“1984, Harcourt acknowledges, was an astoundingly farsighted text, but Orwell failed to anticipate the role pleasure would come to play in our culture of surveillance — specifically, the way it could be harnessed, as opposed to suppressed, by powerful interests. Oceania’s “Hate Week” is nowhere to be found; instead, we live in a world of likes, favorites, and friending. Foucault’s panopticon, in turn, needs a similar update; mass incarceration aside, the panopticon — for the rest of us — has become participatory, more of an amusement park or shopping mall than a penal institution. Rather than being coerced to reveal secrets, today we seem to enjoy self-exposure, giving away “our most intimate information and whereabouts so willingly and passionately — so voluntarily.””
“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.””
“while spectacles and surveillance may be “costless” and “practically free,” the expository society is fundamentally about profit. On the corporate side, the business models of companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Uber, and Amazon are based on the principle of user enjoyment. Social media, we all know from experience, is addictive; our pleasure is habit-forming by design.”
“This is the first crux of Harcourt’s argument: The expository society exploits, rather than represses, our desires. The second crux is his observation that government and commercial surveillance infrastructures have wholly merged.”
“Harcourt compares the Apple Watch to an ankle bracelet used for monitoring parolees:”
““The Apple Watch begins to function as the ankle bracelet. All is seen, all can be seen, all can be monitored — inside or out, where we are, free or supervised, we are permanently surveilled.””
““Privacy,” Harcourt himself writes, “has been privatized.” It is becoming a luxury good, available only to those who can afford it.”
“Harcourt’s analysis hinges on desire:”
“We want to participate, we are impelled to do so, and we like it. But it seems to me we are as much compelled as we are impelled.”
“we are forced to participate in online life in myriad ways”
“Students are advised to manage their social media profiles so they can get into a good college; adults are compelled to groom their LinkedIn profiles in order to secure employment; journalists and other creative professionals are told they must join Twitter to promote their work; and so on.”
“Instead of merely hiding from the oligopolistic octopus, we should strive to free ourselves from its grip.”