[Reader-list] on identification and social control

[Rana Dasgupta]

Within the context of recent postings on surveillance
I would like to ask the question: what does freedom
look like in the networked society?

Modern surveillance and social control do not just
begin with cameras and email censorship.  They are
there in much older systems.  

For instance, an economy built on credit - which is
the case in the US for all of the post-WW2 era -
imposes a profound kind of control.  Instead of a
period of restraint and saving followed by a libidinal
rush of spending on a long-desired asset (a car, for
example), this model extends that phase of restraint
over the entirety of life.  Credit card bills and
mortgages ensure that citizens cannot deviate too far
from the hard work that allows them to remain
financially afloat.  In this kind of society one's
main social duty is to consume and thus keep up one's
'debt to society' - the rest (production,
self-control, etc) will follow.  this predates more
precise forms of surveillance that the credit system
makes possible - your credit card bill as a map, for
instance, of your locations and actions.

As the system's need for growth demands an ever
greater level of both consumption and production from
individuals, it is clear that both activities are ever
more closely controlled.  

but one should not look at this in a vacuum, as if, if
such modes of control were not there, there would be
no control at all, and individuals would be totally
free.  the level of such dispersed, internalised
control, i am sure, has an inverse relationship with
the level of centralised, external control that is
required in a society.  in a place like india where
both kinds of control are at work, they are unequally
applied: i would imagine that middle class people are
much more subject to the former, and working class
people to the latter.  

if this is the only choice, personally i'd prefer to
be subject to a control that is abstract and whose
workings i can anticipate than one that is personified
and random.  and i think that within the realm of the
actually-existing these are the only kind of choices
we have.  here in india where we are familiar with the
experience of society being inadequately 'managed' the
absence of any kind of control whatsoever does not
seem wholly romantic.

if it is true - and i'm not actually sure it is - that
all the phenomena we are looking at point only to
changing forms of control rather than different
amounts of it, then any ideas of 'freedom' must only
be relative.  how do people on the list imagine
'freedom'?

R



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