Exposed

Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age

Bernard E. Harcourt

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674915091
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care.Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society—a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual.We are not scandalized by this. To the contrary: we crave exposure and knowingly surrender our privacy and anonymity in order to tap into social networks and consumer convenience—or we give in ambivalently, despite our reservations. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist. Disobedience to a regime that relies on massive data mining can take many forms, from aggressively encrypting personal information to leaking government secrets, but all will require conviction and courage.

PART ONE

Clearing the Ground

ONE

GEORGE ORWELL’S BIG BROTHER

IN THE WAKE OF THE Edward Snowden revelations, interest in George Orwell’s novel 1984 soared, leading to an exponential rise in sales. Less than a week after the first leaks were revealed by the Guardian in June 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported that sales of Orwell’s book had increased by nearly 6,000 percent.¹ One edition in particular, which includes a foreword by Thomas Pynchon, increased in Amazon sales by nearly 10,000 percent, becoming “the third hottest book on Amazon,” according to its “Movers and Shakers” list.²

Editorialists across the globe instantly drew the connection. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor in chief, announced that the “NSA surveillance goes beyond Orwell’s imagination,” while the newspaper quickly assembled letters to the editor under the headline “Orwell’s Fears Refracted through the NSA’s Prism.”³ At the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof jumped on Twitter to ask, “I wonder if NSA has to pay a licensing fee for its domestic surveillance program to the George Orwell estate. #1984.”⁴ Even the International Business Times ran a story that read “NSA PRISM: 3 Ways Orwell’s ‘1984’ Saw This Coming.”⁵

President Obama stoked the fire, alluding to Orwell’s novel just two days into the revelations: “In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.”⁶ Edward Snowden refreshed the allusion in his Christmas 2013 greeting, speaking directly into the TV camera from Moscow, telling anyone who would listen that the NSA surveillance capabilities vastly surpass Orwell’s fears. “The types of collection in the book—microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us—are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go,” Snowden said. “Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.”⁷ Glenn Greenwald also invoked Orwell’s 1984, emphasizing that “the echoes of the world about which he warned in the NSA’s surveillance state are unmistakable.”⁸ And the metaphor continued to persist, with District of Columbia federal district court judge Richard Leon—who had been appointed by President George W. Bush—striking down the bulk telephony metadata program in Klayman v. Obama, calling the NSA technology “almost-Orwellian”—technology that, in his words, “enables the Government to store and analyze phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States.”⁹

These constant references to 1984 have fueled a rich debate about whether the metaphor is apt—whether Orwell’s dystopian vision accurately captures our political condition today, whether it exceeds or minimizes it, whether it is a useful lens with which to analyze the present.

For some, the similarities are practically perfect. Richard Jinman, in the British news magazine The Week, highlights five matches: the environment of perpetual war in the fictional Oceania and the United States’ own perpetual “war on terror”; the “charismatic leader” of Big Brother and the popular president Barack Obama; the two “anti-heroes,” Winston Smith and Edward Snowden; the “beautiful heroines,” Julia and Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills; and “the sinister technology” and “the sinister language” of doublespeak present in government and corporate responses to the Snowden leaks.¹⁰

Ian Crouch at the New Yorker also highlights a number of symmetries between 1984 and the Snowden affair.¹¹ Crouch notes that Snowden is much like Orwell’s Winston, especially had the latter “been a bit more ambitious, and considerably more lucky, and managed to defect from Oceania to its enemy Eastasia and sneak a message to the telescreens back home.” Second, the technological capabilities of NSA’s surveillance apparatus mirror those in Oceania in 1984—especially the “safe operating assumption” that most of our daily, non-face-to-face communications are capable of being recorded. This, despite the fact that the “technological possibilities of [the NSA’s] surveillance and data collection and storage surely surpass what Orwell imagined,” Crouch adds.¹² Third, today’s language and words “are manipulated by the three branches of government to make what might seem illegal legal—leading to something of a parallel language that rivals Orwell’s Newspeak for its soulless, obfuscated meaning.”¹³ Crouch adds: “Indeed, there has been a hint of something vaguely Big Brotherian in Obama’s response to the public outcry about domestic surveillance, as though, by his calm manner and clear intelligence, the President is asking the people to merely trust his beneficence—which many of us might be inclined to do.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, Crouch does point out a key difference with 1984: “We are far from the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwell’s imagination.” That is, our own political regime does not resemble the “boot stamping on a human face—forever” that Orwell described.¹⁵

Along the latter lines, Robert Colls at Salon.com argues that the world depicted in Orwell’s novel differs in key respects from the particularities of the current NSA surveillance programs. For one thing, Colls suggests, the means by which Orwell’s dystopian society was monitored were far more visible and more encompassing than the NSA’s surveillance apparatus. The figure of Edward Snowden himself—an individual employee, working at a private consulting firm, with access to bulk data—is different from the coercive figure of Big Brother, who listens in every possible way to every possible conversation (though Colls is careful to note that Snowden “leaves no one in doubt that in slightly less serious hands this infinity of tapping could disfigure not only other people’s lives but other people’s countries too”). But “the decisive difference,” Colls asserts, between the reality of Snowden and Orwell’s depiction of Winston Smith “is that Snowden is not really alone.” Edward Snowden has forms of public support that were not possible for Winston Smith:

When the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian, the American Civil Liberties Union, and some very influential legal and political opinion, including that of former President Jimmy Carter on the left and libertarian lawyer Bruce Fein on the right, and influential Democrats and Republicans like Patrick Leahy and Jim Sensenbrenner in the middle—when they and head of US Intelligence James Clapper all voice their various and diverse levels of support for a debate started by a man whom the other side calls an out and out traitor, then you know that unlike Winston Smith, Edward Snowden will not be a traitor forever. The 9th December statement by the giant American information companies is just as significant. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the rest are American brands as well as American corporations. Money counts.¹⁶

Clearly, opinions are divided on the relevance of Orwell’s novel. Some emphasize the similarities with our present condition, others the stark differences. In this case, though, it may well be the differences that make the novel so relevant.

WHAT MAKES ORWELL’S NOVEL 1984 such a precious metaphor today is precisely that Orwell was prophetic in so many ways, yet he got the most crucial dimension flat wrong—namely, the role that desire would play in enabling digital exposure today. It is precisely in the jarring contrast between the myriad aspects of the novel that are so prescient and this one thing that is so off—the place of pleasure—that the 1984 metaphor is so telling. What it highlights and brings out is the central operating mechanism of our own dystopian present: our fancies, our predilections, our simplest desires, all recommended, curated, and cultivated in this digital age.

Across a range of dimensions, Orwell was clairvoyant: on the technologies and pervasiveness of surveillance, on the very idea of thoughtcrime, on the form of punishment, especially on what and how we punish—or at least punished until recently. On everything analog, on the bars and the cinder blocks, on the physical, tangible reality of punishment, Orwell got it. But he misfired at the core of the digital. Orwell got one key feature wrong, marvelously wrong—marvelously, because it sheds so much light on our current condition. In 1984, the fundamental political strategy of oppression—of Big Brother, of O’Brien, of what the fictitious traitor Emmanuel Goldstein described in his splendid book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism—was to crush and eradicate desire. With their Junior Anti-Sex Leagues that “advocated complete celibacy for both sexes” and their drive to abolish the orgasm, the central tactic was to hollow out the men and women of Oceania, to neutralize—in effect, to neuter—all their drives and passions, to wear them down into submission, with the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, coarse soap, blue uniforms, and blunt razors. To eviscerate all desire and fill them instead with hate—with the “Hate Week” and the “Two Minutes Hates.”

Today, by contrast, everything functions by means of “likes,” “shares,” “favorites,” “friending,” and “following.” The drab blue uniform and grim gray walls in 1984 have been replaced by the iPhone 5C in all its radiant colors—in sharp pink, yellow, blue, and green. “Colorful through and through” is our marketing slogan today, and it is precisely the desire for color-filled objects, for shared photos on Instagram, for vivid emoticons, for more “likes,” clicks, and tweets, that make us expose our most intimate desires and deliver ourselves to the surveillance technologies.¹⁷

It is almost as if someone had learned from Orwell’s greatest error: it is far easier to tame men and women by means of their passions—even passions for the simplest things, like real tea, real coffee, and real sugar for Winston and Julia, or for us, lattes, frappes, and free Wi-Fi—than it is by trying to quash desire and lust, by trying to defeat “the Spirit of Man.”¹⁸ Orwell’s misfire, I would say, is so terribly revealing because it is precisely through our passions, desires, and interests—nurtured, curated, and fed by Facebook, MySpace, Google, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and Snapchat—that we, at least in the United States, have become so transparent and so exposed today to pervasive (one might even say Orwellian) surveillance, not only by the government and the police, but by private corporations, social media, retailers, nonprofit entities, foreign countries, and each other. It is our passions—in tension with our ambivalences, anxieties, and discomforts, to be sure—that feed the expository society.

SO, PLAINLY, THIS IS NOT to deny that there is much that is prescient in the novel. Written in 1949, Orwell’s 1984 accurately prefigured a range of deep transformations that would take place in the area of crime and punishment, and in surveillance, over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.

Orwell’s novel foreshadowed a fundamental transformation in what we punish: instead of punishing people solely for the commission of acts, we began to punish people—and we punish them today—for who they are. As O’Brien exclaimed to Winston, “We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about” (253).¹⁹ The thought, or more precisely, the person: the habitual offender, the sexual predator—in short, the dangerous individual. The invention of actuarial methods at the dawn of the twentieth century and the steady rise in their use over the past fifty years fundamentally transformed what we punish in the twenty-first century—not just the act, but the character of the offender, who he is, his age, his schooling, his employment record, his marital history, his prior treatments and incarcerations. And while I trace this shift back to the implementation of the actuarial in American criminal justice rather than to discipline or governmentality, I agree fundamentally with Foucau...