‘Newspeak’ is the name for the ideal language in George Orwell’s surveillance state. It is meant to supplant ‘oldspeak’ entirely. Newspeak has only one goal: to restrict room for thinking freely. Every year, words decrease in number, and the space for conscious thought diminishes. Syme, a friend of 1984’s hero Winston, raves about the beauty of destroying words. ‘Thoughtcrimes’, he enthuses, will be made impossible when the words necessary for them are struck from the lexicon. In the process, the notion of freedom will be abolished too. On this score, Orwell’s surveillance state differs fundamentally from the world of the digital panopticon – which uses freedom to excess. Today’s society of information is not characterized by destroying words, but by multiplying them without end.
The spirit of the Cold War and the negativity of enmity dominate Orwell’s novel. The country it describes is in a state of permanent war. Julia, Winston’s love interest, speculates that the bombs raining down on London every day have been launched by Big Brother and the Party in order to maintain fear and terror in the populace. The ‘Enemy of the People’ is called Emmanuel Goldstein. He commands a network of underground conspirators seeking to overthrow the government. Big Brother is at ideological war with Goldstein. ‘Two Minutes Hate’, broadcast daily on the ‘telescreen’, takes aim at Goldstein. In the ‘Ministry of Truth’ – in fact, a Ministry of Lies – the past is revised and fitted to ideology. Orwell’s surveillance state employs the psychotechnical methods of brainwashing: electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs and physical torture. The ‘Ministry of Plenty’ (newspeak: ‘Miniplenty’) sees to it that consumer goods are always lacking, so that an artificial state of need may be maintained.
Orwell’s surveillance state, with its telescreens and torture chambers, is fundamentally different from today’s digital panopticon, with its internet, smartphones and Google Glass. In the digital panopticon, the illusion of limitless freedom and communication predominates. Here there is no torture – just tweets and posts. Nor is there a mysterious ‘Ministry of Truth’. Transparency and information have taken the place of truth. The new conception of power does not involve controlling the past, but steering the future psychopolitically.
The neoliberal technology of power does not prohibit, protect or repress; instead, it prospects, permits and projects. Consumption is not held in check, but maximized. No production of scarcity occurs; instead, surplus is generated – indeed, a superabundance of positivity. Everyone is encouraged to communicate and consume. The principle of negativity, which still defined Orwell’s state, has yielded to the principle of positivity. Needs are not repressed, but stimulated. Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure. Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers. Big Brother now wears a friendly face. His friendliness is what makes surveillance so efficient.
Bentham’s Big Brother was invisible, but he was everywhere in prisoners’ minds. Inmates interiorized him. In contrast, the inhabitants of today’s digital panopticon never really feel that they are being watched or threatened. Consequently, ‘surveillance state’ is an imprecise name for describing the digital panopticon. Here, everyone feels free. However, precisely this feeling of freedom – which is nowhere to be found in Orwell’s state – is now the problem.
The digital panopticon thrives on its occupants’ voluntary self-exposure. Self-exploitation and self-illumination follow the same logic. In either case, freedom is exploited. The digital panopticon lacks a Big Brother wresting information from us against our will. Instead, we lay ourselves bare voluntarily.
The advertisement that Apple aired during the 1984 Superbowl has become the stuff of legend. In it the company presented itself as a force of liberation, which would counter the Orwellian surveillance state. In lock-step, listless workers – evidently without a will of their own – march into a vast hall and listen to Big Brother’s fanatical declamations on the telescreen. Then the ad shows a woman rushing into the assembly hall, the Thought Police in hot pursuit. Bearing a sledgehammer before her heaving breast, she dashes forward. Full of resolve, she runs straight up to Big Brother and throws the sledgehammer at the telescreen with all the force she can muster; it explodes in a dazzling burst of light. The assembled workers promptly awaken from their torpor. A voice declares: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’ But despite Apple’s message, 1984 did not signal the end of the surveillance state so much as the inception of a new kind of control society – one whose operations surpass the Orwellian state by leaps and bounds. Now, communication and control have become one, without remainder. Now, everyone is his or her own panopticon.
Psychopolitics
Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Byung-Chul Han
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