On Neoliberalism: The Economy of Digital Information, Transparency, and Consumerism

Today, unbounded technological freedom and communication on the web are switching into a form of total control and surveillance.

For Byung-Chul Han, social media resembles a digital panopticon keeping watch over the social realm and exploiting us indefinitely. In contrast to Betham’s panopticon, today’s occupants actively communicate with each other while willingly exposing themselves. The “freedom” digital control society celebrates so much is only able to remain existent because of the occupants voluntary self-illumination and exposure. From there, we can see that data is not surrendered, rather offered out of an inner need. Now then, transparency is deemed by all to be a heil of freedom! The freedom to know everything about someone! Because now, under the immaterial mode of production contemporary capitalism rests itself upon, more information and more communication mean more productivity and growth.

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Information then represents a specific economically positive value in the way it can circulate independently, and free from all context. In the age of data, context and concepts are structurally taken away from discourse practices in an attempt to create what Marcuse would call One Dimensional people in the way they desire data points and information in and of themselves, who don’t care enough to create or even understand context and concepts. In another way though, this creates a population full of subjects who conform to a non-material enemy. This economy of transparency based upon togsl communication creates subjects who act as if everyone was already watching. Even before intelligence agencies or government institutions stepped in, the very way social media combines with the subject’s new obsession with data, information, and thus, transparency creates the exact same effect as the vacated camera in the store that nobody is even watching. When this phenomenon combines with neoliberalism’s power to turn citizens into consumers, the result is a population of docile subjects who obsess over transparency instead of shaping a better future. For the first part, the docility, we see that these subjects have no real interest in politics or shaping a community, they act only passively. They grumble and complain, as consumers do about any product, but never care enough to escape that logic of the commodity form. We see then, that politicians and parties follow the logic of consumption. They are supposed to “deliver” because they are simply suppliers, with a task to satisfy voters who are just passively consuming politicians and policies.

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For the second part, the obsession over transparency, we see these subjects demand transparency out of their product suppliers (politicians), which is anything BUT a political demand. Transparency is never called for in the political decision making process, because no consumer is interested in that. The consumers are interested in “exposing” their supplier, to make them an object of scandal. This phenomenon requires passive onlookers, who care more about demonizing the person behind the product they complain about, instead of an actually engaged citizen. Finally then, we see that when digital economy and its necessitation of full transparency is inhabited with a culture of consumerists, a spectator democracy is created, where no political change, community formation, or conceptualization of a better future is possible, or even desired.