"Riffing on the work of another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his evocative 1992 fragment “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Harcourt settles upon the phrase “Expository Society” to describe our current situation, one in which we “have become dulled to the perils of digital transparence” and enamored of exposure. This new form of expository power, Harcourt explains, “embeds punitive transparence into our hedonist indulgences and inserts the power to punish in our daily pleasures.”
The expository society has been long in the making. Its roots are in ancient Greece and Rome, where the “age of the spectacle” commenced and began its evolution...
Citing Glenn Greenwald, he notes that 70 percent of the United States’ national intelligence budget is spent on the private sector. “Whatever it is that is surveilling us, then, is not simply ‘the state,’” he writes. A more accurate image, he suggests, is a “tenticular oligarchy” — a “large oligopolistic octopus” enveloping the world, neither fully public nor fully private but both.
The expository society is indeed a paradoxical beast. Punishment and pleasure have fused, and commerce and surveillance are now one and the same...
Understanding the degree to which we are compelled to participate, as opposed to lamenting the degree to which we desire our own oppression, is important if we want to devise strategies for resistance. Movements derive more energy from tapping into people’s grievances than chastising them for complacency...
The best solution may not be to combat surveillance directly, but to attack the disease: the arrangements that have allowed an unaccountable political and economic elite to emerge."
I don't have nearly so fatalistic a perspective as this, yet..., and I also find myself a little antagonistic to these kinds of warnings because they feel like they are in parallel to the anti-social-media lectures pointed at young women from all over our society.
But - this ongoing work, struggling with our surveillance and the implications of our use of the internet and social media to share information, this is deeply important for how we define our rights as users, creators, and consumers. It's just this fascinating thing right now, where we are in a capitalist society but have become accustomed to getting a lot of services for free and then we respond to that by providing a lot of our own creative labor for free and/or doing the labor of information gathering and ad-targeting for free, and sometimes this passive system becomes a problem.
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