No trust is possible in the digital panopticon—nor is it necessary. As an act of faith, it is growing obsolete in view of readily available information. The society of information is discrediting all belief, all faith. Trust makes relationships to others possible even when one does not know them well. The possibility of quickly and easily obtaining information damages trust. As such, the contemporary crisis of trust is also medially conditioned. Digital networking makes it so much easier to obtain information that trust, as a social praxis, has less and less meaning. Trust is yielding to control. It follows, then, that our society of transparency is approaching the society of surveillance. Where information is readily and rapidly obtained, the social system switches over from trust to control and transparency. In so doing, it observes the logic of efficiency.
Every click that one makes is stored. Every step that one takes can be traced. We leave digital tracks everywhere. Our digital life is reflected, point for point, in the Net. The possibility of logging each and every aspect of life is replacing trust with complete control. Big Brother has ceded the throne to Big Data. The total recording of life is bringing the society of transparency to completion.
Digital surveillance society evinces a particular kind of panoptic structure. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon consisted of prison cells that were separated from each other. The inmates could not communicate among themselves. Dividing walls ensured that they could not see each other, either. For their improvement, isolation was imposed on them. But now, the occupants of the digital panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Total control comes about not through spatial and communicative isolation but through networking and hypercommunication.
The occupants of the digital panopticon are not prisoners. Their element is illusory freedom. They feed the digital panopticon with information by exhibiting themselves and shining a light on every part of their lives. Autoillumination is more efficient than allo-illumination. Herein lies its parallel to autoexploitation. Autoexploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a feeling of freedom accompanies it. In the process of autoillumination, pornographic exhibition and panoptic control merge into one. Control society reaches completion when its inhabitants communicate not because of external constraints but out of inner need—when fear about giving up one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the urge to put oneself on display, without shame. In other words, it occurs when freedom and control prove indistinguishable.
Surveillance and control represent inherent features of digital communication. The digital panopticon is defined by the fact that it makes the difference between Big Brother and inmates blurrier and blurrier. Governmental agencies are not alone in spying on us. Enterprises such as Facebook and Google also operate like secret services. They take stock of our lives in order to find information to coin as capital. Companies spy on their employees. Banks screen credit applicants. The advertising slogan of the private credit bureau SCHUFA—“Wir schaffen Vertrauen” (“We create trust”)—is cynicism, pure and simple. In reality, companies like this are abolishing trust altogether and replacing it with control.
In the United States, the firm Acxiom advertises the service of providing a “360-degree customer view.” Acxiom is one of the Big Data enterprises that are taking the world by storm. The company maintains a gigantic warehouse of information with legions of servers. Like the building of an intelligence agency, its Arkansas headquarters are sealed off and rigorously patrolled. Acxiom has the personal data of some three hundred million U.S. citizens—practically all of them, that is. Clearly, Acxiom knows more about the country’s citizenry than the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Internal Revenue Service.
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between economically motivated snooping for data and its use for intelligence purposes. Fundamentally, Acxiom’s operations are no different from those of secret services. Indeed, the company evidently operates more efficiently than governmental agencies. When the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were being investigated, Acxiom provided government authorities with personal data on eleven suspects. The intelligence market under democratic rule is on the verge of amounting to a digital surveillance state. In today’s society of information—where the state and the market are merging—the activities of Acxiom, Google, and Facebook increasingly resemble those of official security agencies. They often enlist the same personnel, too. The algorithms employed by Facebook, the stock market, and secret services are essentially the same. In each case, the goal is to exploit information maximally.
Thanks to the undramatic shift to Internet Protocol version 6, the number of Web addresses that are now available is almost unlimited. In consequence, almost every object in our everyday world can be assigned an Internet address. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips turn things into active transmitters—autonomous agents that send information to each other and communicate with each other. This Internet of things is bringing the society of control to completion. Now, the objects that surround us are watching us, too. Objects that we use day in and day out are keeping tabs on our every move. Without cease, they pass along information about what we do—and don’t do. They are active collaborators in logging our lives down to the very last detail.
Google Glass promises unbounded freedom. Google boss Sergey Brin has raved about the wonderful pictures that the device takes; it is programmed to shoot one every ten seconds. Without Google Glass, Brin claims, fantastic pictures like this wouldn’t exist. However, this same eyepiece is what enables perfect strangers to photograph and film us in perpetuity. In practical terms, wearing these glasses means carrying a surveillance camera wherever one goes. Indeed, Google Glass has turned the human eye into a surveillance camera. There is no longer any difference between seeing and surveillance. Everyone is watching over everyone else. Everyone is Big Brother and prisoner—in one. Digital technology has perfected Bentham’s Panopticon.