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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy Do We Expose Ourselves?
(The Intercept) AMONG CRITICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL SURVEILLANCE, there are two allusions so commonplace they have crossed into the realm of cliché. One, as you have probably already guessed, is George Orwells Big Brother, from 1984. The other is Michel Foucaults panopticon a vision, adapted from Jeremy Bentham, of a prison in which captives cannot tell if or when they are being watched. Today, both of these touchstones are considered chillingly prophetic. But in Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt has another suggestion: Both of them are insufficient.
1984, Harcourt acknowledges, was an astoundingly farsighted text, but Orwell failed to anticipate the role pleasure would come to play in our culture of surveillance specifically, the way it could be harnessed, as opposed to suppressed, by powerful interests. Oceanias Hate Week is nowhere to be found; instead, we live in a world of likes, favorites, and friending. Foucaults panopticon, in turn, needs a similar update; mass incarceration aside, the panopticon for the rest of us has become participatory, more of an amusement park or shopping mall than a penal institution. Rather than being coerced to reveal secrets, today we seem to enjoy self-exposure, giving away our most intimate information and whereabouts so willingly and passionately so voluntarily.
Exposed is a welcome addition to the current spate of books about technology and surveillance. While it covers familiar ground it opens with brief accounts of Facebooks methods of tracking users, USAIDs establishment of ZunZuneo (a Twitter-like social network) in Cuba, and Edward Snowdens revelations of the NSAs PRISM program Harcourts contribution is uniquely indebted to critical theory. Riffing on the work of another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his evocative 1992 fragment Postscript on the Societies of Control, Harcourt settles upon the phrase Expository Society to describe our current situation, one in which we have become dulled to the perils of digital transparence and enamored of exposure. This new form of expository power, Harcourt explains, embeds punitive transparence into our hedonist indulgences and inserts the power to punish in our daily pleasures. .................(more)
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/23/surveillance-bernard-harcourt-why-do-we-expose-ourselves/