First of all it’s clear that after 70 years without war in the West, we are no longer aware of the danger posed by the government’s file cabinets. The censuses, the raids, and the killing of communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill, gypsies and Jews would today be facilitated by a tool a thousand times more tragically effective and finely tuned than those available back in 1940. But very few people truly realize this because they did not live through the war. What are the Chinese or Korean dictatorships doing on this subject, the Russian crypto-dictatorship, the Israeli police state so prodigiously equipped to track any Arab dissent? We turn our heads away so as not to see. OK. There are two possible reactions (ignorance, detachment), but both undoubtedly miss the essential point of our acceptance of the worst.

Here I’d like to venture a hypothesis; actually a thesis. This thesis would be the following: the delicate web of surveillance on citizen-customers by those who govern us “vertically” (State powers as well as the liberal powers held by multinationals on the internet) is so amazingly tolerated because it is anchored, “horizontally” in the social practices of mutual checks that occur daily, are familiar, and have become natural. In other words, the NSA sprouts from a social soil that has made self control, control of others and control of the world through technology, proof of a bond, an ethos, a way of life. The stem grows from the rhizomes.

I control myself, you control me, we control ourselves, they control us. Surveillance, management and control become fractalized so that between the mother who sneaks onto the Facebook account of her daughter, the employer who scans the flaws of a job applicant on the web, the husband who reads his wife’s SMS messages and looks at her credit card bills, the retiree who monitors his vacation home with a webcam connected to a motion detector, and the NSA, all the way on top, which runs surveillance on Alcatel, Merkel, J. Schmoe, and Strauss-Kahn. Between all these there is one recurring theme, the same sordid twist, the same economy of desire focused on prevention, fear, and the total control over anything that can surprise, can divert, and can live.

This morning, January 8, 2014, a Palestinian was killed by an Israeli drone, at distance, “cleanly”. Cameras are put in Teddy Bears to reassure parents. Babysitters and our empty houses are filmed. Our cell phones are triangulated, our travels are synchronized, our breathing space is restricted. We put tracking devices in our shoes, toll passes in our pockets because we are in flux, and microchips in the ears of our cats, our dogs and our sheep. The trees in Paris are barcoded. They can remotely hack into the braking system of a car, into a pacemaker in a beating heart. They can disrupt a GPS so that you get lost, activate the webcam on your computer, listen in around you with your smartphone. They manufacture the Xbox One which can constantly monitor your game room, can know which movies you watch, can know which games you play, can know how many people are on your couch, and can measure the volume and the light that enters. These features were quickly removed after facing an outcry that Microsoft never anticipated given that the logic of control has become so natural.

The truth is that we are being mithridatized. We are becoming dangerously acclimated to this subtle poison ingested daily, to this new form of an intimate grip of control and the extensive power that Deleuze diagnosed back in 1990 as our entry into the Societies of Control; and under this yoke we are being gently twisted. The truth is that this control is no longer simply placed and received. It is no longer simply imposed contemptuously, in the form of a pyramid of discipline, which falls upon us, the sad victims of the panoptic powers of the State, of Capital and of Mafias – inciting by its alienating grip strength, resistance, and revolts. No, it’s much better than that.

This desire to control, this impulse towards surveillance and frantic security now runs through each of every one of us. It takes shape and wires itself into our nerves. Everyone becomes the relay, the peddler, the exchanges are made with joy and fear. Everyone gets off on playing their roles as cops, all-powerful bosses, or low-life voyeurs. You control your house, your car, your purchases. He scans his wife’s emails, tracks his daughter with geolocation, and limits the duration of his son’s internet connection. She checks her pulse, controls her blood pressure, counts her calories, and her steps. You filter your calls, track down your ex on Facebook, Google the chick you met at the bar yesterday rather than letting her reveal as much as she wants you to know. And you are offered all the personal and idle tools for that; all the apps; all the flashy hardware for geeks with just a click of a mouse and a beep.

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