The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control

simon schlEusEnEr The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control Introduction: Surveillance and Democracy What is the relationship between democracy and surveillance? Democracies embrace the idea of openness and transparency, but they also guarantee their citizens a right to privacy: “The right of the people,” as it is formulated in the 4th Amendment, “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” According to Glenn Greenwald, the 4th Amendment was specifically intended “to abolish forever in America the power of the government to subject its citizens to generalized, suspicionless surveillance” (Greenwald 2014, 3). Yet, anyone who is even slightly familiar with Michel Foucault’s work on ‘panopticism’ and the disciplinary society (Foucault 1995) is well aware that the relationship between democracy and surveillance is much more complicated (and intimate) than what is asserted in the 4th Amendment� In fact, what Foucault’s perspective suggests is that the increase in mass surveillance during the modern era is in many ways connected to the establishment of a type of power that was specifically designed for democracy. In other words, surveillance, by its disciplinary effects, is able to ensure social cohesion and obedience, yet without having to rely on physical coercion and the premodern “spectacle of the scaffold” (32-69). In this regard, what Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon seems to represent is an architectural figuration of the democratic condition, but one that highlights democracy’s own totalitarian temptation� State surveillance, then, at one and the same time, is located within democracy and on its outside, inhabiting a zone of indistinguishability, where “governments of otherwise remarkably divergent political creeds” (Greenwald 2014, 4) are united in spying on their citizens�1 In 2013, now under the conditions of the digital era, democracy’s totalitarian shadow spectacularly entered public discourse when Edward Snowden leaked the NSA’s PRISM program – a surveillance program that enables the US security apparatus (with the help from tech and social media companies like Google or Facebook) to collect massive amounts of Internet 1 “[M]ass surveillance is a universal temptation for any unscrupulous power� And in every instance, the motive is the same: suppressing dissent and mandating compliance” (Greenwald 2014, 4)� Besides examples from the American context, Greenwald mentions the monitoring departments of the British and French empires, the East German ‘Stasi,’ and the role of surveillance in the suppression of the Arab Spring� 176 simon schlEusEnEr communication data� Obviously, in any democracy, political authority essentially rests upon the trust people invest in their government� That is why governments are typically not simply enacting their policies, but are also engaged in a complex politics of “affect modulation” (Massumi 2015, 31), seeking to establish trust and confidence among their citizens.2 In this regard, the disclosure of PRISM and other secret surveillance programs must certainly be understood as highly damaging to the credibility of the American government (in 2013 represented by Obama, although the program started under George W� Bush)� For how could one still put trust in an administration whose security apparatus gathers millions of emails, phone calls, and other communication data, thus effectively treating anyone as a potential enemy requiring constant surveillance? Interestingly, however, the massive breach of trust to which the Snowden affair drew attention had only very limited effects on political authority� Although much criticism was directed against the American government, protests have been rather isolated and nowhere near as intense as during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s� Of course, there are various reasons for this: On the one hand, the culture of dissent has significantly changed in recent years, and current protest movements are oftentimes rather ephemeral (see, for instance, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began two years prior to the NSA scandal)� On the other hand, the threat of terrorism – and the ‘politics of fear’ (see Massumi 2005) by which it is accompanied – has led to a widespread acceptance of all kinds of political or military measures enacted in the name of security, including the collection of one’s own personal data� While these are important issues, this essay will mostly concentrate on a different (although in some ways related) aspect� One of its arguments is that, having grown up in the Information Age, many Americans today have become used (if not numb) to the notion of some entity tracing their emails, phone calls, movements, consumer behavior, online profile, or other personal data� Placed in this context, the NSA scandal seems to be only one manifestation of an overall ‘culture of surveillance’ (Lyon 2018) that has evolved over the last couple of decades� This development – which can be characterized in terms of the transformation of ‘disciplinary societies’ into ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze 1995c) – not only corresponds to a metamorphosis of democracy, but it has also seriously altered the relationship between the public and the private� Furthermore, it has brought about new forms of surveillance, some of which have been described as ‘post-panoptic’ (Gane 2012), ‘liquid’ (Bauman/Lyon 2013), ‘participatory’ (Cascio 2005), and marketdriven (Zuboff 2018)� As I attempt to demonstrate, the Foucauldian model of the panopticon proves to be increasingly unable to adequately grasp and 2 In this context, Frank Kelleter has analyzed the function of President Roosevelt’s famous ‘fireside chats’ in the effort of winning the citizens’ trust during a time of severe economic crisis (see Kelleter 2014)� Along similar lines, Brian Massumi has argued that Ronald Reagan’s popularity rested less on what he said than on “the timbre of his voice” and his ability to project “an air of confidence” when addressing the American public (Massumi 2002, 41)� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 177 illuminate such contemporary surveillance types� Moreover, I will argue that if we keep this larger context in mind, much of the public discourse on surveillance that resulted from the NSA scandal seems curiously outdated� In other words: To invoke an Orwellian scenario of massive governmental overreach that stifles freedom, creativity, privacy, and dissent (a common reaction to the Snowden revelations, particularly in the US)3 largely overlooks the fact that contemporary surveillance mostly occurs within a neoliberal setting and involves the marketing of data rather than the despotic policing of individuals (see Mischke 2012)� As Shoshana Zuboff outlines in her work on today’s ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2018), most current practices of monitoring, tracking, and tracing can be linked to commercial interests� Along these lines, she highlights “unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification” (Zuboff 2015, 75)� It would be misleading, however, to strictly separate between ‘state surveillance’ (undertaken for security reasons) and ‘commercial surveillance’ (undertaken for profit reasons), as both types of monitoring tend to merge and collaborate, constituting what Christian Fuchs, among others, has described as the “surveillance-industrial complex” (Fuchs 2017, 204). Based on this neoliberal paradigm, what emerges today is an increasingly global culture of visibility, in which the sense that somebody might be watching you has become a predominant ‘structure of feeling�’ As I will argue, however, this phenomenon involves not just enforced types of surveillance, as exemplified by the NSA scandal, but also the ‘voluntary’ surrender of privacy performed by millions of Internet users who ‘publicly’ share their ‘private’ data, experiences, preferences, and particularities on social media like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter – a tendency which Jamais Cascio has referred to under the rubric of the ‘participatory panopticon’ (Cascio 2005)� Although I will therefore place voluntary and involuntary forms of surveillance next to each other, I neither intend to sanction the NSA spy programs (as simply an expression of a general cultural tendency) nor to downplay the justified political criticism directed against the American government and its security apparatus� I do believe, however, that to place government spying in this context (a) helps explain why the NSA scandal has not had more extensive political consequences and (b) may provide a more appropriate way of framing the issue� Hence, looking at the affair with an eye to the neoliberal backdrop of today’s surveillance culture may also problematize the effectiveness and adequacy of some of the more conventional forms and strategies of critique� 3 See Greenwald 2014, 174: “Invoking George Orwell’s 1984 is something of a cliché, but the echoes of the world about which he warned in the NSA’s surveillance state are unmistakable: both rely on the existence of a technological system with the capacity to monitor every citizen’s actions and words.” 178 simon schlEusEnEr In the first part, I will outline the historical transformations of surveillance practices, concentrating on Foucault’s reflections on panopticism and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘control societies�’ Subsequently, the second part will address the problem of ‘self-monitoring’ and the participatory panopticon, discussing the reciprocal relationship between voluntary and involuntary surveillance (which I have termed the ‘surveillance nexus’) in the context of neoliberalism� In the third part, I will then turn to Dave Eggers’s 2013 bestseller The Circle, analyzing the novel as a popular manifestation of ideas surrounding the debate about digital surveillance, privacy, transparency, and (post-)democracy� Here, my argument is that Eggers draws attention to many key elements of today’s surveillance capitalism, but in several respects still relies on the Orwellian imagination of totalitarian surveillance� From the Panopticon to the Society of Control On the face of it, the scenario evoked by the NSA affair does indeed bear certain similarities to the condition of panopticism described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish� Taking his cues from Jeremy Bentham’s famous architectural model, Foucault sees as one of the central qualities of the panopticon the fact that it creates a structure in which those who are observed are placed in “a state of conscious and permanent visibility” (Foucault 1995, 201), while the source of surveillance – the actual inspector who does the observing – becomes essentially invisible� In a panopticon, you are being observed, and you know that you are being observed, but you cannot see who is observing you and whether or not you are being observed at this very moment� As Foucault puts it, “the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon,” but he “must never know whether he is looked at at any one moment.” Yet, what he must be sure of is “that he may always be so.” The panopticon, then, “is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (201-202). Obviously, what interests Foucault most about this constellation is the fact that the authority of disciplinary power is here inscribed in the architectural space as such� There is no need for physical coercion (and not even for personal contact) as the ‘machinic’ nature of the panopticon guarantees the internalization of its hierarchy of vision – to the effect that the inmate will eventually monitor himself and alter his behavior� In other words, what the panopticon is meant to achieve is that the observed become their own observers� It is easy to see how this scenario may, on first sight, conform to the context of Internet spying� To be sure, most people are by now aware of the fact that the data we transmit when using the Internet, or even a telephone, is far from ‘safe’: We know that we might be spied upon, but neither are we able to see the entity that does the spying, nor do we know whether we are spied upon at this or that particular moment� Hence, analogous to what Foucault claims about the panopticon, the Internet, too, is a space in which the question of The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 179 visibility is directly linked to a hierarchical distribution of power� More precisely, while the users’ data become more and more ‘visible’ to the forces of surveillance, these forces themselves tend to remain entirely invisible� It is for this reason that the notion of the panopticon has been used by scholars of the digital era to specifically refer to the Internet.4 Others, however, have argued that today’s digital surveillance is in most cases situated in a decidedly post-panoptic context (see Bauman/Lyon 2013, 11)� For one thing, if we relate the model of panoptic surveillance to the NSA’s PRISM program, it becomes clear that the latter differs from the former in that the program was never intended to be disclosed� While the whole point of panoptic power is to create a system of visibility in which the observed are aware of being monitored, PRISM and similar surveillance programs were initially designed to remain secret (which is why the U�S� Justice Department charged Snowden and other whistleblowers with violating the Espionage Act)�5 More importantly, however, what sets today’s digital surveillance apart from the Foucauldian analysis is the fact that panoptic forms of discipline rest upon a well-defined and overly centralized spatial hierarchy. In contrast, the multitude of contemporary surveillance types obviously lack the panopticon’s “central tower” (Foucault 1995, 202), being much more fluid and decentralized� While the panopticon’s inmates “could not move because they were under watch,” such rigid “fixedness to the place” (Bauman 2000, 9-10) – in line with the overall flexibilization of economic and social arrangements (see Sennett 1998 and 2006) – is for the most part absent in today’s surveillance culture� This is certainly not to say that contemporary society is free of restrictions on mobility, places of confinement, and intimidating watchtowers.6 But as a central metaphor designed to characterize the dominant tendencies of a whole social formation, the notion of the panopticon is largely outdated� Likewise, Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary society and its protonormalistic modes of power seems to refer to a world that is no longer ours� Along these lines, Zygmunt Bauman has argued that Foucault is, above all, a theorist of ‘solid modernity,’ whose analyses are unable to account for the contemporary shift to what Bauman defines as ‘liquid modernity’ (see Bauman 2000). Somewhat similarly, Nancy Fraser has claimed that Foucault “was the great theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation,” and that, read against the backdrop of neoliberalism and postfordist flexibility, his theoretical model (with its focus on disciplinary power and normalization) has lost its cogency� Noting that Foucault’s major works were written during the 1960s and 1970s, 4 5 6 Such critics typically use variations like ‘the new panopticon’ or ‘the virtual panopticon�’ See, for instance, Brignall 2002 and Waycott/Thompson et al� 2017� This point seems to be missed by Glenn Greenwald, who claims “that the essence of a menacing surveillance state, be it the NSA or the Stasi or Big Brother or the Panopticon, is the knowledge that one can be watched at any time by unseen authorities” (Greenwald 2014, 177). A case in point is the prototypical panopticon, the prison, which has by no means disappeared as a result of disciplinary society’s decay� Rather, contemporary penal confinement represents (perhaps nowhere more blatantly than in the US) the static underside of postfordist deterritorialization and flexibility. 180 simon schlEusEnEr Fraser claims: “The irony is plain: whether we call it postindustrial society or neoliberal globalization, a new regime oriented to ‘deregulation’ and ‘flexibilization’ was about to take shape just as Foucault was conceptualizing disciplinary normalization” (Fraser 2003, 160). Although I tend to agree with such accounts on the ‘datedness’ of Foucault’s model of disciplinary power, it might be more fruitful to illuminate this matter via Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” (Deleuze 1995c), a short essay that was first published in 1990. Although Deleuze concurs with Bauman and Fraser that disciplinary society slowly vanished during the second half of the 20th century, his reading of Foucault differs from theirs insofar as he questions whether Foucault’s analysis was meant to directly apply to the present in the first place. “Historical formations,” Deleuze argues in a conversation with Claire Parnet, “interest him only because they mark where we come from, what circumscribes us, what we’re in the process of breaking out of to discover new relations in which to find expression” (Deleuze 1995a, 106)�7 In this sense, Deleuze is able to both use Foucault’s perspective as a starting point for his own analysis and, simultaneously, depart from it� The central thesis of Deleuze’s text is that after World War II, disciplinary societies gave way to a new type of regime, which, in reference to William Burroughs, he terms ‘control society�’ This new regime corresponds to a significant “mutation of capitalism” (Deleuze 1995c, 180) and represents “a general breakdown of all sites of confinement – prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family.”8 According to Deleuze, the dismantling of these institutions (most of which are classic examples of Foucauldian panopticism) has occasionally given rise to “new freedoms, while at the same time contributing to mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement” (178). Unlike the sites of confinement, these new forms of control no longer function as “molds” or different kinds of “molding,” but constitute a continuous “modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next” (178-179). An example is the issue of wages: the factory was a body of men whose internal forces reached an equilibrium between the highest possible production and the lowest possible wages; but in a control society businesses take over from factories […] [and] strive to introduce a deeper level of modulation into all wages, bringing them into a state of constant metastability punctuated by ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars� 7 8 Moreover, one finds various ideas in Foucault’s oeuvre – most of which are linked to the notion of ‘governmentality’ (see Foucault 2008 and 2009) – that move in the direction of a specifically post-disciplinary concept of power. As indicated in a previous footnote, this certainly misrepresents the recent history of the prison, which, according to Loïc Wacquant, “has made a stunning comeback,” just as Deleuze, Foucault, and many others “were forecasting its demise” (Wacquant 2016, 122). While Deleuze had in mind “the attempt to find ‘alternatives’ to custody, at least for minor offenses, and the use of electronic tagging to force offenders to stay at home during certain hours” (Deleuze 1995c, 182), what actually took place was a massive rise in incarceration rates, particularly in Europe and the United States� On the (post-disciplinary) role and function of penal confinement in the context of neoliberal governance, see Wacquant 2009� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 181 Thus, while factories “formed individuals into a body of men for the joint convenience of a management that could monitor each component in this mass, and trade unions that could mobilize mass resistance,” businesses “are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself” (179). As Deleuze argues, the model of the ‘business’ has been introduced on all levels of society, including realms like education or the arts� The most prominent features of what Deleuze calls ‘control society,’ then, correspond to what sociologists like Richard Sennett have termed the ‘new capitalism’ (Sennett 2006), which entails increasing commodification and marketization, on the one hand, and a turn towards more competition and flexibility, on the other�9 Analogous to Sennett’s ‘flexible self,’ Deleuze describes the human actors in control societies as snakelike and undulatory, “subject to a continuous movement of liquefaction and dividuation, a result of the compulsion to participate and to process oneself” (Ott 2018, 34). “In disciplinary societies,” Deleuze writes, “you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything – business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation” (Deleuze 1995c, 179). But in what sense is the concept of the society of control relevant to the theme of surveillance? And how might it contribute to the discourse on spying, privacy, and digital culture? Reconstructing Deleuze’s arguments in view of current developments, I claim that it does so in at least five different but related ways: 1) Commodification: As Deleuze uses ‘the business’ (and not, for example, the state apparatus) as the model for control societies, he reminds us that spying and surveillance nowadays go well beyond the political tensions between nation states or the conflict between state security and individual privacy. Instead, they are in most cases related to commercial interests� There is evidence, for instance, that parts of the NSA spy programs are directly linked to industrial espionage (see Kirschbaum 2014 and Baumgärtner/Blome et al� 2015)� More importantly, however, not just the NSA is interested in one’s personal data, but even more so are profit-seeking businesses. “By drawing together large amounts of data from various sources, specialised private companies are employing huge data bases with increasingly personalised information. These are being used to monitor, predict and influence consumer behaviour of individuals and groups” (Mischke 2012, 40). The arena of this ‘surveillance capitalism’ is, above all, the Internet, the public debate about which typically centers on the question of whether it is a technology that heightens personal freedom and self-expression or fosters new dependencies� 9 See Sennett 1998, 9-10: “Flexibility is used today as another way to lift the curse of oppression from capitalism� In attacking rigid bureaucracy and emphasizing risk, it is claimed, flexibility gives people more freedom to shape their lives. In fact, the new order substitutes new controls rather than simply abolishing the rules of the past.” 182 simon schlEusEnEr But with its infrastructure being largely provided by multinational companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook (whose actual customers are not their users, but their advertising clients), the Internet, more than anything else, is an overly commercialized space� As more and more aspects of social life enter the sphere of the Internet, these aspects oftentimes become, simultaneously, more and more commodified. 2) Digital Machines and Big Data: Surveillance in control societies, then, is above all ‘digital surveillance�’ Although Deleuze is eager to avoid any technological determinism, arguing that one has “to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component” (Deleuze 1995b, 175), he nevertheless highlights the digital revolution’s utmost significance for the new social-economic formation: “control societies function with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers.” This turn to the digital is directly coupled with two interrelated mechanisms of control: the question of (providing or denying) access and the exploitation of data� In contrast to disciplinary societies (which were ruled by ‘signatures’ and ‘numbers’), the “digital language of control is made up of codes indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied.”10 Concerning the exploitation of data, Deleuze argues that, analogous to the transformation of individuals into ‘dividuals,’ “masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (Deleuze 1995c, 180).11 Relatedly, and with reference to Deleuze and Guattari, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have created the term ‘surveillant assemblage’: a system that “operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention” (Haggerty/Ericson 2000, 606)� 3) Decentralization: Since control societies are defined by a turn to the digital and a relative breakdown of the sites of confinement, the mechanisms of surveillance have obviously changed as well� While surveillance in disciplinary societies was mostly centralized and relied on particular spatial and architectural settings (which is why Foucault evoked a generalized panopticism), surveillance in control societies has become increasingly decentralized and more continuous – a phenomenon that Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon have discussed under the rubric of ‘liquid surveillance’ (Bauman/Lyon 2013)� Today, surveillance of public and private spaces involves a wide range of different procedures� Next to rather classic types of surveillance – such as 10 11 Clearly, in the age of what is commonly known as the ‘internet of things’ (see Greenfield 2018, 31-62), digital access is not restricted to ‘information,’ but extends to the realm of the physical world – to objects and things� Deleuze seems to be thinking along these lines when he writes elsewhere in the text that “Félix Guattari has imagined a town where anyone can leave their flat, their street, their neighborhood, using their (dividual) electronic card that opens this or that barrier; but the card may also be rejected on a particular day, or between certain times of day; it doesn’t depend on the barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation” (Deleuze 1995c, 181-182). On Deleuze’s concepts of ‘dividuation’ and the ‘dividual,’ see Raunig 2015 and Ott 2018� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 183 phone tapping or the use of security cameras – there are numerous forms of Internet monitoring (enabled by packet capture appliances, the use of ‘cookies,’ webcams, etc�), technologies such as GPS tracking, spy satellites, drones, body scanners, biometric verification, and various kinds of consumer monitoring (accomplished with the help of wifi and smartphone data tracking, debit card use, or facial recognition systems)� In addition, there is the whole segment of ‘self-monitoring,’ including the widespread use of digital selftracking devices (such as wrist wearables or ‘smart clothes’)� And last but not least, almost any pedestrian is nowadays equipped with a fully-functioning surveillance system installed in her phone� In this sense, decentralization goes hand in hand with a certain “democratization of surveillance” – a process, however, which has hardly “translated into anything approaching a leveling of social hierarchies” (Lyon/Haggerty/Ball 2012, 3).12 4) Flexibilization and Mobility: While the sites of confinement in Foucault’s disciplinary societies had the function to make individuals “stick to their appointed places at all times” (Bauman 2000, 9), ‘dividuals’ in control societies are typically much more mobile and flexible. While this is obviously reflective of the general trend of an increase in flexibility in the neoliberal era, another important aspect of this development is that surveillance technologies have become more and more invisible� As Deleuze argues with regard to the example of freeways: “Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway� But by making highways, you multiply the means of control� I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled” (Deleuze 2007, 327)� Indeed, such an understanding of highways constitutes an almost perfect metaphor for the Internet� In other words: one can surf the Internet ‘infinitely and freely’ and yet be perfectly controlled. 5) Self-Modulation and the Participatory Panopticon: Lastly (though this has already been hinted at in points 3 and 4), Deleuze suggests that human actors in control societies tend to participate in the mechanisms of control themselves, constantly engaging in forms of self-modulation and self-monitoring� In a sense, Foucault has made a similar point regarding the panopticon, arguing that “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, […] inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault 1995, 202-203)� The difference, however, is that the panoptic machine was aimed at correcting behavior so as to conform to some pre-established norm, while control societies are oriented toward capturing (in)dividual desire and creativity�13 This, for instance, is the logic of ‘prosumer capitalism’ (Ritzer 2015), 12 13 One may argue, though, that while previous forms of surveillance were primarily directed against racial and ethnic minorities, political radicals, dissidents, delinquents, prostitutes, and the poor, groups which until recently were “exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored” as well (Haggerty/Ericson 2000, 606). Another aspect of this difference is as follows: While Foucault’s conception of panoptic surveillance involves the ‘internalization’ of disciplinary power, the self-surveillance of contemporary lifeloggers or social media users corresponds to a process of 184 simon schlEusEnEr and it is also common among surveillance techniques related to social media platforms and digital self-tracking devices, whose users voluntarily share their personal data and make it public (see Reichardt 2018)� Along these lines, Jamais Cascio has coined the concept of the ‘participatory panopticon,’ referring to a type of “constant surveillance [which] is done by the citizens themselves, and [which] is done by choice� It’s not imposed on us by a malevolent bureaucracy or faceless corporations� The participatory panopticon will be the emergent result of myriad independent rational decisions, a bottom-up version of the constantly watched society” (Cascio 2005). Similarly, Steven Shaviro has argued that surveillance related to the government or the national security apparatus “is only one aspect of a broader process” (Shaviro 2010, 67): “The reign of universal transparency, with its incessant circulation of sounds and images, and its ‘participatory’ media ecology in which everyone keeps tabs on everyone else, does not need to be imposed from above� Rather, […] it ‘emerges,’ or ‘self-organizes,’ spontaneously from below” (69). Neoliberalism and the Surveillance Nexus In the debate about the PRISM program, one of the most frequent arguments was that the NSA’s indiscriminate spying practices need to be stopped because they violate the individual’s ‘right to privacy�’ Glenn Greenwald, for instance, criticizes the NSA’s surveillance programs as inherently “repressive,” claiming that through their attack on privacy they simultaneously abolish one’s sense of being “free – safe – to truly experiment, to test boundaries, to explore new ways of thinking and being, to explore what it means to be ourselves.” As Greenwald further argues, it is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state – where the private realm is effectively eliminated – is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level (Greenwald 2014, 174). Although I believe that Greenwald tends to romanticize the concept of privacy by disregarding its more problematic aspects (as manifested, for example, in the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’), it is not my position that the private realm should be abolished or that we should simply get used to living in the era of ‘post-privacy’ (Heller 2011)� Indeed, as Christian Fuchs has pointed out, the question is not “how privacy can be best protected, but in which cases whose privacy should be protected and in which cases it should not be protected” (Fuchs 2011, 225). More importantly, though, what is problematic about Greenwald’s perspective is the fundamental gap he posits between voluntary and involuntary surveillance, as if they were completely unrelated practices� In other words: by scandalizing involuntary surveillance, he implicitly justifies ‘voluntary surveillance,’ which – as long as it is ‘externalization,’ involving the creation of what Haggerty and Ericson have termed a ‘data double’ (Haggerty/Ericson 2000)� As Ulfried Reichardt notes: “‘Subjectivity’ is externalized and transformed into information” (Reichardt 2018, 110). The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 185 free of non-legitimate government spying and formally based on individual free choice – seems to leave the private realm intact� That things are more complicated, however, is obvious� For instance: how should one qualify the daily practice of Internet users who ‘accept’ the storing of cookies on their computer? Is this an act of individual free choice or (since many companies deny access to their websites without cookie permission) simply a necessity for using essential resources of today’s digital culture? According to Greenwald, what originally “made the Internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration.” State surveillance programs like PRISM, however, have turned this arena of free expression into a site of repression and fear (Greenwald 2014, 174)� This common narrative, I argue, creates a false dichotomy that tends to misrepresent both the Internet (as a platform designed for creative expression and free communication) and the aims of surveillance programs like PRISM (as Orwellian instruments designed for spreading fear and conformity to silence dissent)� In what follows, I will demonstrate that set against the backdrop of neoliberalism – and analyzed in view of the ‘control’ mechanisms described by Deleuze – voluntary and involuntary forms of surveillance constitute a ‘nexus’ rather than being entirely discrete practices� It is possible, of course, to simply hold that any information that is voluntarily exhibited to the public gaze ceases to be private and therefore loses its entitlement to be protected� With regard to the participatory panopticon, however, the term ‘voluntarily’ is highly ambiguous� In other words: Contemporary self-tracking and self-monitoring practices, coupled with the prevalent inclination to ‘share,’ ‘post,’ and ‘submit’ private content on social media platforms, cannot simply be attributed to personal choice or be understood as a natural aspect of human desire� Rather, what the current accumulation of such practices points to is a general tendency of the world we live in: a ‘surveillance nexus’ that combines voluntary and involuntary forms of surveillance and their cultural, political, economic, and media-technological components� In many ways, this tendency is reflective of the neoliberal ideal of ‘selfentrepreneurship’ – the shift from employee to entreployee (Pongratz/Voß 2003) – and ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski/Chiapello 2007)� In this setting, what sociologists have coined ‘expressive individualism’ (see Bellah et al� 2008 and Fluck 2002) has been thoroughly transformed into an instrument of the neoliberal economy� Self-exploration and self-expression as well as the pursuit of cultural recognition and ‘cultural capital’ now directly correspond with financial exploitation and the competition for ‘economic capital�’14 Consequently, practices such as the widespread use of self-tracking devices do not merely satisfy a personal desire for self-maintenance or selfenhancement, but simultaneously function as essential tools in the context of a market economy, whose participants have been accustomed to viewing 14 On the relationship between ‘cultural’ and ‘economic capital’ (as well as ‘social capital,’ the third term of his conceptual triad), see Bourdieu 1986� 186 simon schlEusEnEr themselves (and their bodies) as ‘human capital’ (see Foucault 2008, 215-237)� Likewise, the forms of self-expression performed on social media platforms are oftentimes bound up with strategies of self-marketing, incentivized by a social environment for which the traditional separation between ‘labor’ and ‘leisure’ has lost its validity� Hence, while Robert Bellah differentiates between ‘expressive’ and ‘economic’ individualism, one may argue that the whole culture of self-expression, in the context of today’s post-disciplinary surveillance capitalism, has itself become increasingly economic and commodified.15 Both in the case of social media and the use of self-tracking devices, many private companies profit from the transmitted data, which nowadays functions as “a form of capital” – that is, data capital – “on the same level as financial capital in terms of generating new digital products and services” (MIT Technology Review Custom 2016)� The affective and participatory elements of this constellation clearly play a major role in the economic logic of surveillance: “We perform tasks that are good for our health, for example, running� Yet at the same time, we provide the device, program, and app developers with the data that are intrinsic to their business models” (Reichardt 2018, 113114)� Here and elsewhere, data mining and monitoring inhabit a grey area between voluntary and involuntary surveillance, as users are oftentimes unaware that their personal data is being stored and used for commercial purposes� It would therefore be a mistake to draw a fundamental line between ‘involuntary’ external surveillance and ‘voluntary’ self-surveillance, since – in the context of neoliberalism and the society of control – these two aspects frequently intersect and reinforce each other� This is even the case for government spy programs like PRISM, which are part of the surveillance nexus as well� As has been investigated under the rubric of the ‘surveillance-industrial complex’ (see Hayes 2012), there are countless connections between the private sector and state institutions in both the implementation of surveillance systems and the analysis and utilization of the acquired data� Most obviously, state surveillance programs essentially rely on the data provided to them by private Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft – data that these companies obtain from their users� Commenting on the Snowden revelations, David Lyon therefore argues: “We can see that surveillance is carried out by government and commercial agencies acting together, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwillingly” (Lyon 2015, 13). In addition, Christian Fuchs notes that the NSA collaborates with roughly 2000 private companies “that make profits by spying on citizens. […] Surveillance is big business, both for online companies and those conducting the online spying for intelligence agencies” (Fuchs 2017, 204)� 15 On the distinction between economic (or utilitarian) and expressive individualism, see Bellah et al� 2008, 32-35� As an example of utilitarian individualism, Bellah refers to Benjamin Franklin, while Whitman serves as the prototype for expressive individualism� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 187 Placed in the neoliberal context of today’s surveillance nexus, the question arises whether the NSA’s PRISM program is really best described by drawing parallels to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or to Foucault’s conception of panoptic power (see Greenwald 2014, 174-177)� Besides their dealings with tech companies and the corporate sector, security agencies like the NSA also operate within an ideological environment – an environment which, in the course of the last few decades, has become distinctly ‘post-disciplinary�’ If, then, one indeed wishes to rely on Foucault in analyzing the NSA and the PRISM program, there are arguably instruments in his ‘toolbox’ that would be far better suited than his ideas about disciplinary society and the panopticon� More precisely, the ideological and operational logic of PRISM clearly is linked more to what Foucault discusses under the rubric of ‘governmentality’ and the ‘security dispositif’ than it is to the perspective of Discipline and Punish� In Security, Territory, Population, a series of lectures held at the Collège de France in 1978, Foucault explains that the “apparatuses of security” (dispositifs de sécurité) need to be distinguished from “the mechanisms of discipline” in that they do not rely on a pre-established norm – on “prescriptions and obligations” – but attempt to intervene in the run of events by grasping things “at the level of their effective reality” (Foucault 2009, 46-47). Hence, while the mechanisms of discipline are designed to correct or eliminate any type of abnormal behavior, the apparatuses of security operate much more pragmatically, frequently willing to ‘let things happen�’ The governmentality of security, then, is engaged in a much more flexible kind of normalization.16 It is less concerned with confinement or with “fixing and demarcating the territory”; rather, what Foucault observes is “the emergence of a completely different problem,” namely that of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are canceled out (65)� Obviously, this characterization of the apparatus of security resembles Deleuze’s conception of control societies in that it represents a mode of power that manifests itself as decidedly post-disciplinary and is directed towards flexibility: towards controlling movement rather than preventing it� Moreover, I would argue that this model is much better suited as a description of a spy program like PRISM� For what such programs are typically aimed at is not the correction of any kind of deviant or abnormal behavior, but rather the securing of conditions under which things and information can be allowed to ‘circulate�’ While this may lead to interventions in cases of grave criminal transgressions (such as terrorism or drug trafficking), government 16 For a more elaborate discussion of this phenomenon, see Link (1999), who differentiates between ‘protonormalism’ and ‘flexible normalism.’ On the connections between flexible normalization and the neoliberal mode of production, see Schleusener 2013. 188 simon schlEusEnEr online surveillance is likewise oriented toward retaining the ‘participatory’ structure of the Internet: the regular flow of data, e-commerce and online marketing, the social media practices of its average users� Despite the cyberutopian ideas of some of its early advocates and commentators (see Barbrook 2000), it has become increasingly difficult to draw a clear distinction between the participatory, communicative, and ‘democratic’ elements of the Internet, on the one hand, and its ‘commercialization’ – the role it plays within the capitalist global economy – on the other� As Tiziana Terranova argues, today’s digital economy “manifests all the signs of an acceleration of the capitalist logic of production.” Evidently, this is the case not despite the Internet’s participatory network structure, but because of it� In fact, the “interface between capital and the Internet” (Terranova 2013, 46) essentially relies on the unpaid immaterial labor and data provided by participating online users, who generate much of the wealth of today’s giant tech companies and web 2.0 firms.17 Consequently, if we understand the NSA as an actor within the neoliberal context of the surveillance nexus, it would be misguided to suspect that the agency’s function is to disrupt this ‘participatory’ structure� Instead, rather than massively blocking websites or applying other forms of pervasive censorship (as is the case in countries like China), there seems to be an effort to balance out the agency’s exercise of its basic security tasks – related, most importantly, to the unending ‘war against terror’ – with the commitment to securing the participatory structure of the internet: the continuous circulation of data and profits along the channels of the network. In this regard, one may question Greenwald’s assertion that the political function of security agencies like the NSA is, above all, the enforcement of compliance through fear: “A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one” (Greenwald 2014, 3). While it is true that the ‘war against terror’ is accompanied by a demobilizing politics of fear, neoliberal governmentality is more concerned with mobilizing desire (via positive affects, such as hope and joy) than with blocking it (via negative affects, such as sadness or fear)�18 In this context, Brian Massumi has pointed out an ‘affective dissonance’ that is specific to the contemporary role of affects in American politics� Commenting on the media’s ‘affect modulation’ in the aftermath of 9/11, Massumi claims that the “constant security concerns insinuate themselves into our lives at such a basic, habitual level that you’re 17 18 See Terranova 2013, 52: “The idea that the value of such corporations is given by users’ participation has become common business sense� The composition of labor producing the value of such companies shows a massive surplus of free labor as compared to a tiny percentage of actual waged labor.” On immaterial labor, see Lazzarato 1996 and Hardt/Negri 2001 (especially 289-294)� The source of this ‘pragmatic’ conception of affects is the philosophy of Spinoza, who sees an intimate relation between the various types of affection and the body’s ‘power of acting.’ “By affect,” Spinoza writes, “I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained” (Spinoza 1996, 70)� For more on how Spinoza’s model can be used to illuminate the role of affects in political constellations, see Schleusener 2011 and Małecki/Schleusener 2015. The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 189 barely aware how it’s changing the tenor of everyday living� You start ‘instinctively’ to limit your movements and contact with people.” Yet, while “the media helps produce this affective limitation,” it also works to overcome it in a certain way� The limitation can’t go too far or it would slow down the dynamic of capitalism� One of the biggest fears after September 11 was that the economy would go into recession because of a crisis in consumer confidence. So everyone was called upon to keep spending, as a proud, patriotic act (Massumi 2015, 31-32)� What Massumi claims about the role of the American media in the aftermath of 9/11 could also be said about US government surveillance of the Internet: “The limitation can’t go too far or it would slow down the dynamic of capitalism.” Hence, while the NSA makes use of its wide-ranging capacities to monitor online activity, the agency simultaneously seeks to minimize any demobilizing effects its surveillance measures might have on the Internet’s participatory nature and the regular flow of data. As I have argued repeatedly throughout this essay, this distinguishes contemporary surveillance in the context of what Deleuze has described as the society of control from Orwell’s dystopian imagination or the Foucauldian understanding of panopticism� Indeed, while Greenwald fears that the NSA’s surveillance programs enhance compliance and conformity, one could instead argue that, against the backdrop of today’s surveillance capitalism, a bigger threat than social conformity is personalized uniformity – an effect of the algorithmic logic that facilitates the emergence of ‘filter bubbles.’19 Again, my intention is not to defend PRISM or the actions of the NSA, nor is it to undermine the political criticism directed against it� It is my perception, however, that some of the critical arguments in this debate are based on a misplaced understanding of both the nature of contemporary surveillance culture and the political conditions of government spying� Especially in the American context, concerns about the exploitative monetization of personal data seem to receive far less publicity than privacy concerns or ‘libertarian’ arguments warning against the emergence of a quasi-Orwellian surveillance state� Such a forgetfulness of the political present typically corresponds to an antiquated mode of critique� One may argue, for instance, that it is politically misleading to invoke the scenario of a totalitarian surveillance state – as the other of democracy – if many of the features of today’s surveillance capitalism (participation, self-expression, ‘free enterprise’) call for an immanent critique, as they appear to be generally in line with the democratic model� In other words, while the public debate about government spying and largescale monitoring centered on the possible return of pre-democratic forms of sovereignty and the adoption of non-democratic means of command, what was largely missing was an account of the data-driven transformation of democracy itself – that is, of its post-democratic erosion�20 19 20 For more on this phenomenon, see Pariser 2011 and Bulban/Trotier 2012� On the concept of post-democracy, see Crouch 2004 and 2011� 190 simon schlEusEnEr Post-Democratic Transparency: Dave Eggers’s The Circle Yet, the notion (and menace) of a data-driven post-democracy certainly is an issue in The Circle, Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel about a giant tech company located in Northern California� The book has been called “an update of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the post-Cold War digital age” (Martin 2016, 55) and interpreted as a present-day version of Brave New World�21 Such readings underline the novel’s contemporary significance and firmly contextualize it within the tradition of dystopian writing – even though some critics have argued that the novel occasionally blurs the line between dystopia and utopia�22 Besides its accessible style and storyline, part of the book’s success is surely related to the fact that it was published roughly four months after the Snowden revelations, when issues like privacy and surveillance were still regularly covered in the news� It is no surprise, then, that the novel quickly became a bestseller and, in 2017, was turned into a movie (starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks)� Different from the debates surrounding PRISM and the Snowden affair, however, the novel is not centered on government spying and national security� Instead, it addresses the problem of surveillance by focusing on a private company, namely the Circle, which Eggers depicts as the world’s most powerful Internet firm. This narrative decision clearly connects the novel with the contemporary context of surveillance capitalism and with Deleuze’s concept of the society of control� In other words, while a novel like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest still dealt with panoptic surveillance, ‘total institutions,’ and the disciplinary society (see Schleusener 2006), The Circle’s take on surveillance and transparency is rooted in 21st century digital culture and the neoliberal surveillance nexus� The novel starts with a typical ‘cool capitalist’ scenario (see McGuigan 2009 and Schleusener 2014), echoing Fredric Jameson’s astonishment about “how the dreariness of business and private property” and “the dustiness of entrepreneurship […] should in our time have proved to be so sexy” (Jameson 1992, 274)� Indeed, the Circle is not just the world’s largest Internet company, it is also a decidedly ‘cool’ one� As Mae Holland, the novel’s main character, explains, it is the exact opposite of the local utility company for which she worked previously, an experience she describes as follows: It was sickening, all of it� The green cinderblocks� An actual water cooler� Actual punch cards� The actual certificates of merit when someone had done something deemed special. And the hours! Actually nine to five! All of it felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time, and made Mae feel that she was not only wasting her life but that this entire company was wasting life, wasting human potential and holding back the turning of the globe (Eggers 2014, 11)� 21 22 See, for instance, Charles 2013: “The Circle is Brave New World for our brave new world.” Margaret Atwood, for instance, has dubbed The Circle a “satirical utopia” (see Atwood 2013, 6)� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 191 Conversely, then, Mae perceives the chance to work at the Circle as a liberating flight from trivial routines, regular working hours, parochial backwardness, and the ‘actuality’ of physical objects and things – in short: from the orderliness of ‘solid modernity,’ traditional bureaucracy, and the Fordist mode of production. Here, the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ – the turn to flexibility and deterritorialization, the merging of life and work, and the rise of global networks and the digital realm – is not marked as a simple ideology but, rather, as an effective desiring-machine. “My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven” (1). But what, specifically, is so ‘sexy’ and ‘cool’ about the Circle? Obviously, the company is modeled after actually existing Internet firms (Google, Facebook) and exhibits the usual features of a competitive business culture, intermingled with elements of moderately alternative lifestyles and ‘countercultural’ sentiments (see Frank 1998 and Turner 2006)� In The Circle, what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have termed the ‘Californian Ideology’ (Barbrook/Cameron 1996) manifests itself as a mixture of entrepreneurial hipsterism and nerd culture (à la The Social Network), coupled with a general notion of benevolent do-goodism� As Margaret Atwood puts it, “recycling and organics abound, people keep saying how much they like each other” and “much energy is expended on world betterment” (Atwood 2013, 6). Yet, besides the prevalent emphasis on ‘caring and sharing’ and the pleasantness of life on the Circle campus – surrounded by “soft green hills” and featuring “a Calatrava fountain,” “tennis courts,” “a picnic area,” and a “daycare center” (Eggers 2014, 1) – the company also exhibits some rather different characteristics� For instance, the ubiquitous practice of ranking and rating each other (through so-called ‘zings’) fosters a keen sense of hierarchy and competition. Exempt from such “inexorable rivalry” (Deleuze 1995c, 179) – spurred by the instrumentalization of one’s desire for recognition – are merely the three ‘Wise Men’ at the very top of the company, who are cultishly worshipped by their employees� Moreover, the Circle is presented as a company that aims for nothing less but total global domination� With the invention of TruYou, “the Unified Operating System, which combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy,” the Circle “changed the internet, in toto, within a year” (Eggers 2014, 21-22), thereby acquiring an undisputed monopoly in the online and technology sector� While such processes of monopolization seem to go against the grain of the neoliberal ideal of market competition, the fictional Circle scenario is in fact hardly different from the current situation, in which a handful of companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) completely dominate the market� As David Lyon has argued, The Circle “is science fiction, sort of, but it is so close to our world that it feels as if the future has arrived” (Lyon 2018, 151152)� While Eggers exaggerates (and at times sensationalizes) aspects of surveillance capitalism, the world his novel depicts is clearly based on contemporary tendencies. This goes for the power and influence of multinational Internet firms, the role of social media, the technological aspects of surveillance, and the emergence of a culture of digital transparency and visibility� 192 simon schlEusEnEr Naturally, surveillance in The Circle is pervasive, and it comes in many different forms and guises� For one thing, it serves as an instrument to intensify competition among employees, who are compelled to constantly participate in online monitoring and self-monitoring, engaging in forms of “performance-based ranking” (24) designed to increase efficiency. Moreover, surveillance is an essential component of the products and services provided by the Circle, as, for instance, the ‘SeeChange’ technology (tiny, inexpensive cameras that can be put up anywhere to stream video through the internet)� Surveillance, then, is directly related to the Circle’s business model� At the same time, however, it is also part of this model’s ‘superstructure,’ in the sense that the novel transforms the notion of total visibility into a crucial virtue that effectively legitimizes the development of new means and technologies of monitoring and tracking� The key element that enables the book to switch back and forth between the utopian and the dystopian mode is, perhaps, the concept of transparency�23 Obviously, transparency is closely related to democracy – to enlightenment values and public accountability� According to Foucault, at the heart of the French Revolution was the utopian dream “of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation” (Foucault 1981, 152). Total transparency, however, is likewise a central ingredient in many dystopian narratives (most apparently in Nineteen Eighty-Four) depicting a totalitarian surveillance state� In The Circle, the company’s management declares transparency to be the highest political principle, explicitly linking it to the utopian notion of a perfect society free of violence, crime, and political corruption�24 Promoting the use of ‘SeeChange’ cameras, Eamon Bailey, one of the Circle’s three Wise Men, announces “the dawn of the Second Enlightenment.” As he explains: “Tyrants can no longer hide� There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness� And to this end, I insist that all that happens should be known” (Eggers 2014, 67-68). Yet, surveillance is not just legitimized on political grounds� During the same speech, Bailey also mentions his elderly mother, who is in poor health since she broke her hip in an accident� The SeeChange cameras in her house now enable him to make sure that she is safe� “As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind� No longer do I have to 23 24 In a sense, the ambiguity of transparency is already significant with regard to the panopticon and its conflicting interpretations. More specifically, while Bentham, being a utilitarian philosopher and democratic reformer, was convinced of his model’s utopian character (see Foucault 1981, 164), the panopticon is also constantly referred to in dystopian accounts of totalitarian surveillance� “Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected […]� And it was natural that it was so, Mae thought� Who else but utopians could make utopia?” (Eggers 2014, 31). On the ‘utopianism’ of transparency, see also 90-91, 386-387, and 488-489� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 193 wonder, ‘How’s Mom?’ No longer do I have to wonder, ‘What’s happening in Myanmar?’” (69). Digital surveillance, then, permeates everything, connecting the near and the far, the personal and the political� Elsewhere in the book, Mae points out yet another rationale for transparency, one that specifically addresses the question of self-surveillance. In a conversation with Kalden (alias Ty, the ‘dissident’ among the three Wise Men), Mae explains that “everything and everyone should be seen […]� I want to be seen. I want proof I existed” (490). Here, surveillance is justified and affirmed on the basis of a reciprocal understanding of identity: Who I am and that I exist is only confirmed through the recognition of others – even if these others merely exist in the virtual realm of the Internet and, besides sending digital ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ (51), have no relation to me�25 This identity-oriented affirmation of transparency and surveillance directly links to the context of neoliberalism and the society of control� As neoliberalism is marked by an intense flexibilization of economic structures and social arrangements, one’s worth is no longer determined on the basis of relatively solid professions, work relations, or social positions� Rather, in line with the dismantling of the traditional separation between labor and leisure, it relies on more and more fluid (or, in Deleuze’s terms, ‘metastable’) constellations of recognition and modulation� The general merging of life and work under neoliberalism is exceedingly apparent throughout The Circle� In the beginning of the book, Mae is told by her boss “that just as important as the work we do here – and that work is very important – we want to make sure that you can be a human being here, too� We want this to be a workplace, sure, but it should also be a humanplace” (47). While this may sound like an effort to ‘humanize’ work, it actually turns out to be the opposite: a thorough transmutation of ‘private life,’ which gradually manifests itself as a mere continuation of work� Hence, Mae is told at another instance that what she thought would be “extracurricular” is an integral part of her employment: “We consider your online presence to be integral to your work here. It’s all connected” (95-96). While in the beginning of The Circle, Mae only hesitantly makes use of the company’s social media options – and only after being pressured to participate – she eventually develops into a “true believer,” recognizing the Circle’s mission as her own (Lyon 2018, 155). Among other things, this process involves a massive intensification of her social media activities, as she becomes overly eager to boost her “Participation Rank.”26 Consequently, surveillance and self-surveillance become essential 25 26 Read in this manner, Mae’s statement in fact resonates with various contemporary recognition-based approaches to identity formation� See, for instance, Fluck 2009, 445: “Identities are not formed exclusively, not even primarily, by attaching one’s own desire to a subject position created in discourse, but by being recognized by others, for without such recognition we literally would not know who we are.” See Eggers 2014, 101: “This is your Participation Rank, PartiRank for short� Some people here call it the Popularity Rank, but it’s not really that� It’s just an algorithmgenerated number that takes into account all your activity in the InnerCircle […] – basically it collects and celebrates all you do here.” Indeed, ‘collects and celebrates’ is a perfect way of describing the neoliberal logic of combining the purely numeric with 194 simon schlEusEnEr aspects of Mae’s existence, a tendency that culminates in her announcement to go fully transparent, agreeing to constantly stream video and audio of her daily life (Eggers 2014, 306)�27 Although The Circle’s portrayal of tracking and transparency is certainly exaggerated, the novel nevertheless proceeds from today’s already existing surveillance capitalism and its technologies of control (many of which Deleuze anticipated almost 30 years ago)� In line with Steven Shaviro, what Eggers demonstrates is that the “reign of universal transparency” is not necessarily “imposed from above,” but involves complicated processes of participation and affective investment� It is hard to decide whether such surveillance practices “from below” (Shaviro 2010, 69) are voluntary or involuntary, as in the neoliberal world of work there is always pressure to participate� Yet, what Eggers underlines is that post-disciplinary surveillance is both based on a ‘desire to see’ and a ‘desire to be seen�’ What is at stake here, however, is more than the well-known question of ‘visual pleasure’ (see Mulvey 1989)� Rather, in the context of neoliberal insecurity, seeing, watching, monitoring, and tracking also function as compensations for the overall loss of social, economic, and personal security� In this regard, the desire to become “allseeing, all-knowing” (Eggers 2014, 71) – the impulse to constantly ‘check everything,’ from emails and social media to physical activity and calorie consumption – is not just related to ‘self-entrepreneurship’ (Bröckling 2007) and the Deleuzian notion of ‘self-modulation,’ but it can also be interpreted as symptomatic of the loss of security under neoliberalism�28 In the culture of surveillance that emerges as a result of these practices, it is therefore not only ‘Big Brother’ who is watching you, but so might be anyone else�29 In this respect, the world depicted in The Circle is decidedly post-Orwellian� In other respects, however, Eggers’s novel is in fact not that 27 28 29 the Dionysian in order to stimulate participation and increase efficiency. For more on this strategy (with regard to the ‘flexible normalism’ of the Kinsey Reports), see Link 1999, 94-100� In The Circle, this drastic form of self-surveillance is also practiced by politicians and public officials eager (and in many cases pressured) to prove that they have ‘nothing to hide’ (see Eggers 2014, 239-242)� Economic insecurity, material precariousness, and class division – the “grim realities” of neoliberalization (Harvey 2009, 119) – are for the most part absent from the Circle’s ‘bubble,’ yet constitute its invisible outside� One of the rare episodes in which this dimension becomes visible is when Mae’s father is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and faces serious problems with his health insurance (see Eggers 2014, 75)� Despite its art-historical background, it might be fruitful to draw on Michael Fried’s distinction between absorption and theatricality here� While Fried claims (via Chardin) that absorption is based on an “oubli de soi” or “self-forgetting” (Fried 2008, 40), he defines the theatrical (via Diderot) as a “consciousness of being beheld” (Fried 1980, 100)� By implication, the theatrical thereby also entails a consciousness of one’s self and one’s actions; for if one is conscious of being beheld by others, one tends to view oneself through the eyes of these others, being intensely aware of one’s own ‘performance�’ In a sense, this is precisely what is at stake in today’s surveillance capitalism, which is marked by the common feeling of an invisible ‘audience’ or ‘witness’ routinely observing one’s actions� Thus, if such ‘consciousness of being beheld’ is a dominant affect in today’s digital culture, ‘theatricality’ is its primary mode of subjectivity� The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 195 different from Nineteen Eighty-Four� For instance, the slogans that are presented to the audience when Mae announces that she will go transparent – sEcrEts arE liEs, sharing is caring, and PriVacy is thEft (Eggers 2014, 305) – are plainly modeled after the Orwellian slogans War is PEacE, frEEDom is slaVEry, and ignorancE is strEngth (Orwell 2008, 6)� While this may simply be a playful reference to one of the key texts of dystopian literature, there are other similarities as well� Most importantly, by the end of the novel, the Circle seems to completely transcend the boundaries of business and capitalist commerce and literally becomes a surveillance state� The company now “has its own currency,” “will soon take over state and federal ID databases,” “proposes a system for collecting taxes,” and “is beginning to take over the voting process through its proprietary voting technology, Demoxie” (Martin 2016, 61)� On the one hand, this narrative move merely describes a process that is already taking place, namely the outsourcing of central governmental functions to private corporations� From this perspective, the notion of a privately-owned company that has effectively conquered and incorporated the democratic state evokes the image of post-democracy put into action� On the other hand, however, the reader may wonder whether Eggers’s novel is really so much concerned with surveillance capitalism, and whether the Circle has not served as a stand-in for the state or the government all along� Indeed, despite the book’s focus on ‘participation’ and the instrumentalization of desire, one may argue that its ending mobilizes fears that are relatively similar to the dystopian anxieties solicited by Orwellian narratives of totalitarian surveillance� In other words, although the context is an entirely different one, the politics of The Circle and Nineteen Eighty-Four may ultimately not be that far apart� For example, while Orwell’s novel is typically interpreted as a critique of Soviet-style socialism, The Circle attacks “Infocommunism” (Eggers 2014, 489) and could therefore be read as a warning against totalitarian attempts to stifle individualism and privacy, too.30 In fact, although Eggers is well aware of the capitalist backdrop of contemporary surveillance, his book seems more concerned with the social costs of the loss of privacy than with the economic exploitation of data� Hence, if The Circle should be read as a critique of capitalism, then it would rather be an ‘artistic critique’ than a ‘social critique’: rather a critique of capitalism as a source of disenchantment and alienation than a critique of economic exploitation and social inequality (see Boltanski/Chiapello 2007, 36-40)� In addition, by emphasizing how total transparency can have drastic effects on traditional friendships and families, Eggers’s critique is obviously intended to appeal to conservative sentiments as well�31 30 31 Contrary to right-wing readings of Orwell’s novel, however, Nineteen Eighty-Four is more than only a critique of actually existing socialism� As Regina Martin argues, the novel instead represents “an urgent call for readers to move beyond the binary opposition of capitalism and Soviet-style communism” (Martin 2016, 60). Similarly, Ty, in The Circle, not just warns against “Infocommunism,” but also against the way in which it is coupled “with ruthless capitalistic ambition” (Eggers 2014, 489). See, for instance, Mae’s deteriorating relationships with her parents, her best friend Annie, and her ex-boyfriend Mercer (who is eventually driven to suicide)� 196 simon schlEusEnEr To be sure, The Circle’s ideological ambiguities are in part responsible for the book’s success� As its storyline integrates elements of a (right-wing) libertarian “state-phobia” (Foucault 2008, 76) with aspects of a (left-wing) critique of capitalism, it seems to aim for a broad audience across the political spectrum� To some extent, The Circle’s insights about the nexus between surveillance technology, economic power, and cultural ideology are therefore mitigated by Eggers’s conventional narrative and his ‘individualistic’ focus on the loss of privacy� Nevertheless, what remains unsettling about The Circle is that its portrait of the culture of surveillance – its logic as well as its technologies – appears only slightly detached from the world we already live in� Conclusion Having used the Snowden revelations and the PRISM program as a starting point, the aim of this essay was to investigate the wide array of contemporary surveillance practices against the backdrop of neoliberalism� While authors like Glenn Greenwald have drawn parallels between the NSA’s spy programs and the Orwellian imagination of a totalitarian surveillance state, my argument was that contemporary surveillance (at least in the US and in most other Western democracies) is decidedly post-Orwellian, post-panoptic, and in many ways bound up with economic interests� Having taken my cues from recent analyses of digital ‘surveillance capitalism’ (e�g� Zuboff 2018) and from Deleuze’s notion of the ‘society of control,’ the essay outlined a ‘surveillance nexus’ that combines voluntary and involuntary surveillance, government spying and commercial data gathering, self-tracking devices and social media� On the one hand, this contextualization facilitated examining the US security apparatus as an actor within today’s neoliberal environment� Consequently, the essay emphasized the NSA’s dealings with the private sector and scrutinized the ideological and affective implications of its spying practice� On the other hand, the framework allowed for a possible answer as to why the NSA scandal has not had more wide-ranging consequences� Given the omnipresence of contemporary surveillance (as well as the range of its technological possibilities), it is likely that many Americans have simply become used to the idea of regularly being watched and monitored – a sentiment which might at least partly explain the relative absence of largescale protests and resistance� In this context, David Lyon has argued that ‘being watched’ and ‘watching’ have today become “a way of life”: Today’s surveillance is made possible by our own clicks on websites, our texting messages and exchanging photos� Ordinary people contribute to surveillance as never before� User-generated content engenders the data by which daily doings are monitored� This is how surveillance culture takes shape (Lyon 2018, 2)� As I sought to demonstrate, this ‘participatory’ dimension strongly distinguishes contemporary surveillance from Orwellian or Foucauldian perspectives, both of which are mostly concerned with centralized, ‘top down’ means The Surveillance Nexus: Digital Culture and the Society of Control 197 of monitoring and tracking� This is not to say, however, that the ‘bottom up’ manifestations of present-day surveillance culture should merely be attributed to voluntary decisions and personal choice� Rather, in today’s neoliberal environment, the desire to ‘always participate’ is often reflective of material needs and insecurities, or responds to cultural and economic demands – “the compulsion to participate and to process oneself” (Ott 2018, 34). In this constellation (and similar to what is depicted in The Circle), the boundaries between desire and compulsion, ‘inner-directedness’ and ‘other-directedness,’ become increasingly fuzzy� Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to be a popular reference in the discourse on surveillance� For here the boundaries are still intact: no one would doubt that the book is ‘dystopian,’ or that the state it depicts is ‘totalitarian�’ In contrast, discussing phenomena like the ‘participatory panopticon’ is politically much more difficult. Indeed, the practices of social media users – their desires to ‘build community’ and engage in ‘social networks,’ their wanting to ‘connect’ and ‘participate’ – seem utterly compatible with democratic principles� Therefore, just as 20th century writers like Orwell or Huxley were pointing out the links between surveillance and totalitarianism, what needs even more thorough exploring in the digital culture of the 21st century are the links between surveillance and democracy (including their post-democratic implications)� Bibliography Atwood, Margaret (2013). “When Privacy Is Theft” (Review of The Circle by Dave Eggers)� The New York Review of Books (Vol� 60, No� 18): 6-8� Barbrook, Richard (2000)� “Cyber-Communism: How the Americans are Superseding Capitalism in Cyberspace.” Science as Culture (Vol� 9, No� 1): 5-40� Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron (1996). “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture (Vol� 6, No�1): 44-72� Bauman, Zygmunt (2000)� Liquid Modernity� Cambridge: Polity� Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon (2013)� Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation� Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press� Baumgärtner, Maik, Nikolaus Blome, Hubert Gude, Marcel Rosenbach, Jörg Schindler, and Fidelius Schmid (2015)� “Spying Close to Home: German Intelligence Under Fire for NSA Cooperation.” Spiegel Online (24 April 2015)� Web� http://www�spiegel� de/international/germany/german-intelligence-agency-bnd-under-fire-for-nsacooperation-a-1030593�html (07 Nov 2018)� Bellah, Robert N�, Richard Madsen, William M� Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M� Tipton (2008)� Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life� Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press� Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello (2007)� The New Spirit of Capitalism� London and New York: Verso� Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). “The Forms of Capital.” J. 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