Updates books/sociology/counterrevolution

books/sociology/counterrevolution.md

@@ -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.