enters public administration itself. The break concerns the actor exercising power, the criteria used to justify decisions and the scope of responsibility. Any account that equates corporate growth with social progress must establish the worker’s place within that growth.

1.3. The power to intervene does not entail the same regime of obligations

States and corporations are not bound by identical rules. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights distinguish the state duty to protect human rights from the corporate responsibility to respect them. Corporate responsibility exists independently of a state’s willingness or capacity to fulfil its own duties (OHCHR, 2011, Principles 1 and 11). The Guiding Principles are not, in themselves, a binding international treaty; they provide a framework distinguishing these positions of responsibility.

Corporations also bear obligations under public law. Articles 34–35 of the EU Digital Services Act require designated very large online platforms and search engines to assess and mitigate systemic risks. These include risks concerning children, public health, and physical and mental well-being. Changes to design and recommender systems are among the measures envisaged (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022). Such obligations do not confer upon corporations the state’s general responsibility to govern.

Authorisation to offer a product does not, by itself, legitimise the power to constitute people’s bodily conditions for action. Cytopolitics identifies an asymmetry in which effective powers of intervention become concentrated without being bound by an equivalent public responsibility for life as a whole. This asymmetry must be established within the legal, supervisory and exposure arrangements of each case.

The state need not disappear for this transformation to occur. It may restrict corporate activity, provide its infrastructure, enter into partnerships with it or shift the costs of its harms onto the public. The centrality of corporations does not erase state responsibility. What changes is the relationship among those who exercise power, design interventions, benefit from outcomes and bear the costs.

1.4. Intellectual antecedents and the scope of the break

Foucault’s account of biopolitics neither excludes the body nor confines power to the state. It also connects biopolitical techniques to capitalist production. Rose’s molecular biopolitics examines the opening of life to intervention, expertise and economic value production (Foucault, 1978, pp. 92–93 and 139–141; Rose, 2007). The claimed break therefore does not depend on asserting that earlier work overlooked corporations or bodies.

Research on addiction by design has examined how technical arrangements sustain consumption. Scholarship on the commercial determinants of health has investigated corporate practices and health outcomes (Schüll, 2012; Gilmore et al., 2023). Cytopolitics inherits these questions while relocating the centre of explanation. The corporate organisation of exposure, the bodily operation of addiction, the erosion of the capacity to refuse, and the return of responsibility to the subject are treated as constitutive elements of the same relation of power.

Cytopolitics is not biopolitics renamed at the cellular scale. It proposes a sharp break in context and claim by placing the conflict between responsibility for governing life and the power to turn life into an input for commercial continuity at the centre of analysis. This is not a universal, linear history in which corporations simply replace states. Its explanatory value rests on demonstrating the relationship: who can organise which exposures; what bodily changes follow; how disengagement becomes difficult; and to whom responsibility for the outcome is assigned.

Not every biological change is an imposition. Imposition is specified by the subject’s inability meaningfully to determine or alter the conditions of exposure, together with addiction’s bodily reinforcement of that difficulty. Where the addiction link has not been established, a finding can support the context or a particular connection without establishing cytopolitic imposition as a whole.

In this text, Onopticon names the prior organisation of visibility, access, price and exposure within which a decision occurs. Homovictimus names the subject who acts tactically within these conditions but is subsequently judged as though they had chosen the conditions themselves. Cytopolitics concerns the level at which this arrangement operates through addiction and the bodily capacity to act.

2. Before Consumption: The Institutional Organisation of Exposure

Choosing food is not the first event in its history. Decisions about sourcing, processing, cost, circulation and sensory composition precede the subject’s encounter with the product. That bodily encounter has a history of production.

Research prepared for the European Parliament’s AGRI Committee estimates that ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus—the ABCD group—accounted for approximately 50–60% of trade in the main cereals, oilseeds and protein crops in 2022. The estimate does not refer to all food production. The report calls for earlier estimates of 70–90% to be updated (Wion et al., 2024, p. 18). Completion of the Bunge–Viterra merger on 2 July 2025 further demonstrates that this structure is changing (Bunge, 2025).

The decisive question is which actors control which points of production and circulation, and thereby help constitute the world of products consumers encounter. Diversity of brands does not establish equivalent diversity in the underlying infrastructure of production.

CASE 1 — CARGILL: DESIGNING EXPOSURE AND REPEAT PURCHASE

Source type: Corporate descriptions of business operations and sensory science.

What is documented: Cargill describes sourcing, storage, trading, processing and distribution as integrated activities. Its account of sensory science covers taste, smell, texture, appearance and sound. TiDS tracks changes in perception over time. AI-assisted models combine consumer evaluations with production data. Repeat purchase is a measure of commercial success (Cargill, n.d.; 2026).

Limit of inference: These records document the design capacities the company reports. They do not constitute independent clinical evidence that its products cause addiction.

The bodily consequences of design cannot be reduced to how much a product is liked. In a Dutch crossover trial involving 41 participants, Forde et al. found that energy intake on a texture-modified, more slowly eaten ultra-processed diet was 369 kcal per day lower than on the comparison diet, with a 95% confidence interval of 221–517. The two 14-day diets were matched on characteristics including liking and the energy provided (Forde et al., 2026). The findings show that the physical organisation of a product can affect the pace of consumption. They do not measure addiction or difficulty stopping.

A study of US tobacco companies’ international food operations, based on 113 original corporate documents, traces the transfer of commercial expansion strategies between sectors. Published in 2026, it principally examines activities from the 1980s to the mid-2000s (Fazzino et al., 2026). The transfer of a strategy does not establish that food and nicotine share an identical mechanism of addiction.

The scale of exposure also requires measurement. The CDC’s 2025 report estimates that ultra-processed foods supplied 61.9% of daily energy among US children and young people and 53.0% among adults during August 2021–August 2023. These are not addiction prevalence estimates. The decline in the adult share relative to 2013–2014 also limits any account that treats continuous increases as inevitable (CDC/NCHS, 2025).

2.1. Visibility, information and the practicability of alternatives

Observations conducted in 2021 across 115 modern retail outlets in Kenya found that ultra-processed foods occupied 33% of shelf space and accounted for 60% of food advertisements. The inability to obtain permission from some outlets introduces a selection limitation (Karugu et al., 2024). A separate study published in 2026 found that only 21% of 5,587 packaged products carried the minimum nutrition information specified by Codex (Dunford et al., 2026). Availability, the direction of attention and access to information are thus distinct institutional dimensions of exposure.

Research in Russia’s Tver, Arkhangelsk and Sverdlovsk regions examines food outlets, distance, cost, and fruit and vegetable consumption together (Kontsevaya et al., 2023). A 2026 publication on Tula assesses 17,777 infrastructure sites recorded across 26 municipalities in 2024; these are not all food outlets. Such mapping can measure conditions of access, but it does not establish the health effects of the proposed interventions (Kontsevaya et al., 2026).

The announcement accompanying FAO’s 2026 report estimates that 66.6% of Africa’s population could not afford a healthy diet in 2025 (FAO and partner organisations, 2026). Affordability measures neither actual consumption nor addiction. It does, however, give material expression to the distance between an alternative’s existence and the capacity to adopt it.

Demand cannot therefore be treated as an independent starting point outside the explanation. An instruction to ‘stop buying’ does not explain the capacity not to buy. A response that disregards exposure and the cost of exit may return responsibility to the consumer for a problem constituted institutionally.

2.2. Urbanisation, wage livelihoods and vertical dependence

The organisation of exposure includes how people sustain their livelihoods as well as how they access products. Using national definitions of urban areas, the United Nations’ 2025 report places 57.8% of the world’s population in urban settlements (UN DESA, 2025). This figure does not show that all urban residents migrated from rural areas, or that most are on a payroll. Urbanisation also incorporates natural population growth and the reclassification of settlements. Wage employment, self-employment and informality require separate examination in each setting.

Horizontal dependence denotes relations of solidarity that allow reciprocity and shared decision-making. Vertical dependence arises when access to vital resources is conditional upon decisions made at centres of power that the subject cannot meaningfully influence. The distinction is not determined by physical proximity or institutional names. A family relationship may be oppressive, while a trade union relationship in a city may sustain solidarity. What matters is who can alter the conditions of access, and what refusing the relationship costs each party.

Marx explains how economic necessity binds workers separated from the means of production to capital. Emerson develops power–dependence relations through the value attached to resources and the availability of alternatives (Marx, 1867/1887, Chapter 28; Emerson, 1962). These accounts provide theoretical grounds for the distinction. The city is not the sole cause of dependence. It is a site of concentration in which wages, rent, credit, transport and service payments can become interdependent within a single life.

Where the loss of wages also threatens shelter and food, refusing a working relationship means more than leaving one employer. Access to several necessities may be placed at risk simultaneously. A courier outside formal payroll employment or a producer dependent on one customer may face comparable pressures. Dependence becomes more vertical when the power to contest decisions governing survival falls behind the need to remain subject to those decisions.

This process cannot be treated as a law advancing every year in every country. The OECD’s 2025 assessment reports a decline in trade union density from 30% in 1985 to 15% in 2023/2024, and in collective bargaining coverage from 47% to 33.6%. It also records differences between countries and bargaining arrangements that have maintained high coverage (OECD, 2025). These findings support an erosion of collective bargaining capacity in particular settings; they do not establish the disappearance of all horizontal relationships.

2.3. Downsizing, digitalisation and redundancy: growth that can exclude the worker

Corporate claims about downsizing require a precise account of what is being reduced. Headcount, management layers, particular business units and total economic activity are different variables. A company can increase sales, profit and technical capacity while ending its relationships with particular workers. Digitalisation becomes redundancy through institutional decisions about investment, work organisation and the distribution of gains.

CASE 2 — AMAZON, BLOCK AND WORKDAY: CORPORATE GROWTH AND JOB SECURITY DIVERGE

Source type: Corporate communications to employees, a shareholder letter and a quarterly filing submitted to the SEC.

Corporate record	What is documented	Limit of inference
Amazon	Jassy’s 2025 statement anticipates a smaller corporate workforce in subsequent years as AI improves efficiency. A statement dated 28 January 2026 announces reductions affecting approximately 16,000 roles (Jassy, 2025; Galetti, 2026).	Reading the statements together does not establish that AI caused every redundancy. An expectation and an announced decision are different forms of evidence.
Block	The shareholder letter dated 26 February 2026 reports 2025 gross profit of US$10.36 billion, up 17%, alongside a decision to reduce the workforce from more than 10,000 to fewer than 6,000. Management attributes the decision to smaller teams being able to do more with new tools (Block, 2026).	Management’s explanation is not an independent causal assessment. An announced reduction does not establish that all departures have occurred.
Workday	The filing for the period ended 31 July 2026 reports workforce reductions of approximately 7.5% under the February 2025 programme and 2% under the February 2026 programme. Nevertheless, total headcount was approximately 7% higher than in July 2025, and quarterly revenue was approximately 13% higher (Workday, 2026).	Redundancies and net employment change are different measures. Particular jobs can disappear within an expanding organisation.

Shared implication: Corporate growth does not secure an existing worker’s continued employment. These selected records do not represent all companies. Announced decisions, implemented reductions and net employment change must be assessed separately.

These records do not show that companies only dismiss workers, or that technology necessarily reduces aggregate employment. The ILO–NASK assessment published in 2025 identifies potential occupational exposure to generative AI in approximately one-quarter of global employment. In many jobs, the transformation of tasks is more likely than complete substitution (ILO, 2025). An exposure estimate is not an estimate of job losses.

A company’s promise of a growing future does not guarantee its current workers a place in that future. Jassy’s call, in the same statement, for employees to learn new tools illustrates the separation between the obligation to learn and the security of employment (Jassy, 2025). Acquiring skills does not give a worker control over the institution’s employment decisions. Adaptation can become compulsory without guaranteeing continued inclusion.

2.4. The promise of security and the institutional operation of fear

The promise of peace and security is a principal means through which states justify governing. Corporate demands for continual adaptation, efficiency and restructuring can instead communicate that the worker’s future place is conditional. This distinction does not assert that every state produces security or that every corporation openly adopts slogans of fear. The relationship under examination is between the continuity being promised and the concentration of decisions that determine whether it will continue.

Fear is a lived experience. Job insecurity concerns uncertainty about continued employment and the conditions of protection against its loss. One cannot be inferred automatically from the other. Nevertheless, for a subject whose livelihood depends on a job and whose alternatives are limited, the possibility of dismissal may raise the cost of dissent before any job is lost. That effect can be investigated without first establishing a corporate intention to create fear.

In testimony to the US Senate Budget Committee on 21 January 1997, Alan Greenspan treated job insecurity as a factor capable of restraining wage growth (Greenspan, 1997). The record documents the presence of insecurity’s economic function within official economic discourse. It neither establishes a central plan to produce insecurity nor independently verifies the causal assessment. A public narrative of stability and an economic relationship that benefits from workers’ insecurity can coexist within the same order.

Fear need not become a slogan; embedding it in the conditions of livelihood is enough. When financial success is announced alongside workforce reductions, workers may fear success achieved with less need for them as well as corporate failure. Who can feel secure depends on whose account of success is being privileged.

The subject’s need for wage income can persist while a particular employer’s need for that subject’s labour declines. Where alternative income, social protection and collective bargaining are weak, this divergence narrows the capacity to refuse. For Cytopolitics, the question is how these livelihood arrangements shape opportunities to alter exposure, rest, organise meals and disengage from addiction. Job insecurity is not, in itself, a diagnosis of cellular dysfunction or clinical addiction.

3. Addiction: From Liking to Impaired Control over Consumption

Addiction is the focus of this manifesto. The pattern requiring investigation includes consumption that continues despite the subject’s endorsed aims, unsuccessful attempts to reduce it, intense product-seeking and functional impairment. Frequent consumption, liking or a single symptom does not, on its own, constitute a diagnosis.

Dopamine is not treated here simply as a chemical of pleasure. In Peciña et al.’s mouse experiment, enhanced dopaminergic activity increased ‘wanting’ for sweet rewards without increasing ‘liking’ (2003). Johnson and Kenny’s rat study associated changes in reward function and compulsive eating under extended-access conditions with D2 receptor processes (2010). Such animal findings do not permit receptor changes to be inferred from a person’s everyday account of an experience.

Human research has reported greater willingness to pay and reward-related brain responses for foods combining fat and carbohydrate (DiFeliceantonio et al., 2018). Associations have also been found between certain highly processed foods and reports of addiction-like eating (Schulte et al., 2015). Reward valuation and reported difficulty controlling consumption are distinct outcome domains.

In a randomised study conducted in Germany, eight weeks of exposure to a sweet and fatty snack altered preferences and reward-related brain responses without changes in weight or metabolic indicators (Edwin Thanarajah et al., 2023). Prior exposure need not produce weight gain before it can alter the value of a subsequent encounter. Whether these changes amount to addiction requires a further test. Brain imaging is not a direct measurement of dopamine.

Exposure to sweetness alone does not explain the entire mechanism. In the Sweet Tooth Trial, 180 healthy adults experienced low, usual or high dietary exposure to sweet taste for six months. The anticipated differences between groups in sweet liking and body weight were not found (Čad et al., 2025). This result limits an account of inevitable escalation in preference. It does not test every component of product design or addiction as a whole.

Bodily substitution cost denotes the bodily difficulty encountered when a subject wishes to reduce or stop consuming a product and move to an alternative. An alternative’s failure to provide the same pleasure is not intrinsically pathological. The concept becomes particularly relevant where consumption conflicts with endorsed aims and attempts to change repeatedly fail. A ‘loss of substitutability’ asserts a change over time and therefore requires more than a single measurement of preference.

4. The Metabolic A Priori: Bodily History before the Decision

The metabolic a priori comprises bodily conditions formed before a particular decision that participate in its enactment. It is not independent of experience in the Kantian sense. It names a historically acquired ground that nevertheless precedes the present decision.

Hunger, satiety, reward valuation and stress responses are not constituted anew with every choice. Nor do the effects of past exposure amount to an unalterable destiny. The concept brings the body’s history into the explanation of decision-making.

Body weight does not exhaust this history. Despite similar weight gain, interventions containing palm oil and sunflower oil produced different liver and visceral fat outcomes (Rosqvist et al., 2014). Equal energy intake does not mean equal bodily consequences. Advanced glycation end products can also form during domestic food preparation, however, so the proposed mechanism cannot simply be equated with industrial production.

The 2025 ICMR–INDIAB analysis of 18,090 adults examines relationships between dietary composition and metabolic risk in India. Its data were collected during 2008–2020. Its dietary substitution estimates arise from statistical modelling, not an intervention trial (Anjana et al., 2025). In a Chinese follow-up study of 5,147 adults, the highest quartile of ultra-processed food consumption had an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.17 for metabolic syndrome, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.01–1.35 (Pan et al., 2023). Neither association establishes addiction in an individual.

In a 2025 UK trial, both the minimally processed and the ultra-processed diets were designed to follow healthy dietary guidelines. Both produced weight loss: approximately 2.06% and 1.05%, respectively (Dicken et al., 2025). This manifesto does not require every ultra-processed product to cause weight gain in every person.

Addiction and metabolic deterioration need not occur in the same sequence in every case. They are distinct processes that may reinforce one another under particular conditions and must be measured separately.

5. Bodily Reports: Investigating Lived Experience

Dismissing bodily accounts as ‘excuses’ turns a difficulty requiring explanation into a moral deficiency. Treating the same account as a diagnosis of addiction presupposes the result that research should establish.

The following statements are illustrative accounts of lived experience, not clinical data collected from a systematic patient sample. They indicate how consumption history, attempts to change and bodily substitution cost might be investigated together.

Research has established a material basis for the pungency of oleocanthal in olive oil through TRPA1 (Peyrot des Gachons et al., 2011). This finding does not show that someone reporting a burning sensation is addicted to refined oil. An interpretation in terms of addiction requires investigation of consumption history and patterns of impaired control.

Listening to what the body reports is different from assigning it a mechanism without investigation. Bodily substitution cost must also be examined in relation to money, time, distance and access to reliable information.

6. Body, Mind and Decisional Health: The Practical Efficacy of Truth

Hormonal and neuroendocrine regulation are constitutive of bodily functioning. ‘Hormonal balance’, however, is not a single, homogeneous variable capable of explaining every health outcome.

In Watson et al.’s follow-up study, certain proxy measures of insulin resistance predicted subsequent depression (2021). Ekblad et al. found an association between baseline insulin resistance and elevated fasting insulin, and a decline in verbal fluency over 11 years (2017). These observational findings support connections among metabolism, mental health and cognition. They do not establish a chain from addiction to political passivity.

This manifesto uses ‘deterioration’ across three distinct outcome domains: erosion of bodily functioning; psychological and affective difficulties; and difficulty initiating and sustaining action consistent with the subject’s endorsed aims. Change in one domain does not automatically establish change throughout the others.

Decisional health concerns a person’s ability to evaluate their own endorsed aims, implement a decision and revise it when necessary. It does not mean choosing the option a researcher considers correct. Knowingly giving another value priority over health information does not, in itself, establish an impaired capacity to decide.

The practical efficacy of truth denotes the subject’s capacity to act upon a reality they recognise in relation to aims they endorse. Truth is not a biological organ. The concept identifies the practical force of knowledge in the relationship between subject and world: the conditions under which what is known can inform and sustain action.

There is no necessary contradiction in asking how a subject under occupation can recognise that occupation. Awareness and the capacity to intervene are different. A person can recognise their addiction, while the actor designing the product need not be addicted to it. Exposure, protection and opportunities for exit are unequally distributed.

Self-spectatorship names a proposed experiential form of this separation. The subject witnesses their own bodily or psychological deterioration while experiencing a diminishing power to intervene. The concept does not characterise all patients as passive. It directs attention to a particular manifestation of the rupture between knowing and being able to act.

Where this rupture occurs within a commercially produced and sustained relationship of addiction, the subject can witness their own failure while the corporation records continuing consumption. The subject’s inability to act on what they know is entered as a moral failing; the success of the arrangement sustaining consumption is entered as corporate growth. Homovictimus emerges through this separation of accounts. The institutional agent that helped constitute the conditions withdraws from the explanation, while the subject bearing their consequences becomes the centre of responsibility.

Wage and employment arrangements connect this separation to the material conditions of everyday action. Workers may know that irregular hours are straining them or that their exposure needs to change. An inability to sustain that change because it threatens their income or employment does not make their knowledge false. Explaining job loss exclusively through inadequate skills can likewise remove corporate profitability and restructuring decisions from the account of responsibility. Homovictimus appears where the burden of adaptation created by an institutional decision is subsequently recorded as a personal defect. The bodily effects of that burden require separate investigation.

Capacity can be regained. A randomised study in China compared ten weeks of guided cognitive behavioural self-help with a waiting-list condition among 87 adults with eating disorders. Food addiction symptoms and psychosocial functioning improved following the intervention, while body mass index did not change (Chen et al., 2026). Weight, addiction symptoms and functioning are separate outcomes. Improvement with support demonstrates that a difficulty is modifiable, not that it was imaginary.

At the social level, the question is how this difficulty affects collective action when combined with time poverty, insecurity, opportunities to organise and repression. Those exercising power may benefit from an outcome without having designed it for that purpose. This relationship requires its own explanation.

7. Feedback, Falsification and the Possibility of Institutional Change

The mechanism proposed by Cytopolitics is not a one-way, necessary progression through disease. It identifies potentially reinforcing relationships among institutional exposure, reward valuation, consumption, metabolic regulation and the cost of exit.

Commercial feedback occurs when consumption data inform subsequent formulation and marketing decisions. Bodily feedback occurs when bodily changes affect subsequent consumption. Whether these processes converge in a particular case must be investigated. Findings from separate experiments do not close every intervening link. The ‘closed circuit’ names a model of reproduction to be tested, not a completed body of universal proof.

Diagram — Two feedback processes and the attribution of responsibility

The diagram brings relationships investigated in different studies into a single model. Every dashed arrow denotes a connection requiring assessment in the particular case. The arrows do not establish the whole chain or imply that every exposure produces addiction. The evidence supporting particular connections, and its scope, are discussed in the relevant sections.

Reading the diagram: In the commercial loop, consumption data feed into new decisions about design and exposure. In the bodily loop, regulation altered by earlier consumption contributes to later consumption. Addiction is assessed separately from consumption itself. Price, wages, time and access may affect both exposure and the capacity to disengage. Attributing responsibility is a distinct institutional operation concerning the interpretation of institutional contributions and the subject’s difficulty; it is not a biological outcome.

The product, population, duration and expected effect must be specified before investigation. Context must not become a store of exceptions revised after each contrary finding to protect the theory.

The University of Michigan’s registered UltraCrave study is designed to investigate possible withdrawal and difficulties sustaining a reduction in ultra-processed food consumption. It is cited here as a research protocol addressing questions close to bodily substitution cost, not as evidence of results (University of Michigan, NCT06044285).

Changes in institutional conditions also provide opportunities for testing. A household purchasing study of South Africa’s beverage levy estimated approximately 51% less sugar purchased from taxable beverages relative to a modelled counterfactual. This is not a reduction in total dietary sugar (Stacey et al., 2021). A separate working paper using manufacturers’ and importers’ tax returns reports a 33% reduction in sugar supplied through taxable beverages over two years, with some substitution towards untaxed beverages (Cejka et al., 2025). Differences in data and method mean that these percentages are not interchangeable.

A controlled time-series evaluation in the United Kingdom estimated that, approximately one year after implementation of the soft drinks levy, free sugar intake across the total diet was lower than the counterfactual trend by 4.8 g per day in children and 10.9 g per day in adults (Rogers et al., 2024). These policy studies are not randomised; concurrent changes must be considered.

Reductions in exposure following institutional intervention limit any interpretation of occupation as unchangeable. They reinforce the need to investigate how capacity is constituted through conditions. The success of an intervention must also be assessed alongside substitution towards products outside its scope and unequal access to alternatives.

8. Digital Cytopolitics and the Accelerated Age

Digital platforms organise the sequence of content, the timing of feedback and the conditions for renewed engagement. Lindström et al. show that social media behaviour exhibits patterns that can be explained through reward-learning principles (2021). This finding is neither a measurement of dopamine nor evidence of clinical addiction or hormonal deterioration.

Sherman et al. conducted an experiment with 34 adolescents aged 13–18, manipulating the number of likes displayed in an Instagram-like environment. The imaging analysis included 32 participants. Like counts affected behavioural responses. Stronger responses in reward-related regions were observed particularly when participants’ own photographs received many likes (Sherman et al., 2016). The study demonstrates behavioural and neural effects of how social approval is presented. It does not measure dopamine levels or clinical addiction.

The externally organised repetition of encounters, and its effects on the capacity to disengage, provide a shared object of inquiry across food and digital environments. Food is encountered through images, smells and expectations; digital experience is also embodied. Biological findings from one domain cannot nevertheless be transferred directly to the other.

The US litigation involving Meta provides documents concerning the institutional organisation of these encounters. A BBC report published on 17 August 2026 and updated on 18 August described states’ demands for changes to Facebook and Instagram, including like counters, infinite scrolling and recommendation systems (Hays and McMahon, 2026). The demands reported in the article and the obligations subsequently accepted do not have identical scope.

CASE 3 — META: DESIGN OBJECTIVES AND INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Source type: An interlocutory court order assessing evidence, a corporate statement and a settlement agreement.

Internal document: Dkt. No. 3012-3, discussed in the California federal court’s order of 29 June 2026, connects biological features of adolescent development to product strategy. It treats sensitivity to dopamine as a commercial opportunity. At that stage of proceedings, the court considered this record among the evidence supporting the allegation that Meta acted knowingly or recklessly (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, 2026, p. 18). The order is not a final judgment resolving every contested issue.

Settlement: Meta’s update of 27 August reports judicial approval of the multistate settlement dated 26 August 2026 (Meta, 2026). The agreement provides for teenagers to be able to select a chronological feed as their default, for like counts to be hidden by default, and for usage breaks and daily time limits. The two-hour limit has exceptions, including messaging and long-form content. Less restrictive settings require parental approval. The general implementation period is six months from the effective date, with four months allowed for the chronological-feed option. The agreement contains no admission of liability, and its obligations are limited to participating US jurisdictions (Meta Platforms, Inc. and the Settling States, 2026, Sections II.B–D and X).

Limit of inference: A company’s use of its interpretation of biology in commercial design is not a directly measured change in users’ dopamine. Nor does a settlement establish that design changes have been completed or that their clinical effects have been demonstrated.

The subject’s bodily characteristics can themselves become inputs into institutional decisions organising consumption. The Meta case makes visible the design-dependent conditions for continuing and interrupting an encounter. Onopticon concerns the organisation of that encounter; Cytopolitics concerns its relationships with bodily processes, addiction and the capacity to refuse; Homovictimus concerns the recording of difficulty as personal failure. Reducing opportunities to stop within an interface and raising addiction-related bodily exit costs must be established separately. The judgment in the separate New Mexico case is considered within its own scope in Section 10.

This is not an age of speed; it is an accelerated age. The claim calls attention to the technical and institutional production of speed rather than attributing all acceleration to a single centre. Rosa’s account of social acceleration provides grounds for understanding time pressure beyond individual haste (2013).

Acceleration concerns the duration of consumption as well as the frequency of encounters. The effects of food texture on eating rate provide a material example. A controlled study of simulated night work also found that restricting eating to the daytime could prevent the adverse glucose-regulatory effects associated with night-time eating (Chellappa et al., 2021). This laboratory finding does not establish the long-term effects of workplace policy. It does show that working and eating schedules are not bodily neutral.

Where wage earners have limited control over work and rest, changes needed for bodily regulation become conditional upon the employment relationship. Whether productivity gains result in shorter hours, intensified work or workforce reductions determines the institutional content of acceleration. Outcomes produced through the same technology must be explained in relation to who organises the subject’s bodily time and for what purpose.

In Castelo et al.’s randomised study, blocking mobile internet on smartphones for two weeks improved sustained attention and some mental health measures. Calls, messages and internet access through other devices remained available. Of 467 participants, 119 met the prespecified adherence criterion, so difficulties implementing the intervention must be considered (Castelo et al., 2025). Non-adherence alone does not establish addiction, and cellular mechanisms were not measured.

The constitutive agent can organise intervals between encounters, opportunities for breaks and the tempo of repetition; the tactical agent acts within the resulting tempo. Subjects do not create every pace to which they are subjected, yet neither are they deprived of every possibility of intervention.

Growth in engagement at the corporate scale is not growth in freedom at the subject’s scale. Time spent using a service cannot stand in for the capacity to act, and platform growth cannot stand in for social benefit. Combining these different measures within one account of success renders bodily and experiential costs invisible.

9. Technical Modulation of Cellular Activity and Corporate Governance

External intervention in cellular activity is more than a metaphor. Stanley et al. used specially engineered cells, iron oxide nanoparticles and radiofrequency stimulation to regulate blood glucose through insulin production in mice (2012). Their subsequent work investigated remote gene expression and glucose regulation through a genetically encoded, ferritin-based system (2015).

These experiments depend on specific bioengineering conditions. They do not show that ordinary environmental radio waves have the same effects in unmodified human bodies. The associated patent records proprietary claims over particular compositions and methods; it is not evidence of use in humans or of imposition upon a population (Stanley et al., 2020).

Orengo Serra’s discussion of Big Tech, neurotechnology and corporate governance raises the question of who governs the capacity to intervene (2026). These sources open ownership of that capacity to investigation. They do not substitute for an account of everyday food exposure or digital addiction.

Investigating how a capacity is constituted need not await its widespread imposition. Establishing an actual practice, however, requires more than treating evidence of capacity as evidence of an outcome.

10. Asymmetric Evidence, Syntax and Semantics

Power does not make all its inputs and calculations available for inspection. Actors organising exposure may control product, user, cost and design data, while subjects largely have access to their own experiences and consequences. This asymmetry must inform the method of explanation.

The requirement for evidence does not apply only among equals. Yet assuming equal access to evidence can turn a lack of access into a standard that favours the more powerful actor. Research cannot depend exclusively on admissions or complete internal corporate records. Operational documents, product analysis, exposure comparisons, bodily measurements and process tracing must be used together. Undisclosed records cannot themselves substitute for evidence of an alleged effect.

Seeking repeat purchases, knowingly sustaining a risk of harm, transferring costs and intending political passivity are distinct claims. Failure to establish the last does not invalidate the others. Equally, an outcome’s usefulness to those exercising power does not show that it was designed for that purpose. Intention, mechanism, outcome and benefit require separate explanation.

Here, syntax denotes the variables, comparisons and outcome measures a study admits; semantics denotes the meaning assigned to its findings. An experiment may measure accurately while an interpretation of its result as personal preference excludes the institutional conditions through which that preference was constituted.

The distinction between employment and profit exposes the same problem in the evaluation of decisions. Profit growth can be measured accurately. Treating it as social progress requires further evidence about workers’ income, security and capacity to act. An assessment that records workforce reductions as an efficiency gain may leave lost livelihoods and public burdens outside its frame. An accurate financial account is not, by itself, an adequate social judgement.

Kearns et al.’s analysis of sugar industry documents demonstrates commercial intervention in the framing of research (2016). Drawing on interviews and documents, Greenhalgh’s investigation of ILSI and the formation of the obesity agenda in China examines how commercially connected networks promoted an explanation centred on physical activity (2021). The benefits of exercise do not remove the question of why one particular response was placed at the centre of the agenda.

The Meta proceedings reveal a related asymmetry in the evaluation of protective tools. Internal records discussed in footnote 14 of the California order indicate that some usage-limiting tools did not effectively reduce behaviour, although they could still be presented as evidence of protective activity (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, 2026, pp. 17–18). These records do not establish that all protective tools are ineffective. The existence of a tool is not evidence of its effect. Recording its availability and concluding that it prevents harm are separate operations.

Meta’s statement also reports that the settlement envisages an independent research organisation and consent-based sharing of user data (Meta, 2026). The arrangement’s potential to reduce evidential asymmetry depends on the conditions under which researchers can access and analyse data and publish findings. An institutional announcement of independence and independence in practice are not the same evidence.

In separate proceedings in New Mexico, a trial court judgment dated 6 August 2026 found that Meta had substantially contributed to a public nuisance affecting young people’s health and public resources. Paragraphs 99–101 did not treat the contributions of other platforms and social factors as grounds for removing Meta’s responsibility (First Judicial District Court, New Mexico, 2026). This legal finding is not an experimental validation of cellular mechanisms. Nor does the presence of multiple causes invalidate inquiry into a corporate contribution. Responsibility does not require being the sole cause; it requires an account of the relevant contribution, its mechanism, its scope and its preventability.

The accuracy of a scientific finding and the neutrality of the explanatory framework in which it is produced and used are distinct questions. Commercial funding warrants scrutiny, not automatic rejection of a result. Cytopolitics must submit its own concepts to the same scrutiny: ‘addiction’ cannot be allowed to absorb in advance every behaviour requiring explanation.

11. Pharmacological Intervention and Metabolic Cost Transfer

GLP-1 receptor agonists such as semaglutide, and the dual GIP/GLP-1 receptor agonist tirzepatide, have demonstrated clinical efficacy in treating obesity (Wilding et al., 2021; Jastreboff et al., 2022). Their effects show that bodily regulation is amenable to intervention; they do not explain every cause of the condition.

Benefits extend beyond weight loss. In SELECT, among participants with established cardiovascular disease, overweight or obesity, and no diabetes, the primary cardiovascular event rate was 6.5% with semaglutide and 8.0% with placebo (Lincoff et al., 2023). Structural criticism does not require diminishing the value of treatment.

In SURMOUNT-4, the difference in weight trajectories between continuation and withdrawal of tirzepatide demonstrated the importance of ongoing treatment (Aronne et al., 2024). Weight regain alone does not establish cytopolitic imposition through the food environment. Medication does not, by itself, change prices, working hours or product development objectives either.

Pharmacological research on addiction must be considered separately. A small phase 2 alcohol trial found that semaglutide reduced some measures of intake and craving (Hendershot et al., 2025). In contrast, a cigarette-use trial involving 24 adults did not establish significant effects in the primary interaction tests or a significant difference in daily cigarette consumption, although some craving and metabolic measures improved (Hendershot et al., 2026). A change in craving does not automatically become a change in behaviour. These trials do not establish a treatment for food addiction.

Metabolic cost transfer occurs when responsibility for the conditions producing harm is erased while treatment, lost time and income, and the burden of self-regulation are left to individuals or the public.

The estimated economic burden of diagnosed diabetes in the United States in 2022 was US412.9billion : US306.6 billion in direct medical costs and US$106.3 billion in indirect costs (Parker et al., 2024). This total spans the causes of diabetes and cannot be attributed to particular products or companies. A separate global model estimated 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages in 2020. In sub-Saharan Africa, the attributable share was 21.5% of new cases (Lara-Castor et al., 2025). These are model estimates, not diagnoses of causation in individuals.

The claim of transfer requires three accounts: the harm attributable to exposure; its economic and lived consequences; and the distribution of the burden among actors. Public provision of treatment is not inherently an unjust transfer. The problem arises when responsibility for producing harmful conditions disappears within that sharing of costs.

Employment decisions likewise require the company’s wage savings to be considered alongside household income losses, time spent seeking work and the need for public support. These burdens cannot be classified as metabolic costs without evidence of bodily consequences. Where working and livelihood conditions help sustain addiction or erode bodily regulation, employment decisions become part of the connections to be investigated in metabolic cost transfer. Compensation and support payments must be included when assessing how the burden is distributed.

The Meta settlement provides a separate digital example of costs being redirected towards a corporate actor. According to the District of Columbia Attorney General’s announcement, the core payment obligation is US12.1billionovertenyears.AfurtherUS5 billion, conditional on other major platforms adopting comparable terms, could bring the total to US$17.1 billion (Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, 2026). This is not a fine already paid in full. Nor does the amount demonstrate that the entire economic value of the harm has been calculated or remedied.

The documented obligation must be assessed within the distribution of bodily, psychological and social costs. Without separate evidence of metabolic outcomes, the payment cannot be converted into a measure of ‘metabolic harm’. The analytical connection is that decisions organising exposure and obligations to meet its consequences can fall upon different actors. It does not require food and digital environments to produce the same disease. The availability of protective tools, like the availability of treatment, does not by itself discharge responsibility for harmful conditions.

‘Is there a medication for this?’ may be a rational question about treatment. The structural alibi arises when a treatment’s efficacy is used to justify leaving harmful conditions unchanged, not from efficacy itself. Access to treatment and institutional responsibility must be defended together.

12. An Intervention in the Ontology of the Subject and Society

The strongest thesis of Cytopolitics is this: if the capacity to act can be constituted and restricted at the cytopolitic level, theories of the subject and society must incorporate that constitution into their explanations.

A corporation shaping exposure, the tempo of repetition and bodily substitution cost is a centre of power participating in the conditions of the subject’s action. Commercial growth can continue as the subject’s capacity to leave the relationship erodes. This is how the divergence between a responsibility to govern and sustain life and an imperative to exploit and expand becomes consequential within a life.

Urbanisation and the organisation of wage livelihoods participate in this encounter. A subject who needs a working relationship cannot determine its continuation through that need alone. Expanding employment requires the inclusion of working people; expanding profit carries no equivalent condition. Any explanation equating economic growth with emancipation must establish workers’ place within that growth. The capacity to disengage from food and digital exposures must likewise be assessed in relation to livelihood and time.

The target is an explanation that treats access to knowledge and the formal existence of options as sufficient for effective agency. The subject must be understood as a being whose conditions for turning knowledge into action can be altered by others.

Society is more than the sum of choices. Its explanation must include the relationships organising exposure before a choice, bodily practicability within it, and the attribution of responsibility afterwards. The fact that a bodily process occurs within an individual does not establish that its constitution or responsibility for it is exclusively individual.

The geographical comparison does not claim that the same mechanism has been demonstrated everywhere. The European experiments considered here principally concern Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; the African field and policy findings concern Kenya and South Africa. Russian infrastructure research and an Indian feeding trial do not measure the same outcome. The task is to compare connections extending from the organisation of exposure to the capacity to refuse, rather than rank countries by a single rate of addiction.

Further research requires a documentable institutional change, actual exposure, an appropriate bodily measure and the person’s own aim to change to be followed within the same case. Support addressing price, time and access should help distinguish the contribution of bodily mediation. Outcomes must be assessed against prespecified measures. The question is whether action changes when conditions change while knowledge remains constant.

Intervention must therefore address the following fields together:

• Production and formulation: Trace the effects of composition, texture, energy density and the tempo of consumption.
• Price and access: Make nutritious and culturally acceptable alternatives consistently affordable and practicable to prepare.
• Working and digital time: Make visible the institutional decisions governing breaks, rest, meals and opportunities to disengage.
• Employment and livelihood: Measure corporate growth separately from changes in workers’ employment, income and bargaining power; explain the livelihood cost of refusal.
• Treatment and support: Assess addiction, metabolic health and psychosocial functioning without reducing them to moral failure.
• Accountability: Examine decisions organising exposure together with the distribution of harm and costs.

Reality exists. The subject can know it. But knowing does not mean possessing the conditions for action.

Cytopolitics relocates bodily reports from an account of moral defect to an investigation of exposure, the cost of refusal and the allocation of responsibility. The fact that the body can be shaped does not make its condition a fixed destiny. Regaining capacity through support does not invalidate the difficulty that preceded it.

Where the power to shape life is concentrated in actors that do not bear an equivalent responsibility for life as a whole, corporate growth cannot be recorded as human progress. An order that counts a relationship the subject cannot leave as economic success cannot assign responsibility for that subject’s failure exclusively to the subject.

This is not an age of speed; it is an accelerated age. Restoring the practical efficacy of truth requires more than telling the subject the truth again. It requires reclaiming the conditions for acting on what they know—the conditions that imposition has eroded.

Methodological Note

Sources were selected through a purposive, mechanism-oriented review of work available by 8 September 2026. This is not a systematic review or meta-analysis. Publication years are distinguished from the years in which data were collected. Where a full text was unavailable, assessment was limited to the original research abstract. Corporate statements, observational associations, controlled experiments, model estimates and registered protocols have not been used interchangeably. The text does not propose a clinical diagnostic scale. It opens the relationships among institutional exposure, addiction and the capacity to act to investigation.

The Meta case distinguishes the evidential status of demands reported in the news, an interlocutory order assessing evidence, a trial court judgment in separate proceedings, and obligations created by a settlement. News reporting establishes chronology; court and settlement documents support the corresponding institutional claims. Internal documents as reported in a court order are distinguished from direct measurements of biological effects.

Urban population share, wage employment share and institutional dependence have not been treated as measures of one another. Corporate expectations, announced redundancies, implemented reductions and changes in total headcount are distinguished. The selected corporate records do not constitute a representative sample of all employers. Public employment objectives document normative responsibilities, while profit and employment records concern different outcome measures. The connection between job insecurity and bodily mechanisms remains one that requires separate demonstration.

Glossary

These concise definitions provide a route back to the main argument. Section references identify where each concept’s scope and limits are discussed.

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