E-Book Overview
Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care. Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society—a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. We are not scandalized by this. To the contrary: we crave exposure and knowingly surrender our privacy and anonymity in order to tap into social networks and consumer convenience—or we give in ambivalently, despite our reservations. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist. Disobedience to a regime that relies on massive data mining can take many forms, from aggressively encrypting personal information to leaking government secrets, but all will require conviction and courage.
E-Book Content
EXPOSED E X PO S E D desire and disobedience in the digital age Bernard E. Harcourt h a r va r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s cambridge, massachusetts l o n d o n, e n g l a n d 2015 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harcourt, Bernard E., 1963– Exposed : desire and disobedience in the digital age / Bernard E. Harcourt. pages cm ISBN 978-0-674-50457-8 (cloth) 1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Privacy, right of. I. Title. HM851.H3664 2015 303.48'33—dc23 2015012788 To Isadora To Léonard To Mia contents The Expository Society 1 part one Clearing the Ground 29 1. George Orwell’s Big Brother 2. The Surveillance State 3. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon 31 54 80 part two The Birth of the Expository Society 105 4. Our Mirrored Glass Pavilion 5. A Genealogy of the New Doppelgänger Logic 6. The Eclipse of Humanism 107 141 166 part three The Perils of Digital Exposure 185 7. The Collapse of State, Economy, and Society 8. The Mortification of the Self 9. The Steel Mesh 187 217 234 viii Contents part four Digital Disobedience 251 10. Virtual Democracy 11. Digital Resistance 12. Political Disobedience 253 262 280 notes 285 ac know ledg ments 347 index 349 EXPOSED the expository society Every keystroke, each mouse click, every touch of the screen, card swipe, Google search, Amazon purchase, Instagram, “like,” tweet, scan—in short, everything we do in our new digital age can be recorded, stored, and monitored. Every routine act on our iPads and tablets, on our laptops, notebooks, and Kindles, office PCs and smartphones, every transaction with our debit card, gym pass, E-ZPass, bus pass, and loyalty cards can be archived, data-mined, and traced back to us. Linked together or analyzed separately, these data points constitute a new virtual identity, a digital self that is now more tangible, authoritative, and demonstrable, mor