What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us
It's now 35 years since Gilles Deleuze published the essay Postscript on the Societies of Control. Meant as a warning about the future, it's never felt more like a description of the present.
Deleuze outlines a shift from the institutions described by Michel Foucault (school, factory, barracks, prison) towards a much more fluid regime in which control seeps into every corner of life. Access codes, digital identities, and continuous monitoring replace locked doors and fixed schedules, turning us from individuals into what he calls “dividuals” – datafied fragments to be tracked, sorted, and modulated.
What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation—as they say—but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form.
These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.
What interests me, re-reading this in a post-pandemic, smartphone-saturated world, is the ways in which technologies which once promised emancipation, connection, and flexibility have quietly become the instruments of domination. Systems that invite us to express ourselves and optimise our lives, instead enclose our attention and monetise our behaviour. The fine line between freedom and control is increasingly blurry.
The covert nature of this influence is something that Byung-Chul Han discusses in The Burnout Society (2015), suggesting that we’ve shifted from a disciplinary or even “control” society into an “achievement society.”
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves. The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault’s analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society. Nor does the commonly employed concept of “control society” do justice to this change. (p.13)
In other words, overt discipline becomes less important when individuals regulate themselves within a pervasive capitalist system; the logic of control moves inside, becoming self-optimisation and self-exploitation rather than external coercion. It is not the technology itself which emancipates or constrains us; the internet, for example, provides both control and freedom depending on how it is used.
There is something transformative about carrying an internet-connected device packed with sensors in our pockets. But most of us use our smartphones in a naive way – allowing notifications to pull us back into group chats, news feeds, and status updates that exacerbate context collapse – the flattening of different audiences and roles into a single, always-on performance.
Particularly for those, like me, who work from home, unless we are very intentional there is no meaningful difference between our work time and our leisure time. This is captured by what Tiziana Terranova refers to in After the Internet (2022) as “cognitive capitalism.”
While one can measure the productivity of manual labor performed in the assembly line by counting the number of items assembled in a given time, the problem of cognitive capitalism becomes that of measuring the cognitive labor performed by a scientist, an artist, a teacher, a designer, or a writer. Do they ever really stop working, that is, thinking? Furthermore, the notion of cognitive labor suggests that this type of value-creation is not confined to those who would be classed as “cognitive workers” from a sociological point of view, but affects the global mass of living labor—including activities performed in leisure time such as posting comments, photographs or videos to social networking platforms or inventing a new fashion style that only later will be picked up by the industry. (p.90)
In Deleuzian terms, this is what it means to become a “dividual.” Value is extracted continuously from our clicks, posts, and even our downtime, whether or not we see ourselves as “working.”
Social networks in particular require a performance of self, in a way that Mark Andrejevic and others have described as a digital enclosure. That is, instead of the original land enclosures during the Agricultural Revolution providing a way of controlling the means of production, it is “the intangible commons of the mind” that is enclosed, as legal scholar James Boyle puts it. Our personalised feeds are not just convenient, it is the primary interface through which our attention is captured, profiled, and resold.
Like slowly boiling frogs, it can be difficult for us to remember what life used to be like before cognitive capitalism digitally enclosed us. Six years ago, at the ITHAKA Next Wave conference in New York, I presented on Truth, Lies, and Digital Fluency, introducing the audience to the Shoshana Zuboff's seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She identified three stages in which this performance of self is digitally enclosed to provide behavioural data:
- The commodification of human behaviour through data extraction
- The concentration of computational knowledge
- "Remote behavioural actuation" – i.e. moving from prediction to actively shaping behaviour.
As social animals, we voluntarily expose our lives online, forming what Zuboff calls the “expository society.” Companies, some now with trillion-dollar valuations, have built a data ecosystem which parses people into behavioural patterns and predictive models for profit. Like the character Neo in The Matrix, we are “farmed” – not for energy, but for behavioural data that makes a very small subset of society unimaginably wealthy.
What this means in practice is that your lifestyle has already been designed. Companies shape our behaviour, help create intentions, and then sell us products and services based on that actuated, synethetic desire. This is marketing as Deleuze’s “soul of the corporation” – not just selling products, but modulating desire itself. It's one of the reasons that the internet is less weird these days; everyone ends up 'wanting' the same thing.
We live in an abundant, diverse world where we should be pursuing our own interests and desires. Instead, in the “achievement society” that Byung-Chul Han describes, we are competing against one another for what seem like scarce resources. As a result, we burn ourselves out.
Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. (p.54)
One of the key issues of our time is the rolling context collapse of our daily lives, exacerbated by the cognitive burden of multitasking and the expectation of permanent availability. Being able to check our bank balance while walking the dog, reply to a group chat while in a boring work meeting, or check our social media feed while standing in line all mean that we have very little downtime.
Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness.
[...]
In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion—either they are eating or they are copulating. The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing [Gegenüber] because it must also process background events. Not just multitasking but also activities such as video games produce a broad but flat mode of attention, which is similar to the vigilance of a wild animal. Recent social developments and the structural change of wakefulness are bringing human society deeper and deeper into the wilderness. (p.17)
Deleuze sensed in 1990 that “we are at the beginning of something.” Now, 35 years later, we are living inside the thing he described: a world where control no longer needs walls because it travels with us in our pockets. We are covertly weighted and measured, turned into the 'achievement subjects' described by Byung-Chul Han.
Our world of cognitive production in both work and leisure time is not an exception to Deleuze’s societies of control but a refinement of them; we volunteer our data, perform for platforms, and exploit ourselves in the name of flexibility and “personal brand”. This is the time of the year when we slow down and question our participation in these pervasive systems. But 'escaping' them can feel impossible.
So what can we do? I'd suggest:
- Reclaim the right to be opaque, unmeasured, and unproductive.
- Resist the enclosure of digital life by prioritising connection with other people over connection with brands and corporations
- Build small, shared spaces that are not immediately optimised for extraction.
And, finally, perhaps we should all ask ourselves the question, who are you without the doing, once the metrics, notifications, and achievements fall silent?