From Client to Hardware: The Ontological Inversion of the Service State and the Biopolitics of Forced Mobilization

Abstract

The transformation of citizenship in digitalized societies under conditions of existential war presents a profound socio-philosophical problem, as the contemporary paradigm of the service state reduces civic belonging to algorithmically moderated consumption, digital access, and administrative convenience. This article aims to conceptualize the ontological inversion of the service state during existential military conflicts, examining how forced mobilization exposes the material and bodily dependence of liberal-democratic citizenship on sovereign survival. The study employs a qualitative socio-philosophical analysis, integrating conceptual reconstruction, critical interpretation, normative analysis, and contextual triangulation to examine the transition from client-based citizenship to mobilized embodiment within the framework of biopolitics and theories of sovereign power. The research reveals that existential war destroys the consumerist illusion of citizenship by forcibly re-embodying the digitalized subject as the vulnerable substrate of state defense. The analysis demonstrates that when the political order is threatened, the state ceases to function merely as a service provider and reasserts its coercive claim upon the embodied citizen, highlighting the paradox that the enforcement of universal human rights depends on territorial, institutional, and coercive conditions. Furthermore, the study indicates that refusal of mobilization by a defending democratic state does not necessarily preserve civilian autonomy and may, under occupation, expose the population to unlawful incorporation by an occupying power. To maintain democratic legitimacy, wartime mobilization requires a renewed social contract grounded in legality, institutional trust, reciprocal obligation, and the unconditional dignity of the mobilized citizen, preventing the degradation of civic subjects into disposable resources.