Freedom and control in the digital age

Introduction

Isaiah Berlin introduced two concepts of liberty (Berlin, 1969), negative and positive. The mitigation of negative freedom requires the deliberate interference of another agent, while the mitigation of positive freedom results from a lack of self-mastery of individuals. ICT is thought to bolster the freedom of individuals in both senses, due to the consent given by those who use them. No external agents are thought to be interfering with what we choose to do online, most of which would not be possible without ICT, and it is consequently thought to enhance self-mastery. I shall argue, however, that these actions in fact mitigate individual freedoms all by themselves. To make this case, we must examine the notion of ‘consent’, and why it is seen as the primary justification of individual freedom when using ICT. With this motivation, this paper underlines the problematic of ‘consent’ due to the control mechanisms inherent to contemporary societies dominated by ICT.

Deleuze and Guattari understand a Control Society as one grounded on a capitalistic device which captures desire in a functional organisation of a complex assemblage of elements, such as objects, bodies and experiences, and thereby re-organises it (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005). Power over individual desire in Control Society is quite unlike power in traditional Discipline Societies, with the latter exemplified by the Foucaultian idea of power as grounded on surveillance and control, which seeks to standardize individuals and their desires through close monitoring and punishment of transgression (Foucault, 1977). Control Societies, on the other hand, are ruled by information itself, where this is defined as the controlled system of ‘order-words’ (a function immanent to language that compels obedience) that are used in a given society. As Deleuze sees it, a Control Society is emerging in which, by means of ICT, confinement as a control mechanism (e.g. imprisonment for crimes) is being replaced with information that enables ‘free’ but nonetheless ‘perfectly controlled’ action (Deleuze, 1995).

Within ICT-dominated societies, ICT seems to offer the space to exercise limitless freedom, with the technology itself inducing the movements with which freedom itself is increasingly identified (Beckman, 2018). Control seems to have been left behind. However, human actors in control societies participate in the mechanisms of control themselves, by constantly engaging in forms of self-modulation and self-monitoring, which reveal the controlled de-territorialization and re-territorialization of their own desires. Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison in which complete visibility would ensure complete control, has been left behind in a post-panoptic era in which visibility is no longer a trap—a threat to our self-control from others—but rather the subject’s own desire. Visibility has become the process of an individual willingly trying to get his- or herself iconized. People now really want to be monitored by other people (Baştürk, 2017); the watchful eye of Bentham’s prison guard has become our own deepest desire, one which guides our free actions. This observation problematizes the notion of individual consent which is thought to justify ICT in digital societies as both liberating and freedom-enhancing. ICT seems to satisfy the demands of Berlin’s negative freedom because we choose how to use it without undue influence from external agents, with the requirements of positive freedom being satisfied because self-aware individuals choose to use ICT to enhance their self-mastery. But this picture is transformed if we conceive the consent itself as a new kind of internalised control.

Conceptualization of individual freedom

In outlining his distinction between negative and positive freedom, Berlin says that:

the ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ The second, which I shall call the positive sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference, that can determine someone to do, or be, one thing rather than another?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap (Berlin, 1969, p. 121).

In the negative sense, the presence of something (e.g. another person) can render a person unfree. In the positive sense, the absence of something (e.g. will-power) may render a person unfree (MacCallum, 1967). Accordingly, we might say that if I am conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being who bears sole responsibility for my choices, and who is able to explain them by reference to my own ideas and purposes, with no external agents having interfered against my will, then I am both positively and negatively free—I have achieved a kind of total freedom. Against this backdrop, ICT might be thought to offer a space of total freedom in which individuals can experience their own self-mastery. However, this conceptualisation, which justifies the thought that ICT is liberating, is put into question by the new ontology that has emerged with ICT-based Control Societies.

Ontological nature of ICT

The great destruction caused by the use of the instrumental power of technology during the twentieth century popularised the idea that technology will continue to function as an instrument of external agents for the purpose of controlling and mitigating the freedom of individuals. Thus, concerns have arisen that “the governments of the industrial world are weary giants of flesh and steel organized into hyper-rationalized bureaucracies devoted to enforcing their laws by military means” (Turner, 2006, p. 13) with the instrumental power of technology. However, with the advent of ICT, this negative reading of technology has shifted to a positive one, due to the capacity of these new technologies to overthrow conformity; to ‘disrupt’ our old, destructive ways. Thus, as John Perry Barlow, an information technology journalist who drafted the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, states

Thanks to the advent of the digital technologies, we are creating a world that all may enter without privilege, or prejudice, accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity (in Turner, 2006, p. 13).

A new digital generation has been envisaged in which individuals can liberate themselves from the prison of flesh and bones. A newly liberated people are expected to gain the ultimate freedom to explore their authentic selves within free, decentralized and egalitarian digital spaces.

These digital spaces are thought to introduce a novel kind of individual whose existence goes beyond its physical presence, and who will bring an end to the old Discipline Societies grounded on surveillance and control. However, the ‘liberated’ non-physical individual of this digital space would have really become part of a novel kind of a system, one which “operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention” (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 606). They thereby enter a Deleuzean Control Society, in which control promotes a kind of flow, or circulation, which is regulated by codes that transform individuals into “‘dividuals’, masses become samples, data, markets, or banks” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 180). For Deleuze, confinement as a control mechanism is being replaced with information that enables a ‘free’ but nonetheless ‘perfectly controlled’ movement due to the power processes inherent to the system (Beckman, 2018).

This replacement of confinement with information overlooks the power processes that create the territories which connect desiring-machines to other desiring-machines, which is what such societies turn us into. Through the active and dynamic process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, ‘individuals’ become ‘dividuals’, and ‘free’ movement is transformed into a ‘perfectly controlled’ movement. The control is no longer external, it is rather the case that human actors within Control Societies participate in the mechanisms of control, by constantly engaging in forms of self-modulation and self-monitoring through their ‘free’ movements.

The image of these technologies as non-conformist and free, derives from the idea that they are self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception (Castells, 2007). This emphasis on self-rule is thought to bolster the positive freedom of individuals. What’s more, the ontological non-physical/non-material nature of these technologies is thought to bolster the negative freedom of individuals; ICT allows us to break free from the physical world. Yet, in reality, far from aiding our pursuit of negative and positive freedom, what they provide is the digital space in which self-aware individuals willingly consent to nullify their individual freedoms, since the space itself has taken control of their desires, as it constantly de-territorializes and re-territorializes those desires in accordance with the capitalist power processes of Control Societies.

Desire and control societies

Deleuze and Guattari, in their 1972 book, Anti-Oedipus, challenge the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud and Lacan which considers dreams and fantasies as representations of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is a production of the assemblage of ‘machines’ created by a ‘factory’ of the unconscious. By this, they mean that desire is a force that motivates behaviour through a consciousness that is shaped by the drives, motives and inclinations of the unconscious, with the unconscious itself under a constant process of rearrangement determined by relations between the ‘machines’ of desire within a capitalist society (Özpolat, 2018). Desire, for Deleuze, is a kind of vital force which functionally organises a complex arrangement of elements such as objects, bodies and experiences (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000; 2005). The assemblage of elements is construed as machines operated by desires, with these machines connected to other machines within complex systems, or ‘territories’, which are experienced institutionally, socially and culturally. According to Deleuze and Guattari, territories are unfixed spaces assembled through the process of territorialization, which is the power-process through which machines of desire connect, producing a perpetual process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization (De Souza-Leao & Costa, 2018). For Deleuze & Guattari, it is through de-territorialization that power interiorizes itself within individuals in order to shape the desires which control the acts of individuals. The subjectivities of each desiring machine are produced by another’s production of products, with desire displaying itself through a productive unconscious regulated by connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000).

Control societies are ruled by information itself, which Deleuze understands as the controlled system of order-words that are used within any given society. The information is circulated by the desiring machines that, due to the ICT, consider themselves able to fully express their individuality, their identity, their differences, their idiosyncrasies and their eccentricities in a way encouraged by the control itself (Beckman, 2018). Control seems to offer the space in which to exercise limitless freedom, but the apparent exercise of an immense freedom is just the desiring machines circulating the information in the form of embedded selves constantly shaped by the digital. As Deleuze emphasizes individuals are intensely invested with investments of desire. Interests are placed by desire therefore it follows and finds itself where the desire has placed it. Consequently, individuals never desire against their interests (Harcourt, 2015). The desires attached to the desiring machines are formed, produced and invested by the digital technologies. Yet, in the context of digital space, the desiring machines are

always already programmed for in advance; ‘control’ comes to be so subtle that it may well present itself in the form of ‘choice’. In such a situation, control emerges as an immanent process of rechannelling of turbulent flows (Parisi & Terranova, 2000), a process one may well not even experience as ‘control’” (Poster & Savat, 2009, p. 57).

The desire to be exposed, to be watched, to be recorded, to be predicted, is a consequence of the kind of a choice grounded on a constant attention to rankings and ratings, to the number of ‘likes’, retweets, comments, and shares (Harcourt, 2015). “In this regard, the desire to become all-seeing, all-knowing (Eggers, 2014, p. 71)—the impulse to constantly ‘check everything,’ from emails and social media” (Schleusener, 2019, p. 194) can also be interpreted as symptomatic of the loss of individual freedom.

This loss of individual freedom due to control as a consequence of the de-territorialization and the re-territorialization process means that we must reconsider how we define individual freedom and the conditions in which it is mitigated. Thus,

For an individual to be self-governing it at least must be the case that she is not moved by desires and values that have been oppressively imposed upon her, even if she faces no restraints in performing actions such desires motivate (Christman, 1991, pp. 345–346).

For although mitigation of positive and negative freedom is deeply concealed with Control Society, due to the non-oppressive and non-imposed control of desire, individuals have still relinquished their individual freedoms through their so-called ‘choice’ by offering ‘consent’ to (and through) these technologies.

The problematic of ‘consent’ given to / through ICT

To underline the problematic of ‘consent’ being the primary justification of individual freedom within the scope of ICT, it is crucial to stress how individual freedom is represented within digital spaces. Thus, information privacy is one of the fundamental tenets of individual freedom and “violation of privacy consists in the dissemination of information of an intimate nature to an interested audience without the consent of the subject” (Ess, 1996, p. 54). Another fundamental tenet is data protection, closely related to informational self-determination, which is the notion that assigns people the right to exercise control over their own personal data. Thus, individual freedom is represented as informational privacy and as informational self-determination within and through ICT by means of their giving or withholding consent to certain forms of data processing.

Consent is considered as the main justificatory ground that sets the status of individual freedom within digital spaces. If self-aware and un-coerced individuals give their consent to any sort action practiced through / within these technologies, then they are considered to have informational privacy and informational self-determination. Any action taken within / through ICT grounded on the consent of individuals is not considered to be mitigating of individual freedom. Behind this conviction are views about positive and negative freedom, and the ways they can be undermined. However, due to the non-oppressive and non-imposed control of desires in Control Society, individuals mitigate their individual freedoms by and through their given consent.

As Harcourt puts it,

Mortification of the self, in our digital world, happens when subjects voluntarily cede their private attachments and their personal privacy, when they give up their protected personal space, cease monitoring their exposure on the Internet, let go of their personal data, and expose their intimate lives (Harcourt, 2015, p. 233).

‘Mortification of the self’ is due to contemporary self-tracking and self-monitoring practices, coupled with the prevalent inclination to ‘share,’ ‘post,’ and ‘submit’ private content on social media platforms that are ascribed to personal choice, and which is executed by giving consent (Schleusener, 2019). But the constant de-territorialization and re-territorialization of desires by the power processes of control societies through / within these technologies, makes ‘consent’ seem like a non-oppressed personal ‘choice’ of a self-aware individual. It is, but only because control has so deeply internalised itself in Control Society that consent itself has become another part of the controlled system, as has the will of the individual.

Conclusion

Traditional conceptualization of ‘individual freedom’, and of the factors capable of mitigating it, has been rendered obsolete by ICT. A novel kind of mitigation of freedom has arisen as a consequence of the de-territorialization and re-territorialization of desires within desiring machines, shaped by the power processes, experienced and practiced within the Control Societies. This new kind of mitigation is disguised as the ‘choices’ of ultimately free and self-aware individuals giving ‘consent’ through / within ICT. This makes it important to undertake new inquiries into the nature of ‘consent’, and to question its use in justifying ICT as freedom-enabling.