psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power [byung chul han]

Once upon a time, the theory goes, there was an Orwellian big brother who sought to scare his subjects into submission. He was a twentieth century phenomenon. He ruled with gulags and execution squads and ford falcons and martial law. He strode around the world shaking his fist and some called him fascist and others communist and an old Etonian wrote a book about him, a book that defined him as a bogeyman who would haunt the dreams of little children and old age pensioners alike. There was only one problem: big brother’s tactics were scary but in the end they weren’t that effective. People resisted. Dictatorships were overthrown. People don’t enjoy living in fear and they got so sick of it that they tore down the walls and the statues and installed something known as democracy. Which meant big brother needed to find another way to get people to do what he wanted. He had to do it under the rubric of choice. And also around this time, the start of the 21st century, a phenomenon known as the internet began to invade people’s lives. In a much more effective way than anything big brother had dreamed of. And the interaction of the internet and the people created data. Which could be processed, manipulated, used to understand and control the subjects. It was done not by threatening them, but by asking them what they liked. And what they didn’t like. And promising to deliver these wishes. It created, in the words of Han, “a dictatorship of emotion”. Which also served the purpose of making people more stupid. Because stupid people are docile. They don’t think, they feel. Feelings can be manipulated and satiated. Thoughts are harder. People weren’t really worried about whether or not the information big brother was feeding them was true or false: the point was that it felt good to receive it. Like children being given sweets. And because the data had been studied, big bother always knew which people liked which sweets, and it was no skin off big brother’s nose to give them those sweets. And make them pliant and happy at the same time. 

Byung Chul Han’s text is indeed a text for the age of Cummings, the age of digital data manipulation, the age that we live in. It’s not always an easy read, but it ought to be a compulsory one.  Should you have any interest in understanding why you are thinking what you are currently thinking….