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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2019-09-14 13:05:23 -0300
committerSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2019-09-14 13:05:23 -0300
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@@ -1191,3 +1191,72 @@ Counterinsurgency goes domestic:
are: outwardly you must treat every civilian as a friend; inwardly you must
consider him as a rebel ally until you have positive proof to the contrary.” 2 This
mantra has become the rule today—at home.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In Exposed, I proposed a new way to understand how power circulates in the
+ digital age and, especially, a new way to comprehend our willingness to expose
+ ourselves to private corporations and the government alike. The metaphors
+ commonly used to describe our digital condition, such as the “surveillance
+ state,” Michel Foucault’s panopticon prison, or even George Orwell’s Big
+ Brother, are inadequate, I argued there. In the new digital age we are not forcibly
+ imprisoned in panoptic cells. There is no “telescreen” anchored to the wall of our
+ apartments by the state. No one is trying to crush our passions, or wear us down
+ into submission with the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, coarse soap,
+ and blunt razors. The goal is not to displace our pleasures with hatred—with
+ “hate” sessions, “hate songs,” “hate weeks.” Today, instead, we interact by
+ means of “likes,” “shares,” “favorites,” “friending,” and “following.” We
+ gleefully hang smart TVs on the wall that record everything we say and all our
+ preferences. The drab uniforms and grim grayness of Orwell’s 1984 have been
+ replaced by the iPhone 5c in its radiant pink, yellow, blue, and green. “Colorful
+ through and through,” its marketing slogan promises, and the desire for color-
+ filled objects—for the sensual swoosh of a sent e-mail, the seductive click of the
+ iPhone camera “shutter,” and the “likes,” clicks, and hearts that can be earned by
+ sharing—seduce us into delivering ourselves to the surveillance technologies.
+ And as the monitoring and marketing of our private lives changes who we
+ sharing—seduce us into delivering ourselves to the surveillance technologies.
+
+ And as the monitoring and marketing of our private lives changes who we
+ are, power circulates in a new way. 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” or what he called
+ “panopticism,” drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s design of the panoptic prison.
+ Gilles Deleuze went somewhat further and described what he called “societies of
+ control.” But in our digital age, total surveillance has become inextricably linked
+ with pleasure. We live in a society of exposure and exhibition, an expository
+ society.
+
+ [...]
+
+ And that’s what happened: taxpayers would pay the telecoms to hold the data
+ for the government. So, before, AT&T surreptitiously provided our private
+ personal digital data to the intelligence services free of charge. Now, American
+ taxpayers will pay them to collect and hold on to the data for when the
+ intelligence services need them. A neoliberal win-win solution for everyone—
+ except, of course, the ordinary, tax-paying citizen who wants a modicum of
+ privacy or protection from the counterinsurgency.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In my previous book, however, I failed to fully grasp how our expository
+ society fits with the other features of our contemporary political condition—
+ from torture, to Guantánamo, to drone strikes, to digital propaganda. In part, I
+ could not get past the sharp contrast between the fluidity of our digital surfing
+ and surveillance on the one hand, and the physicality of our military
+ interventions and use of torture on the other. To be sure, I recognized the deadly
+ reach of metadata and reiterated those ominous words of General Michael
+ Hayden, former director of both the NSA and the CIA: “We kill people based on
+ metadata.” 20 And I traced the haunting convergence of our digital existence and
+ of correctional supervision: the way in which the Apple Watch begins to
+ function like an electronic bracelet, seamlessly caging us into a steel mesh of
+ digital traces. But I was incapable then of fully understanding the bond between
+ digital exposure and analog torture.
+
+ It is now clear, though, that the expository society fits seamlessly within our
+ new paradigm of governing. The expository society is precisely what allows the
+ counterinsurgency strategies to be applied so impeccably “at home” to the very
+ people who invented modern warfare. The advent of the expository society, as
+ well as the specific NSA surveillance programs, makes domestic total
+ information awareness possible, and in turn lays the groundwork for the other
+ two prongs of counterinsurgency in the domestic context.