Adversarial Intentionality

In press at Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology.

Author’s manuscript: Download PDF. This is the author’s version of the article as accepted for publication in Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. It is not the journal’s version of record; please cite the published article in Techné.

Abstract

Postphenomenology provides powerful resources for analyzing how technologies mediate human experience, yet the framework maintains a foundational assumption that mediation operates through recognizable logics accessible to phenomenological examination. This paper identifies a boundary condition where that assumption fails, namely technologies engineered to conceal their operative logic while exploiting phenomenological vulnerabilities. I introduce adversarial intentionality as a theoretical extension, articulating three constitutive dimensions: intentional deception as mediation design, exploitative phenomenological engineering, and relational weaponization. Analysis of AI-enhanced social engineering (deepfake fraud, business email compromise, and romance scams) demonstrates how adversarial configurations systematically exploit vulnerabilities intrinsic to embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations. This extension preserves postphenomenology’s relational ontology while revealing phenomenological vulnerability as a constitutive feature of human-technology relations. At stake is phenomenological integrity, the correspondence between mediated experience and the domains it presents, on which collective meaning-making depends.

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Straight, R. (in press). Adversarial intentionality: Extending postphenomenology for technology-mediated deception. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology.