cumulative control societies

I really enjoyed our conversation on Deleuze’s “Postscript.” While I’ve read the piece a few times before, what struck me reading it, perhaps due to our emphasis on economic history and neoliberalism, is how much of it is dedicated to describing the technologies, media, and mechanisms through which the logic of individualism in all areas of life arises. From the mass of the factory to the individual waged according to their ‘merit’. It felt quite clear – the piece describes neoliberalism as a symptom/co-constitutor of a society of control.

What I also forget is how Deleuze insists that the disciplinary society isn’t just left in the past – it still exists within the control society, enacted through mechanisms old and new. This cumulative aspect has made me view a couple specific cases in new light.

One piece that Deleuze does emphasize but perhaps could not predict the extent of is how much of the systems of control are enacted not by the state/governments, but private companies acting as state actors, in control of huge swaths of infrastructure. When he describes Guattari’s forcefields that are passed through biometric/ID scans, I don’t think of a city-owned fence, I think of a tech company that has cordoned off sections of the city to their employees or to private security. When something is done by a for-profit company, optimized individual extraction necessarily follows; if the scale and breadth continues, more and more aspects of life become optimized. It also aligns with a more distributed architecture and imagery of power, distributed and ever-present instead of institutionally centered. These shifts in where power is located make me think of a poignant anecdote by a worker at Google who became disillusioned:

“One day… I heard a woman screaming from the lobby. It was the type of screaming you might hear at a crowded Verizon store when somebody has just learned the cost of cancelling their contract. This wasn’t a common sound in the corporate offices… A few of us crept towards the lobby to see a woman in a San Jose Sharks jersey confronting our building’s receptionist while clutching a printout of what appeared when she entered her name into Google. She had marched down to the headquarters to demand that the first two search results be removed. She was savvy enough to know the internet was produced and organized somewhere, but like most of us she didn’t fully understand how it worked.” As private companies control more and more of national infrastructure, where do we go to make things change? Is there anything we can even do? “The coils of a serpent…”

I also think of the factory, such a hallmark of the disciplinary society. Factories still exist today, of course, but there are new institutions that feel like the control society instantiation of the factory, such as the amazon warehouse. “It’s a capitalism of a higher order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts.” The workers are pushed to the brink of productivity through individualized means: tracked with wearables and automatically warned/fired, with deep monitoring of each worker’s behavior; not able to go to the bathroom as it will affect their metrics too severely, among other reasons; and, utilizing the new medium that comes into being along with the control society, videogames, to visualize and narrativize individual surveillance and productivity. And app-based gig work, too, he mentions: “What it wants to sell is services… no longer a capitalism for production but for the product.” A lot, still, to think about.