The laying bare of kings, the possibility of seeing them, as in the tale, without clothes, this new right delivered to the disenfranchised, to nobodies, to those who were called the sans-culottes in the French Revolution for their lack of proper breeches-this power to expose princes, officials, prestigious people, and, of course, tyrants is central to the democratic idea and to democratic resistance.īut still, the machine cannot distinguish between potentates and ordinary politicians. Instead of passively allowing themselves to be watched, the lowly eyes take the initiative they turn their leaders into objects of insatiable and unforgiving curiosity, with the result that the watchers come to be watched, the informers informed on, and the inspectors inspected. ![]() Read: China’s new frontiers in dystopian tech ![]() But the tools wielded by those at the top are not much better than those available to the people at the bottom and provided they are a little geeky or at least use the right websites, they can be just as powerful as the people at the top. Operated from the top down, it gives GAFA, governments, and other actual or would-be major players full power to observe, monitor, and control those under their dominion. What is the internet if not a modern panopticon? But it is a two-sided one, a panopticon that can be turned around. He conceived the simple idea that it is enough for a person to believe that he is being observed to get that person, without force and even without words, to bend and submit. The web became a throng, a free-for-all, a venue for the headlong pursuit of the self, where everyone shows up with his opinion, his conviction, his complaint, and his “personal truth.” The point of departure was the equal right of all to express their beliefs but, somehow, that conviction gave way to the idea that all of those expressions of belief are of equal value.Īnd here it is necessary to bring up the name of someone who is not a GAFA head but rather an 18th-century English philosopher: Jeremy Bentham.īentham invented a model prison that he dubbed the “panopticon,” the chief feature of which is a central watchtower that allows the guards to observe the prisoners detained in chambers radiating like spokes from the tower hub, without the prisoners being able to observe the observers. A torrent of previously dammed-up speech washed over the internet. The story began like a fairy tale offered up to the rest of the planet: the giddy opening of infinite spaces and labyrinths of intelligence the vertiginous feeling of having all the known world within one’s grasp the joy, for those living at the edges in remote villages or peripheral nations, of gaining access to globalized methods of socialization and personal growth.ĭerek Thompson: The attention economy is a Malthusian trapįor people who previously had no collective importance, who were forbidden to speak or even to possess a narrative and a story of their own, the fairy tale promised new possibilities for expression and freedom. It took only a short amount of time for a band of young people, working in their garages and dorm rooms, to dream up and put into practice the equations and protocols that underpin this electronic empire, a system of influence and control whose strength is gradually coming to be seen as greater than that of the old empire and its heavy equipment. At the same time: No, because the new empire with a digital face has no interest in spreading or maintaining what were once called American values. Yes, because these companies-though they are so completely unrooted as to be almost governed by no law, not even that of the United States-are in their culture and language unmistakably American. This America that you are not the first to say is in decline, isn’t it the center of a revolution that has changed the face of humanity and made America more dominant than ever? Yet others might say: Aren’t you crying over yesterday’s American empire? The real empire is busy exerting its global domination through GAFA-Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple-which were born on the West Coast of the United States and have become states within a state, empires within the empire. ![]() This essay was adapted from The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World, by Bernard-Henri Lévy.
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