The invasiveness of today’s digital technology is breathtaking. We know that our network service providers, search engines, and social media monitor our every digital action to recommend products and fuel consumption. Google collects and mines our Gmails, attachments, contacts, and calendars. Twitter watches our activity on all the websites that carry its little icon. Facebook’s smartphone app collects information from all our other phone apps. Likewise, hackers seamlessly infiltrate the financial systems of large retailers like Target and Neiman Marcus. Neighbors, and Google’s streetview cars, tap into our unencrypted networks and record our usernames, passwords, and personal emails.
And, thanks to the Snowden revelations, we know that the federal government can easily obtain all of this information. The National Security Agency has direct access to search histories, emails and contacts, file transfers, Facebook messages, and live chats. Just this past August, newly leaked documents revealed that AT&T willingly collaborated with the NSA as recently as 2013 to provide the agency access to “billions of emails” as they were being transmitted, and installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil. The reach is simply staggering.
But we are told it is not enough. National security leaders seize selectively on horrific acts like the Paris attacks to demand still more surveillance powers — even before investigating the responsibility of ordinary intelligence failure, analyzing the existing digital tracks, or engaging the complex issues surrounding our new global violence. Leading presidential candidates call for a national database of Muslims, even though data brokers and social media already compile one.
We are also told that, if we are innocent, we should not worry. With so much data available and machines doing the searching, any random citizen’s information would be as hard to retrieve as a needle in a haystack — even as we learn of signals-intelligence agents at their consoles spying on their friends and lovers, and of federal investigations targeting family members of suspects on “material support” prosecutions. President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act in June, promising it would “strengthen civil liberty safeguards,” and privacy advocates hailed it as a milestone. The act, which authorizes bulk collection of U.S. citizens’ telephony metadata, provides that telecommunications companies will hold and maintain the data — and the government will reimburse them for the service.
We have experienced a total breakdown of the boundaries between the state, the economy, and society.
Yes, in what government documents describe as a “partnership,” we taxpayers will pay AT&T to collect and hold on to our data for when the intelligence services need them. A win-win solution for everyone — except, of course, the ordinary, tax-paying citizen who wants a modicum of privacy.
Critics across the political spectrum have used the term “surveillance state” to describe the new political condition we live in. Some argue that we need to “dismantle the surveillance state,” others that we need to “rein in the surveillance state,” and still others that we simply need to adjust “to life in a surveillance state.”
But that figure of speech no longer suffices. Surrounded by a Lernaean Hydra of retailers, data brokers, social media, multinational corporations, hackers, and our own intelligence agencies, we have experienced a total breakdown of the boundaries between the state, the economy, and society. This fundamentally transforms our citizenship. The liberal ideal — that there could be a protected realm of individual autonomy — no longer has traction in a world in which commerce cannot be distinguished from governing or policing or surveillance or simply living normally in the digital age.
After World War II, writers and judges framed privacy in humanistic terms: a distinctive realm for the self to develop, at liberty not to agree or conform with the majority. But after 9/11, judges, especially, began to conceive of privacy more often in terms of costs and benefits, efficiency, and rational choice — market logic in furtherance of a security agenda. Today, privacy is much more likely to be thought of itself as a type of private property: something that can be bought or sold in the market. So we sign up for free Gmail, and Google Docs or Dropbox, and in exchange give access to our entire private lives.
The other common metaphors for our political condition — the panopticon or Big Brother — are equally misleading. Today, we are not forcibly imprisoned within the omnipresent line of vision of a central watchtower. There is no “telescreen” anchored to the wall of our apartments that we cannot turn off. No, the strategic games are quite different.
In 1984, the fundamental strategy of oppression was to eradicate desire. With its Junior Anti-Sex Leagues that advocated complete celibacy and drove to abolish the orgasm, the central tactic was to neutralize the passions of the men and women of Oceania, to wear them down into submission with the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, coarse soap, and blunt razors. The goal was to replace jouissance with hate — “hate” sessions, “hate songs,” “hate weeks.”
We expose ourselves knowingly and willingly, in a mad frenzy of disclosure, in order to become ourselves.
Today, by contrast, everything functions by means of “likes,” “shares,” “favorites,” “friending,” and “following.” No telescreen is forced upon us, instead we gleefully hang smart TVs on the wall that record all our preferences, and even our words. The drab uniform and grim gray walls in 1984 have been replaced by the iPhone in its radiant pink, yellow, blue, and green. “Colorful through and through,” its marketing slogan promises, and it is precisely the desire for color-filled objects — for the sensual swoosh of a sent email, the seductive click of the iPhone camera “shutter,” and the “likes,” clicks, and tweets that can be earned by sharing — that seduce us into delivering ourselves to the surveillance technologies. As Siva Vaidhyanathan suggests in The Googlization of Everything, “ChoicePoint, Facebook, Google, and Amazon want us to relax and be ourselves.”
A survey released in October found that among Americans’ greatest fears are the corporate and government tracking of our personal information. And yet we continue to expose ourselves knowingly and willingly, in a mad frenzy of disclosure, in order to become ourselves. We post our political opinions, musical choices, memories, and most important moments — yearning to multiply our digital traces. We have become digital subjects.
Even those of us who do not partake in the rich world of social media end up sharing our intimate lives and political views digitally. It is impossible to have a social or family life without text messages, cellphones, and email. It is impossible to live fully in today’s world without searching the web, buying online, swiping an access card, retrieving money from an ATM. It is impossible to have a professional life without using apps like Doodle and SurveyMonkey or responding to Paperless Post.
And we expose ourselves even further as we buy in to the discourse of “datafication": the idea that amassing large data sets and mining and analyzing them will reveal truths about our society and solutions to problems that we might never have discovered. That quantifying (and sharing) what we eat, how much we exercise and sleep, or how many minutes we have meditated will help us diagnose our shortcomings and reach our personal ideal. All we have to do, we are told, is let the data speak.
To be sure, analyses of large data streams have identified important events before we would otherwise have noticed them. We hear endlessly how Google searches can forecast flu epidemics or digital monitoring may have some positive effects on policing. And at times, these new mediums allow us individually to be healthier or more productive.
But the digital realm does not so much reveal truths about society and ourselves as produce them. Our desires and practices are constantly shaped, guided, pointed in particular directions. Netflix tells us which films we will like, Amazon which books we will read, Spotify which songs we will enjoy.
As the monitoring and marketing of our private lives changes who we are, power circulates in a new way. George Orwell depicted the perfect totalitarian society. Guy Debord described ours rather as a society of the spectacle, in which the image makers shape how we understand the world and ourselves. Michel Foucault spoke instead of “the punitive society.” But punishment now has become inextricably linked with pleasure. Today we live, rather, in a society of exposure and exhibition. We live in what I would call the expository society.
The means of surveillance have inextricably inserted themselves in our daily activities. This is radically new. And that is what we must begin to resist.
Some have. Jennifer Lyn Morone™, turning her life into political performance art, has declared herself a corporation, to try to reprivatize her personal data. Others, like Edward Snowden, have sacrificially exposed the surveillance. Still others, like Julian Assange, have created platforms to promote radical transparency throughout society. And there are myriad more common ways of foiling the system or resisting the intrusiveness, techniques like encryption, private servers, even sticking Post-it Notes on the optic eye of your computer.
In the end, it falls on each and every one of us — as desiring digital subjects, as teachers and students, as conscientious ethical selves — to do everything we can to resist the excesses of our expository society. Particularly in the face of such grotesque exploitation of unquestionably horrid violence, it is imperative that we disrupt this new political economy. It is time to wake up and get real. In fact, like the fading colors on a Polaroid instant photo, time may already be running out.
Bernard E. Harcourt, author of the new book Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press), is founding director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and a professor at Columbia University and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris.
