Since the seventeenth century, according to Michel Foucault, power has manifested itself not as the sovereign’s power to deal death but as biopower. The sovereign’s power rests in the sword, which ends life. In contrast, biopower works to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it”—that is, to promote life. Biopower is “bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them” instead of “impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”1 The sovereign’s power of death has yielded to the careful administration and control of the population. Biopower is significantly subtler and more exacting than the power of death, which is too coarse to yield power of control. In other words, the prevailing order intervenes in the biological processes and laws that shape people into masses.
But for all that, biopolitical control seizes exclusively on external factors such as reproduction, mortality rates, and health conditions. It is unable to penetrate, much less mold, the psyche of the population. It is like Bentham’s Panopticon, where Big Brother observes only the outer behavior of inmates, who are silent and voiceless; their thoughts remain hidden.
Now, a further paradigm shift is underway. The digital panopticon engineers not a disciplinary society along biopolitical lines but a transparency society along psychopolitical ones. Psychopower is taking the place of biopower. With the help of digital surveillance, psychopolitics is in the position to read and control thoughts. Digital surveillance is taking the place of the unreliable and inefficient optical system of Big Brother, which is tied to perspective. The new regime is more efficient because it is aperspectival. Biopolitics does not enable the human psyche to be grasped and controlled in subtle fashion. Psychopower, on the other hand, can intervene in psychological processes themselves.
Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, recently published a telling article, “The End of Theory.” He claims that inconceivably vast quantities of data have made theoretical models superfluous: “Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.”2 According to Anderson, the patterns of behavior identified by Big Data’s analyses enable accurate prognostication. This, in turn, means that the hypothetical models of theory are unnecessary. Directly comparing and balancing out data yields better results. Correlation takes the place of causality. Why is an idle question in view of simple fact: that’s how it is.
Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.3
For Anderson, theory is a construct—an auxiliary instance that compensates for a lack of information. If enough data are available, no theory is needed. The possibility of enlisting Big Data to discern the masses’ patterns of behavior heralds the beginning of digital psychopolitics.
Every new medium reveals an unconscious dimension. Thus, the camera offers access to the “optical unconscious”:
With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. … Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. “Other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. … We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.4
The camera brings something that escapes the naked eye to light—the optical unconscious. Today, data mining is making collective patterns of behavior visible. As such, it is disclosing the collective unconscious. In analogy to the optical unconscious, one might also call it the digital unconscious. Psychopower is more efficient than biopower insofar as it watches over, controls, and influences human beings not from outside but from inside. Digital psychopolitics is taking over the social behavior of the masses by laying hold of, and steering, the unconscious logic that governs them. Digital surveillance society—which has direct access to the collective unconscious (that is, the future social behavior of the masses)—is assuming totalitarian traits. It is handing us over to programming and control. With that, the era of biopolitics has come to an end. Now, we are entering the age of digital psychopolitics.