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Paper short abstract

Post‑truth politics and corporate doubt expose the limits of STS symmetry. Drawing on Söderberg’s Asymmetry Principle, the paper examines how socio‑technical infrastructures enact dominant realities and weaponise ignorance. I propose ontological hegemony as a way to reassembly critique within STS.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that post-truth politics, corporate doubt-production, and the organised manufacturing of ignorance expose the limits of the symmetry principle in Science and Technology Studies. Building on Söderberg’s Asymmetry Principle, the analysis shows how contemporary knowledge conflicts are shaped by actors who intentionally cultivate uncertainty, doubt and ignorance, making symmetrical treatment of all claims analytically untenable. To address this, the paper reworks the Gramscian notion of hegemony into an ontological STS vocabulary by conceptualising it as an ontological regime: a distributed configuration of devices, platforms, practices, and institutional routines that enact particular realities while disarticulating or foreclosing others. In this formulation, hegemony operates not primarily through ideology but through socio-technical assemblages that stabilise certain ontologies while rendering alternative enactments fragile or impossible. Agnotology and research on “undone science” provide tools for tracing how ignorance becomes a strategic resource embedded in these ontological infrastructures. Drawing on Marxist and Hegelian traditions of critique, the paper outlines how STS can renew critical engagement without reverting to foundationalist truth regimes or naïve scientism. This approach foregrounds the political and moral necessity of distinguishing real from fake claims, interrogates the limits of the idiom of co-production and the generalised symmetry principle, and offers conceptual resources for analysing how technoscientific and corporate infrastructures reproduce ontological dominance in the post-truth era.