The state no longer required the outward-facing exercise of authority. Performative demonstrations of might had become obsolete. A form of public discipline and control had emerged far more sophisticated, and, critically, covert compared to the hulking iron heel long favoured by the state.

Bentham’s Panopticon was a cylinder shaped structure where guards could see out, but inmates could not see into. In seeding the idea that they might be watched at any point day or night, Bentham believed that control would be exercised by the prisoners themselves. Rather than maintaining control via baton-wielding guards and the sanctions they alone had discretion over, inmates would redesign their behaviours to meet the new conditions of their incarceration. Power’s ‘God’s eye view’ would lead to a self-managing prison population permanently cautioned by the relentless presence of a one-way watchful tower.

Foucault observed Bentham’s logic applied across state institutions, from army barracks to hospitals. The consequences were dire. A ‘dynamic normalisation’ would result. A population that believed they were subject to unseen and thereby unaccountable surveillance was likely to become increasingly compliant, conformist and drained of creativity. If you think someone is watching you, your behaviour shifts accordingly. Look respectable, Big Brother is streaming you.

Behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner had long railed against Enlightenment concepts of agency and freedom, forms of human immaturity he regarded as overdue for displacement by top down operant control. His 1948 novel Walden Two approvingly imagined a future utopia where free will is replaced by behavioural techniques promoting harmony and efficiency. Skinner longed for a global project of operant conditioning that could excise damaging behaviours like precision surgeons removing tumours from the organs of a willing patient. Skinner’s laboratory rats had been trained to return to a lever which when pressed released pellets of food, though only on occasion. Skinner observed the rats returning nonetheless. Infrequent rewards had positively conditioned the rodents to try their luck time after time.

Missing from the media froth around banning social media for under 16s has been any public conversation on effective regulation of bandit platforms. Absent from most political rhetoric has been any challenge to increasingly concentrated ownership patterns. Under the radar, Facebook, Google and the entire social media firmament have long been perfecting Skinner’s imagined project untroubled by political intervention. Orwell’s classic authoritarian state has been usurped by a privatised landscape where companies vie for our ‘behavioural surplus.’ An attention economy has seduced us into a corrosive relationship of asymmetrical knowledge and power. Very few of us are aware of how aggressively invasive the new media is. None of us have consented. Every movement, click, share, purchase or expression of opinion is meticulously captured by online vultures picking over the nuances of our digital activity. Where once there was public indignation at the prospect of an unprecedented dismantling of privacy norms, so now there is dependency and habituation. The online oligarchs knew how to play the long game.

With its relentless assault on the social bonds of community and solidarity, neo-liberalism curated the perfect lab conditions to implement the surveillance capitalist project. Extreme individualism has led to a fraying culture just at that moment when more than ever young people are crying out for authentic connectivity and shared meaning. While promising to link us in previously unimagined ways, our online feudal lords bleed us of behavioural data for the sole purpose of selling on our inner desires to third party profiteers. A 24 hour Panopticon re-purposes our most intimate thoughts, movements and opinions as data for algorithms to learn how best to modify our future behaviours in the interests of profit. This is a dispossession cycle of unprecedented scale. There are no co-ordinates for these innovations. Where once the notion of a ‘horseless carriage’ helped make sense of the invention of the car, our current vocabulary has no reference point. We are being herded towards uniform behavioural norms by platforms owned by billionaires convinced of the righteousness of their shared mission.

In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff skewers the wafer-thin pretensions of the tech companies and their visions of a Walden Two ushered in by smart technology implanted in our homes, clothing, glasses and skin. While it is undoubtedly true that the online world has found a way to monetise rage, and where far-right populism and a toxic manosphere have prospered in a lawless state of nature, Zuboff exposes the longer term plans of the feudal media owners determined to expand the boundaries of a new frontier of power. Their reach is daunting, but if social media can be seen as a new commons to reclaim in the public interest, Zuboff believes that the tech giants can still be brought to heel. But time is running out.

Speaking at his inauguration as Rector of Glasgow University in 1971, trade unionist Jimmy Reid warned students of the perils of an alienation he depicted as disconnecting us from our communities, family, friends and creativities. ‘A rat race is for rats,’ he said. ‘We are not rats. We are human beings.’

Meaningful online privacy laws could redistribute knowledge and power towards billions of online citizens whose behavioural data the tech barons have come to see as their private property. A revival of local media platforms and the creation of a publicly funded and accountable online platform could democratise communications and challenge misinformation. The coup from above can be halted. Zuboff quotes Hanna Arendt, the chronicler of 20th C authoritarianism, as seeing in every beginning no matter how ominous a parallel potential for ‘great and beautiful things.’ We can resist our futures being shaped and predicted by algorithms programmed by corporations determined to remove uncertainty from the marketplace.

As with all previous movements for human liberation, our declaration is a simple one roared against the digital robbers: ‘No more!’ The future is unwritten. We can still be its authors.

Mike Cowley