Abstract
Edward Snowden’s disclosures on the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs confirm exponential advances in pioneering, what Gilles Deleuze called, ‘societies of control.’ What makes Snowden’s revelations seem so futuristic and dystopian is the total interoperability and full spectrum dominance of Big Data technologies have produced a surveillance dispositif that aims to ‘Collect it All.’ Just as there is a periodicity shift in the transition from Michel Foucault‘s ‘disciplinary societies’ to Deleuze’s ‘societies of control’ today, approximately a quarter of century from when his postscript was penned, the advent of Big Data signals a shift from the early cybernetic control systems that Deleuze theorized. The first part of this paper describes societies of control in terms of emerging Big Data technologies, that I call the ‘posthuman dispositif.’ The second part develops resistance strategies by riffing on statements Deleuze makes in his book ‘Foucault’: “What resistance extracts… is the forces of a life…. Life is a sort of counter-power, a return flow of forces aimed backward toward the source of exploitation” (p. 92). As a concrete example of resistance I instance Edward Snowden’s transformation from C.I.A/N.S.A systems analyst to government whistle-blower. I contextualize Snowden’s flip by invoking Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra.’ Finally, I deploy Gilbert Simondon’s notion of the transindividual to explore resistance to the posthuman dispositif.
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.
—Benjamin (1969, p. 222)
So he laid the dead man into a hollow tree – for he wanted to protect him from the wolves.
—Nietzsche (2010, p. 19)
Ethical reality is structured in networks, that is acts take on resonance with one another (and) contains in itself a power of amplification.
—Simondon (1995, p. 245)
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Notes
- 1.
In addition to its ability to process enormous amounts of information the term Big Data includes its capacity to deploy A.I. or artificial intelligence.
- 2.
Estimates of the storage capacity of the NSA data storage center in Utah range from ‘yottabytes’ to ‘zettabytes.’
- 3.
In 1984, George Orwell describes the same psychological machinery at work in his futuristic dystopia as follows: “There was of course no way of knowing when you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”. Orwell (1948).
- 4.
Deleuze writes: “Marketing has become the center or the ‘soul’ of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.”
- 5.
Harcourt (2015) refers to the pervasive forms of self, or do-it-yourself (DIY), surveillance as the expository society.
- 6.
See Jay Stanley, ACLU.org, 5 April 2013: https://www.aclu.org/blog/report-details-governments-ability-analyze-massive-aerial-surveillance-video-streams accessed 2/27/2015.
- 7.
- 8.
Metadata refer to files, communications, and programs that when modified, transmitted, or received can be used to pinpoint a suspect’s actions.
- 9.
“We use the term biopower when thinking of the sources and wellsprings of state power, and the specific technologies that the state produces, … to control populations: we speak of the biopolitical context when referring to the complex resistances, and occasions and measures of the clash between social dispositifs of power” (Hardt and Negri 2008: 73, 74).
- 10.
In Foucault’s archeology, the knowledge structures of any historical stratum are defined by a double articulation: ‘the seeable,’ a material field of ’visibilities,’ and ‘the sayable,’ a discursive field of ‘statements.’ “Each historical formation reveals all it can within the spectrum of its visible field, just as it says all it can within its epistemological range of discursive statements” (Deleuze 1988: 59).
- 11.
Deleuze (1988) concludes his book on Foucault by envisioning the historical subject vis-à-vis the unfold (infinitude/medieval, religious), fold (finitude/enlightenment, humanist), and superfold (unlimited finitude/post-modernity/post-humanist).
- 12.
Kim Zetter, Countdown-to-Zero-Day-Stuxnet/ Crown (11 November 2014).
- 13.
While acknowledging the real threats posed by state and terrorist networks, the cryptographer Bruce Schneier advocates the use of encryption technologies, like the Web browser TOR, but believes that unless one foregoes the Internet, social media, smartphones, driving a car or using any form of personal identification that there is no fail-safe way to avoid detection. He promotes support for grass roots citizen movements to pressure legislators to change intelligence data mining operations and for adoption of legislation similar to the ‘right to be forgotten’ laws that currently prevail in the European Union and Japan. Interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now (March 3, 2015): www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/3/13/part_2_bruce_schneier_on_the (Accessed March 4, 2015).
- 14.
Silicon Valley corporations pose a more symmetrical resistance to NSA surveillance. Having lost significant global business, when their complicity with NSA spying operations was discovered, they responded by encrypting products without retaining encryption keys (end-to-end encryption). However, evoking fear of a terrorist attack, the indispensable nation in the name of the FBI has begun to challenge end-to-end encryption. The showdown between the exceptional nation and its most successful corporations has, as of this time, yet to be fought. However, it is thought by many experts that the NSA already possesses ways to hack current end-to-end encryption technology.
- 15.
The omniscient/omnipotent dream that the Enlightenment hatched of the progress of reason and technology is quickly overwhelmed by the cataclysmic imagination of nature entrained in a positive feedback loop that rapidly outstrips human capacity to cope, as evidenced in natural disasters, global pandemics and such technological backfires as the reactor meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
- 16.
It has been pointed out notably by Slavoj Zizek that practices of self-care, both Western and Asiatic, may become occasions for narcissistic/hegemonic disconnection. Oft cited is the Me generation of the 1970s and generations of organizational psychologists thereafter, who cultivate self-care as stress reduction techniques for coping with neoliberal workplace pressures. see Zizek’s critique of Star Wars III, http://mariborchan.si/text/articles/slavoj-zizek/revenge-of-global-finance/ (Accessed Jan 2, 2016).
Today, practices of self-care are increasingly outsourced to algorithms programmed into smart watches, smartphone apps that augment the will by triggering alarms or messages throughout the day to serve as reminders to keep focus on the goals one sets for purposes of self-improvement.
- 17.
While Foucault traces these inner technologies back to the Ancient Greeks, he admits his ignorance of self-making practices developed in Asia. Nietzsche’s misreading of worldly Buddhist practices is a notable embarrassment. In fact, Nietzsche inherits notions of the will from Schopenhauer, who derived them from the Upanishads. For his part, in his book, Foucault, Deleuze renders an Orientalist interpretation that smooth out Eastern spiritual practices into a striated transcendence (unfold). But self-making practices exist in Asian societies. One example is the integral yoga of the revolutionary/yogi Sri Aurobindo of the Indian Independence movement, who was educated at Cambridge and a scholar of Latin, and Greek, (1872–1950) Aurobindo’s draws on the ancient Indian yogas, to constitute a practice for cultivating excellence in head, heart, and hands (jnana, bhakti, karma) that aims at an immanent transfiguration of matter, he calls purna, or integral, yoga. As praxis (sadhana), it is a form of self-making involving the sublimation of desire (tapas), and the cultivation of the ‘psychic being’ whose genealogy, Aurobindo traces back to the Socratic, Daemon. Like Nietzsche, Aurobindo believed the human to be a transitional being also positing the coming of a super human form. In Aurobindo, ‘will to power’ has affinities with what he calls ‘nature’s yoga.’ See Aurobindo (1972).
- 18.
‘To speak truth,’ Euripides [c.484–407 BC].
- 19.
Doxa is common belief or popular opinion “When there is a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization, the natural and social world appears as self-evident. This experience we shall call doxa” (Bourdieu 1977: 164).
- 20.
This relationship is mediated by technical elements, objects and ensembles that also express the preindividual, which had been deposited in them through the process of invention. Bernard Stiegler, who has done the most of any philosopher in recent years to expound on Simondon’s work, deploys the preindividual (and transindividual) in a different way. For Stiegler, the preindividual is not so much a movement of primordial ‘apeiron’ as it signifies human immersion in systems of knowledge and signification—grammatization—that are archived and transmitted over generations through mnemotechnologies or retentional apparatuses, (he calls the ‘What’). It is the mnemotechnological (What) that conjoins the individual (I) and collective (We). “What links the I with the We in this individuation is a preindividual milieu, which has positive conditions of effectivity, related to what I have called the retentional apparatuses… (What)… These retentional apparatuses are supported by the technical milieu, which is the condition of the meeting of the I and the We: the individuation of I and of We is equally in a sense the individuation of a technical system (this is what Simondon, strangely, did not see)” (Stiegler 2004: 106).
- 21.
Allagmatic comes from the Greek word for change, allagma.
- 22.
In context of Simondon, a singularity is a momentary pause in individuation. See Scott (2014: 17).
- 23.
Notable among American national security whistle-blowers are the recent cases of John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, William Binney, Diane Roark, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis.
- 24.
While empathizing with the victims whom terror strikes and being sure not minimize the psychological effects of contagious panic fear in an age of Fox News, the number of terrorist attacks in the indispensable nation is notably low compared to those nations it has preemptively attacked. The definition of terrorism from this statistical sampling is: “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.” Reported Terrorist attacks between 2011 and 2014/100,000 people were as follows: Iraq (9522/27.4), Afghanistan (5153/16.3), Yemen (1614/6.2), Libya (1082/17.3), United States (57/.02) (Global Terrorism Data Base: https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/globe/index.html, accessed Feb 2, 2016). In 2014 (one year), cause of death in the United States were: (1) heart disease: 611,105, (2) cancer: 584,881, (3) chronic lower respiratory diseases: 149,205, (4) accidents (unintentional injuries): 130,557, (5) stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,978, (6) Alzheimer’s disease: 84,767, (7) diabetes: 75,578, (8) influenza and pneumonia: 56,979, (9) nephritis: 47,112, (10) intentional self-harm (suicide): 41,149. In contrast, from 2005 to 2015, the number of Americans killed by terrorism = 71 (Juan Cole, http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/30-americans-die-worldwide-from-terrorism-annually-while-130000-die-by-accident.html, accessed Feb 2, 2016).
- 25.
WashingtonsBlog, “You’re More Likely to be Killed by a Toddler than a Terrorist.” washingtonsblog.com. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/youre-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-toddler-than-a-terrorist.html accessed May 2, 2015.
- 26.
This trade-off of civil liberties for security and comfort is not confined to the USA, and has occurred in other democratic nations as well, as the ongoing state of emergency in France, for instance. Many of its draconian security measures such as warrantless police intrusions into private homes and placing suspects under house arrest without the prior consent of a judge have the support of up to 90 % of its population, months after the Paris attacks in 2015. Moreover, these laws have been used to persecute groups not affiliated with terrorism such as environmental activists.
- 27.
- 28.
Chelsea Manning, “Why speaking out is worth the risk,” Amnesty International Blog. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/08/chelsea-manning-why-speaking-out-worth-risk/ (accessed June 23, 2015).
- 29.
Similarly, Snowden’s disclosures have not been demonstrated to have seriously undermined counter-terrorism operations or American national security, given its multi-billion dollar R&D budget for adapting to change. There have been no credible claims made that anyone has lost their life on account of either the Snowden or Manning leaks. To help safeguard the identities of individuals who may have been identified in the leaks, both allowed journalists to vet the material before release.
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Carlson, R.J. (2016). Nietzsche’s Snowden: Tightrope Walking the Posthuman Dispositif. In: Banerji, D., Paranjape, M. (eds) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures . Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_4
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