Şahap Eraslan: How the digital order takes our will away

Rastinews — Please understand me…

Perhaps the problem is not that no one understands me, but that I cannot reach anyone who could. There is no one to listen to what I need and to decide according to that concrete situation. The system imposes only its own form of communication. It forces me to take the path it shows, to answer the questions it asks with one of the answers it offers. It disregards my will. It is even steadily eliminating it. But not only mine. The system that takes the will away from the official at the airport takes my will away at the same moment. The official cannot act on his own judgement, and I cannot explain my need to him and work out a solution together. In the end we are no longer two people facing each other. We become two beings whose will, reason, thought and feeling have been narrowed. The official looks at me and understands me. I understand that he cannot in fact decide. Yet this mutual understanding leads nowhere. Because between us there is not merely a problem of communication but a system that has removed the possibility of deciding.

The system does not only order relationships; it takes the place of the relationship.

Erving Goffman, whom I have mentioned in earlier pieces, describes how people take on various roles in particular social positions. A person behaves within one role as a waiter, another as a patient before a doctor, another as a teacher or a passenger. Each of these roles carries certain expectations, forms of behaviour and room to move. Today, though, it is as if even the roles have been taken from us. Because to play a role at all one needs at least some room to interpret and to act. A person does not perform a role identically in every situation; they adjust their behaviour to the person before them and to the situation they are in.

Today the possibility of weighing the particularity of a situation is steadily disappearing. The official cannot really behave as an official, and I cannot exist as a passenger or a patient able to explain my trouble. The official is no longer someone who decides according to the situation before him; he is an intermediary applying procedures the system has set in advance. And I am not a person explaining a need but a user obliged to tick the correct box. The human being turns from a person into a "user"; the relationship into a "transaction"; the conversation into "data entry". The loss of the space for movement, interpretation and decision that Hartmut Rosa calls Spielraum (room to move) becomes visible precisely here. We cannot think, judge or decide by looking at the concrete situation we are in. Instead of asking "what should be done in this case?" we ask "what does the system allow?" The options the system permits take the place of moral, human and professional judgement. After a while it also ceases to matter whether what the official does is right. What matters is only that the procedure was carried out according to the rule. The passenger suffering a loss, the patient unable to reach a doctor, a person's need going unmet all become secondary. The task is completed but the problem is not solved.

Everyone does their job, yet no one takes responsibility.

Digital freedom…

In psychoanalysis, in psychology, in schools and across much of neoliberal storytelling, being autonomous, becoming independent, needing no one and standing on your own feet are presented as an important ideal. These things undoubtedly have their place in human life. The problem is not that independence is valuable; it is that this ideal has been made almost limitless and turned into the measure of an individual's success. Because at the same time we live in an entirely different world.

When the battery of the phone in my hand runs out, sometimes I cannot board my plane, cannot pay while shopping, cannot reach my bank account, cannot see my appointments, and even have difficulty finding out what time it is. If our laptop and mobile phone were taken from us for two days, carrying on daily life would suddenly become seriously difficult. Our information, our contacts, tickets, banking, doctor's appointments, addresses, calendars, passwords and at times even information about our medicines sit inside these devices and the systems they are connected to. So on one hand a person is constantly told to "be independent"; on the other, the infrastructure of life places them within ever denser relations of dependency.

Imagine the internet in a city being cut off completely for a day. Transport, payment systems, communication, health services, working life, reservations, orders and maps fail one after another. The modern city is all but paralysed. This is not merely a technological breakdown. A person may feel they have suddenly lost access to their own life. Because an ever larger part of that life has been entrusted to systems built outside them. And precisely here a strange contradiction appears. While the system makes people maximally dependent on one another, on institutions, networks, platforms, devices and infrastructures, it expects maximal psychological independence from the individual. They are expected to be self-sufficient, strong, self-confident, not to ask for help, to manage their fragility, to solve their problems. A social and structural contradiction is thus turned into a psychological problem.

When a person struggles, the question is usually not "why does this system make people so dependent and so fragile?" Instead they are asked: "why are you not resilient enough?", "why can you not cope better?", "why are you not more independent?" The dependency the system produces is redescribed as a deficiency in the individual's character. Perhaps one of the most curious aspects of the neoliberal narrative appears here: while increasing dependency in the material world, it turns independence in the psychological world into a moral obligation. A person is in fact tied to more systems than ever before, yet is pressed to think of themselves as a subject who must stand entirely on their own. The helplessness felt when the system fails thus ceases to be the system's problem and begins to look like the person's inadequacy. And for precisely that reason the dependency itself becomes invisible. Because we are constantly told that we are independent.

Nation states and the slogans of homeland and nation are also built on independence. It seems that as the dependencies of nations and individuals grow, they take refuge in the opposite discourse in order to cope with it…

From surveillance capitalism to digital surveillance

Years ago I read Michel Foucault's book Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses (1977; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison). In it Foucault describes how power in modern societies works not only by prohibiting and punishing but also by watching, disciplining and finally bringing the person to supervise themselves. One of the most striking examples of this is the Panopticon. In the middle of a circular prison stands a watchtower. The prisoners can be seen from the tower, but they cannot know whether the person watching them is actually in the tower at that moment or looking at them. And that is the point: there is no need to watch a person constantly. It is enough to keep alive the feeling that they might be watched. Surveillance is thereby carried from outside to inside. After a while there is no need for a guard to stand over the person; the guard settles into their mind. The person begins to behave as though watched even when they are not. Surveillance is internalised and the person becomes their own overseer.

About forty years after the form of surveillance Foucault described, Shoshana Zuboff, in Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus (2018; The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), describes how surveillance has changed under the conditions of digital capitalism. There is no longer a single prison, a single tower and a visible overseer watching us from it. Surveillance has spread across the whole of daily life. Online surveillance…

The searches we make on Google, the pages we look at, the things we buy, the places we are in, the links we click and the countless traces we leave in the digital environment turn into an economic raw material. Human experience becomes a source for producing data for digital companies. This data is used not only to understand what we do but also to predict what we will do and, increasingly, to steer our behaviour in certain directions.

Here there is an important difference between Foucault's world and Zuboff's. In the Panopticon a person changes their behaviour because they know they are watched, or think they might be. In digital surveillance we often behave without even knowing how much we are watched. We even buy the tools that make our surveillance possible of our own accord, carry them in our pockets and use them for most of the day. Phones, computers, applications, platforms and algorithms have taken the place of the old watchtower.

The requests on social media to "follow me" are perhaps among the most striking expressions of this shift. Once, when a person thought they were being followed constantly, they might go to the police out of fear, or, if the thought became a delusion, consult a psychiatrist. Today "being followed" has turned into something desired, even something that gives pleasure. A rising follower count is taken as a sign of visibility, of interest and at times of social worth.

The shift here is not only technological. Our emotional relationship with being watched has changed too. The state of being followed, which once aroused fear, is today associated with being liked and recognised. A person does not merely consent to being watched; they invite others to watch them, to follow them, to look into their life. In an order where being watched has become acceptable and being observed a source of pleasure, the request to "follow me" shows how far surveillance has been internalised.

Perhaps this is where the real shift along the line from Foucault to Zuboff becomes clear: the person in the Panopticon supervised themselves because they thought they might be watched; the person of digital capitalism not only accepts being watched but voluntarily offers themselves to the field of surveillance in order to be visible and followed.

The freedom of being monitored, the love of being monitored… Digital capitalism often presents itself in the language of freedom: limitless communication, limitless access, limitless sharing, limitless choice… Yet a strange paradox appears here. While the user's freedom seems to grow, the companies' opportunities to penetrate people's lives also expand to an extraordinary degree.

One of the problems is that the speed of technological development and the speed at which states and the law can move are very different. It takes time for states to pass laws, for institutions to understand new technologies, for public debate to form and for legal limits to be set. Digital companies can move far faster. One reason for this speed is that these companies have extremely hierarchical structures and almost no democratic decision-making mechanisms. For a state to reach a decision, long processes must run through parliaments, committees, experts, courts, public opinion and various interest groups. The owner of a company with vast economic and technological power, such as Elon Musk, does not have to put his decisions to the public, debate them in parliament or pass them through a democratic approval process. He can decide in line with the information that reaches him and his own judgement, and put those decisions into effect very quickly. He also has both the financial and the technological power to do so.

Another relation of dependency appears here. States and state institutions are at the same time customers and users of the digital technologies they try to supervise and regulate. From communication infrastructure to digital systems, from software to data processing tools, they have become dependent in many fields on the technologies these companies supply. The state is thus in the position of an authority that ought to set limits on these companies while also having fallen into the position of a user that needs their technology. Supervising a power you depend on is in fact far harder than supervising a power entirely outside you. For this reason a new application, algorithm or method of data collection may have entered the lives of millions of people before society begins to debate its consequences, the law to define it and the state to set its limits. Part of the power of digital capitalism appears here: first it changes reality, and then law and politics try to catch up with that new reality.

For this reason the notion of freedom held by digital capitalist companies contains another demand for freedom: to be restricted as little as possible. Here freedom and the absence of rules come close to one another, and blur. While the company defines the breadth of its own room to move as freedom, from society's point of view the same state of affairs can mean the absence of oversight. In this sense one of the most important problems of digital capitalism is that technology companies accumulate enormous power, both economic and social. States trying to regulate them mostly come from behind. Decision processes take a long time; technology companies decide much faster, enter new fields and in practice set the rules themselves.

In Foucault's Panopticon the tower was visible but whether the overseer was looking was unknown. Under digital capitalism the situation has almost been reversed: the tower is now invisible, but the surveillance is almost continuous. Perhaps this is the real novelty of our age. The question of power used to be "how can I watch you?" The question of digital capitalism is turning into this: how can I make you experience being watched as freedom?