In The Great Divorce, one of C. S. Lewis’ characters voices the sentiment that there really are no private affairs.
Of course, the idea being expressed here is that every single thing on God’s green earth is intimately related to everything else. That every deliberate act is deeply meaningful in that it impacts the whole web of life and the ultimate fate of creation, and that our free agency therefore always ought to be predicated upon compassion.
The erosion of privacy in the contemporary dystopia means something entirely different, something which is fundamentally juxtaposed to the above notion.
Indeed, without genuine privacy, it’s difficult to see how actual autonomous agency, much less a compassionate one, could even be possible. If the person lacks the requisite privacy to reflect and to form her perspectives independently and in accordance with this mysterious rational will that we all somehow possess, the very idea of free agency becomes nonsense.
For this reason, the fact that our social environment is taking on the characteristics of Bentham’s Panopticon should perhaps be a cause for concern.
Jeremy Bentham’s quaint little idea is an early example of the intentional application of imperial social dynamics on the scale of social institutions. It’s basically about bludgeoning human beings through machine logic in a setting of artificial deprivation and discipline. Yes, sort of like Facebook.
The original Panopticon devised in the 1700s was a hypothetical prison in which every inmate would be constantly aware of possibly being under surveillance, forcing certain behavioural adaptations. It’s kind of the inceptive ideological epitome of the authoritarian and disciplinary institutions ushered in by utilitarianism and instrumental rationalism, exemplified in everything from industrial schooling to the modern insane asylum. Foucault is probably the most significant analyst and critic of these particular manifestations of authority under modern civilization (see Madness and Civilization & Discipline and Punish).
In the latter work, he considered the Panopticon “[t]he diagram of a mechanism of power in its ideal form”, which is a quite apt description. The actual technology in terms of an approach to imprisonment is less important than the social mode of organization that it represents.
This fact, however, is arguably now obsolete considering the amalgamation of social engineering and technology emerging in relation to digitalization. The distinction between the two evaporates, with Foucault’s ideal type becoming fully manifest in a social mode wherein technology and authority are almost completely melded in the active mediatic participation of the consumer-citizen, almost to the exclusion of other forms of life. A new totalitarianism.
Or rather the new face of an old one.
The lockdown metaphor. The digital prison. The constant state of emergency.
John Steppling’s recent piece opens with the theme of a “deeper and more indelible indoctrination” being evident in what passes for the current public discourse. He argues that the seamless transition from Covid to to the Russian emergency in terms of the public’s willing acquiescence is facilitated by an entirely new level of bellicose theatrics, and, I would add, one wherein popular participation has become the driving force.
The title of John’s article, “The Movie that Never Ends”, calls to mind the reduction of information to entertainment that we’ve touched upon a number of times on these pages, but also the radical commodification of every human interaction in the digital sphere. Our relationships become acts of spectacular consumption when even “private” interactions reproduce and reiterate the currently dominant narratives of the hegemony.
The point here is that anyone who objected to the state policy of emergency was to be pilloried. And if you did not participate in these cyber lynchings you were yourself subject to scrutiny. Social media accelerates the mob mentality and intensifies it. But there is something deeper involved in both the social response to Covid, and to the Ukraine crisis. Certainly huge numbers of people objected to the lockdowns. I would argue a majority of the world rejected the global health measures. But these voices are invisible on social media. Therefore the official version of those two and half years was the one scripted by the state (and various global health NGOs). Cultural imperialism is what we live with every day (ibid.).
And in accordance with the initial line of reasoning above, if you in practice abolish the genuine interpersonal relationships of the private sphere, neither can there be an actual public agency. The populace is reduced to viewers. Consumers who simply reproduce that which is being displayed to us.
Aristotle’s epistemology entails that the intellect is actually being shaped by that which it receives, which in turn grafts its patterns into the human organism. Contemporary neuroscience agrees.
But there’s something else in addition to the mere spectacle at work here. While it’s inevitably the case that we’re being enthralled by the carnival of infotainment all about us, and that this diminishes us in many ways, there’s a new factor in place that wasn’t at all an issue throughout the 20th century of mass media.
While we passively consume that which is shown us through our little peephole of social media, surveillance capitalism now unceasingly stares back into ourselves and all that we do.
(Image from Silent Hill 4: The Room)
The contemporary digital environment thus combines Debord’s spectacle and Bentham’s panopticon (or Orwell’s and Huxley’s respective dystopias), bringing us a truly devastating cocktail of cognitive distortion. We’re provided with an artificially narrow view of the world around us, constantly filtered by the vast complex of institutional power being expressed through the media and the culture industry, and at the very same time, we’re made to feel that this spectacle is actually watching us.
Judging us (so we’ve gotta ritually appease it by posting photos of oúr beauty, youth and success on Tumblr).
Knowing the full extent of governmental and corporate surveillance and data collection hasn’t changed our browsing habits necessarily, but it has wedged this large block of paranoia into every conversation and every interaction we have online. Once, the internet was a relatively private place. Today, the internet is another public forum full of CCTV cameras where there are no blind spots
…
Being constantly watched means your life becomes a spectacle. Even if nobody is actively viewing, the fact of recording intrinsically alters our nature.(Drew Kalbach. 2014. “Scale and Becoming Spectacle in Privacy Policy”. Entropy.)
On some level, we’re conscious of being surveilled throughout not only all of our “digital activities”, but this haunting presence increasingly casts its shadow over everyday life (insofar the two can still be separated).
As is well known, every social animal behaves differently when it’s aware of somebody else perceiving it, and abolishing privacy in concert with an artificial myopia flooded with a theatre of hate and horror? Let’s just say that this will have certain repercussions for how we act and think.
And the disturbing novelty of this emergent technology of power is that we’re almost entirely naked before it. We’ve indeed been isolated and split-up since urbanization, but now we hardly even see real faces anymore. Robbed of self-reliance and agency in the face of a global cult of authority that saps any conceivable social status from the local arena, we all fall in line at the perceived lower rungs of an artificial dominance hierarchy. There are no big fish all the way out here nowadays, which saps the essence of all attempts at a genuine local culture. The teenage rebels hanging out with their custom rides about the all-night hamburger joint (yeah, we still have those up here) can’t really hold a candle to the top-tier competition on Instagram.
This is probably why subcultures are all but dead.
And thus bereft of agency, dazzled by the incoherent and distracting lights of the “now-this”-theatre, we have neither sufficient peace nor the real capability for truly communal storytelling. We cannot as a an actual society carry out and manage the active rational mapping of the world.
I can do it on my own, but… I’m not doing it with you, in joy, friendship and enterprise. Not in the tranquility of my garden, sword and scythe near at hand.
So we collectively revert to the bare bones of myth. We’re stripped of our common reason, being reduced to utter conformity and ignorance, joining in the choir calling for fresh victims in this increasingly bizarre mediatic ritual of affective pornography and hollow, vicarious emotion.
And if you ever thought there was something reprehensible in a social order positing God the Father omnisciently watching over His creation - well, this particular dystopian shitshow doesn’t place us under the dominion of a Prince of Peace who paid for your salvation with His own blood.
It explicitly surrenders us to the auspices of some soulless Leviathan demon.
Coldly observing- callously reserving
A driver’s time
Automated autonomy
Playing on his mind
The spy in the cab
A twenty-four hour unblinking watch
Installed to pry
Installed to cop
I dont use the words psychopath or psychosis. Many users > many meanings.
I'm still puzzling over Matt Desmet's 'Mass Formation Psychosis". What does it reveal ? Or is it a re-branding ?
Humans are not herd animals, they are social animals. They gather for parties, BBQs, and Rock Concerts, but wouldnt want to live That Way...
Born with a loaded gun pointed at their heads, crowded into cities > easily managed (controlled).
Crowds > Stress. Stress - a co-factor to disease ? No. Stress causes dis-ease. Its effects are deep, disturbingly deep...
Space, personal space is an expensive commodity. It is hierarchised. The More Important > the more space to live in. A bigger, more spacious 'home' is nearly always the first commodity purchased by lottery winners...
The suburbanite who believes the world is over-populated feels crowded locally. (And the planet IS over-populated.) Over-population > a driver of technological surveillance systems...
" We’re provided with an artificially narrow view of the world around us, constantly filtered by the vast complex of institutional power being expressed through the media and the culture industry, and at the very same time, we’re made to feel that this spectacle is actually watching us." - Brilliant observation and precisely the world of the left hemisphere as described by Iain McGilchrist.