Hidden Powers? On the Societies of Control, Attention Economy, Nation State
Sovereignty, and Digital Censorship
“There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another.”
Gilles Deleuze
Abstract
The internet has changed the world in several ways. People are now more informed, the economy more technological, and the world more connected than ever before. In the face of these digital transformations, the sovereign capacities of modern-day nation states have shifted from being primarily based on marking citizens’ identities to revolve around defining the general parameters of their living conditions as well as claiming exceptions to local and international laws. This paper aims to link such functional nation state metamorphosis with the internet’s progression from a tool for connecting computers with one another to its current status as a ubiquitous technology that is integrated into all walks of life.
To do so, Gilles Deleuze’s influential “Postscript on the Societies of Control” is utilized side by side with contemporary readings of capitalism as being in an attention economy phase to present an overview of the changes impacting the globe’s main structural apparatuses. This paper then connects the two overarching theoretical frameworks through the prism of state-mandated censorship practices in the digital world. Finally, the theories are applied to a more practical realm by utilizing Egypt as a case study for outlining the progressions of these social, political, and economic transformations.
The paper finds that nation state sovereignty, while undergoing noticeable conceptual shifts over the years, is still the world’s foremost representation of organizational power. Nation states’ ability to withstand the continuous socioeconomic transformations of the globally dominant capitalist economic system will ultimately prove to be what determines their sovereign longevity within the internet-driven societies of control.
Introduction
Accessing information has never been easier. The proliferation of the internet across the world has meant that little is beyond reach for technology-savvy users, with a mere few clicks often enough to arrive at any sought-after data. Unlike older forms of mass media, say television or newspapers, which were designed to transfer knowledge from societal centers to peripheries, the internet has been created with the aim of circulating information freely and evenly across the globe (Lister et al.164). The internet, which encompasses both the worldwide web and cloud services, currently reaches nearly three billion people around the world in a largely reliable and transparent system that has all the characteristics of an international infrastructure (Zuboff 77; Plantin et al. 301). At the root of it all is a unique mix of publicly and privately owned
technologies that guide and mold various cultures and businesses into one virtual space (Lister et al. 163). This melting pot of different ideas has now made the internet a pillar of fields ranging from leisure and entertainment-based offerings to everyday governmental and work operations.
The global reliance on the web is mainly predicated on its open and decentralized infrastructure, one which allows it to never be ruled by any one entity and permits any of its users to create visible, findable, and linkable content at any point in time (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 137; Plantin et al. 302; Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 151). This freedom to share ideas has not just brought with it an unprecedented acceleration in global communication; it has also
contributed heavily towards a uniquely localized internationalization of thought that has the same information transferred globally and culturally filtered domestically (Memon 163; Lister et al. 181; Warf 18). This is to say that while the internet is occasionally seen to represent a liberation technology due to its borderless informational facilitation, country-specific norms and biases still carry an influence within the web-based media arena (Rød and Weidmann 338). These effects, taken together, have gradually led to the formation of a distinct global social, economic, and political climate that is continuously shaped by and reflective of the online world.
This research paper is primarily concerned with analyzing two important shifts brought about by this hybridization of the virtual and the analog, namely the adjustments in economic thought arising from the ease of information spreading and the altered authoritative role of governments in attempting to control this diffusion of ideas, all with an aim to illustrate the changing
is that the analysis presents new viewpoints on pre-existing contributions made in the
multidisciplinary fields of political, economic, and media theory and helps define the nature of modern-day nation states as the world braces for its third millennium’s third decade.
From an economic perspective, this paper has identified attention economy theories as the main lens through which to overview the evolving nature of the world’s dominant capitalist economic model. Built on neoliberal foundations that spread the subjectivity of individualistic economic thought to every arena of life, these theories stipulate that the internet-led influx of information has caused capitalism’s chief economic indicator to start breaking away from purely monetary foundations and to instead revolve around a chase for online users’ attentions (Read 9). Under this framework, information is viewed as the main resource that powers the web and stimulates its activity by shaping enterprising users’ identities (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 149). The attention economy is hence a byproduct of a world where humans are implicitly taught to constantly think of themselves as entrepreneurs whose ideas are impacted by the information that they consume through the media that they interact with (Read 5). It is no wonder then that there is an argument to be made that today’s economy is commanded by a new ruling class that does not own the means of production in the classical capitalist sense, but instead controls the flow of information (Srnicek 38). Web conglomerates such as GAFAM — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft — are some of the biggest names associated with this dominant class.
In this digitized economy, a new kind of invisible hand that identifies power through the ownership of behavioral modification capacities looms large (Zuboff 82; Yeung 130). This has made the regulating capabilities of the modern nation state — very generally defined by Achille Mbembe as “the model of political unity, a principle of rational organization, the embodiment of the idea of the universal, and a moral sign” — somewhat different from earlier historic eras (24). Whereas governments regulate online provisions to some extent via domain name systems and guideline-setting practices nowadays, the behavioral modification and identity formation capacities associated with the classical Foucauldian nation state power apparatus are also being controlled by the America-based GAFAM and other dominant online platforms around the world (Plantin et al. 301; Thacker and Galloway 47; Agre 744; Srnicek 57). To put it differently, although nation states still retain sovereign and regulating authority over their subjects in today’s digital world, the wholesome population controls that they possessed in what Michel Foucault
termed “disciplinary societies” of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries are now being rivaled by the subliminal governance of some of the world’s large internet conglomerates.
The ongoing gradual move away from state-monopolized citizen commands means that, in order to frame their powers most accurately, current nation states can perhaps best be seen as sovereign power closed environments, or enclosures, in what Gilles Deleuze famously termed the
“societies of control” in the early 1990s. In the “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze outlined how Foucault’s vision of human progression — from societies of sovereignty where the goal of the state was largely to rule by instilling fear in its constituents, to disciplinary societies with vast areas of enclosure that lead individuals from one closed environment to the next (from family to school to factory, for instance) throughout their lives — is now accurately presented through societies of control (4). Deleuze thought that humanity was in a generalized crisis in relation to all of its enclosures. The societies of control are the ones that keep all of these
enclosures intact until the new structures that will replace the ones in disciplinary societies come to be. Here, enclosures are molds, whereas their controls are modulations. The idea of a
corporation for example, one which conceptually replaced that of the factory, is a modulation within the societies of control. As Deleuze explains: “Just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination” (5). This is to say that whereas individuals would move from one enclosure to the next in
disciplinary societies, they are never truly finished with any in the societies of control. The glut of information on the internet can be seen as a crystallization of that, as while individuals were to generally stop learning after finishing school in disciplinary societies, they are expected to be in a state of incessant information consumption — to continuously improve their employability and social standing — in the societies of control (Lazzaratto 190). It is possibly here that the biggest difference between disciplinary societies and societies of control is manifested: Insomuch as the former are marked by physical objects like a signature or a document, the latter are characterized by more immaterial ones such as a password or a computer (Thacker and Galloway 35).
Despite being published nearly 30 years ago, Deleuze’s societies of control hypothesis is still noticeably apt in describing the socioeconomic foundations of today’s globalized world. Most of the institutions that shaped disciplinary societies, such as schools or prisons, have largely
reform in their operations. This could well mean that these entities are overextended enclosures that are waiting to be replaced by newer institutional versions that better suit today’s climate. Deleuze’s assertion that capitalism has shifted from tangible products towards intangible services has similarly survived the test of time well. The link between this economic evolution, the
attention economy, and the power layers of the societies of control is critical.
For Deleuze, a distinction needed to be made between power and the institutions that attempt to govern it. The late French thinker viewed power as a relation between forces that institutions can merely aim to integrate or stratify rather than wholesomely or permanently control. This
viewpoint goes hand in hand with the argument that the most controlled systems are the ones that regulate themselves (Thacker and Galloway 36). From this perspective, the importance of the middle-man governing role of nation states could be seen to have waned within today’s largely self-regulated, internet-led world. This is to reiterate that a new framework for viewing nation state sovereignty is needed to reflect these changing sociopolitical dynamics. Sovereignty is broadly read here as exercising control over mortality and defining life through the deployment and crystallization of power (Mbembe 12). Holistically investigating the notion on an
international scale is naturally challenging — state sovereignty in China might carry very different connotations than it does in Germany, for example. Nevertheless, some main themes relating to the concept are still generally prevalent across the board.
Chief among these is that whereas the notion was primarily juridical in disciplinary societies, nation state sovereignty nowadays is frequently not defined through the ability to set rules or regulations, but rather through the capacity to claim exceptions to any local or international law (Mbembe 16; Thacker and Galloway 38). These exceptional capabilities are somewhat related to the influence of today’s digitized economy, which, along with tacitly urging citizens to accept online surveillance and behavioral modification as the price for doing the business of living, have necessitated that governments become leaner and more intelligent in their power-exercising capacities (Lotz 231; Srnicek 5). Much like today’s economy, these capabilities have been largely digitized. And while the internet’s free infrastructure makes it harder to control than traditional forms of mass media, it is not entirely immune to governmental intervention. In this sense, nation states that interfere with the flow of information on the web can be seen to be exercising their power through taking exception to the internet’s open circulation ethos.
Given its historical prevalence within other media forms, censorship has proven to be a particularly popular form for such exceptional government tactics. The practice assuredly has distinct forms and meanings across different media arenas. When limited to the online world, though, it can be succinctly defined as involving control over internet access, content, and functionalities (Warf 4). Perfectly filtering the web’s information is almost impossible for any nation state. Nevertheless, the fact that internet services are routinely managed by governmental institutions typically facilitates censorship practices (Rød and Weidmann 341). Concerns over the internet’s emancipatory potential are the main drive in most of these instances, with nation states fearing that the web could nurture dissent or popularize anti-establishment sentiments. And this is not just limited to a few wealthy autocracies that have the means to implement large-scale operations; rather, it is estimated that roughly one quarter of the globe’s population and internet users are subjected to heavy censorship practices (Warf 4; Rød and Weidmann 341).
This paper will attempt to provide a study of the transformations undergone by nation state sovereignty through the lens of state-mandated censorship practices. Within its effort to connect any possible shifts with theories relating to both the societies of control and the attention
economy, the research below will first touch on how the internet has developed throughout the years. The paper will also examine changes within the hegemonic capitalist economic system as well as overview how nation states and their sovereignties originally came to be. The two overarching political and economic spheres will then be connected through examining state-mandated censorship practices in the digital world. In an attempt to concretize the
generalizations involved with investigating nation state sovereignty from such a wide scope, this research paper will finally use Egypt as a case study for examining any possible transformations in a nation state’s governing role within a digital society. The choice to focus on Egypt was made not only due to the country’s regional importance in the censorship-dominated Middle East, but also because of the unique controls that its governments have consistently had in regulating both online and offline media within its confines (Warf 12; Shwartz, Kaye, and Martini 15). Today, the country is afflicted by censorship in wide-ranging issues related to politics, sexuality, human rights, and religion (Shwartz, Kaye, and Martini 16). Such broad spectrum makes Egypt a
fascinating case study for outlining general themes in answering this paper’s research question of whether digital censorship can be read as an attention-economy-based practice used by nation
states to maintain their Deleuzian enclosure power stature in the face of a decentralized and globalized internet that might well help bring forth a new worldwide governance apparatus.
The Internet: A Historical Analysis of the Media Form
To begin analyzing state-mandated online censorship as a sovereignty tool that is related to the attention economy and the societies of control, a brief examination of the media characteristics that shape the internet seems in order. As Erik Borra and Bernhard Rieder have suggested, technologies such as the internet are media arenas that do not just transport information, but also alter its scale, speed, and form (263). This is to say that the information shared on the web cannot be viewed in a vacuum without considering the general nature of the digital medium on which it has been published. The internet is not conceptually unique as a media arena in this respect. Where it may be, though, is in the scope in which it has exceeded its original premise of merely connecting computers to one another (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 152).
In his considerable work on the foundations on which the internet has been built, Richard Rogers has noted that early ideas of the web portrayed it as a hyperspace where users would move from “one site to another at some great, unknown distance” (41). These early internet users had to ‘surf’ from one webpage to the next to find the information that they were after (Buchanan,
Deleuze and the Internet 152). And while that meant that implementing one’s intent on the web
was not easy at the time, it also signified that users had considerable agency in their internet journeys, with their clicking through different links being viewed as a process akin to authoring their own stories (Rogers 27). In that internet, generally known as Web 1.0, spreading and archiving information were largely seen as the medium’s core functionalities (Samouelian 42). The social media platforms of today, with their controversial algorithms and one-page
facilitations of an enormous range of information, were very hard to envision at the time. Leisure was not the web’s chief point of attraction, either.
The technological boom of the late 1990s marked a turning point for the internet, with the medium’s entrenchment into global consciousness bringing with it an increasingly diversified range of websites. A main element of the transformation that the internet went through around that time was the mass introduction of interactive graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to webpages across the board. The user-friendly interfaces that began to be utilized around the turn of the millennium revolutionized computers by transforming them from command-based instruments to tools for user empowerment that had the grunt of the work levied onto machines (Chun 61).
The shift to Web 2.0 had begun. The term, popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 2005, is used to mark the internet’s move towards sharable microcontent among socially connected users (Alexander 151). The internet is viewed here as a shared collective intelligence environment where users can search for, consume, as well as contribute to the creation of content (Buchanan, Deleuze and the
Internet 157; Samouelian 43). This capacity to look up, create, and post is in many ways the
main cause behind the internet’s ubiquity in its ongoing Web 2.0 phase. And while certain geographic factors — country-specific digital censorship being a prominent example — as well as so-called digital walled gardens, such as banking programs or institutional intranets, present obstacles to the free flow of information on the web, there is a general agreement among scholars to label the internet as a largely deregulated, open medium (Alexander 156; Plantin et al. 302).
In moving this internet analysis to a more theoretical realm, it is immediately noticeable that Marshall McLuhan’s view that new media and technology forms typically far exceed their original goal certainly rings true when it comes to the medium (Shaviro 20). In the move from its first phase onto the present one, the internet has been seen by Ian Buchanan to have not only revolutionized itself, but to have also set off a permanent conceptual revision of media as a whole (Deleuze and the Internet 154). This media transformation is both related to the varied ways in which the internet has allowed its different forms to be presented as well as the method in which the public has been wired to search for and interpret it. The internet in general, and search engines specifically, are seen to have redefined curiosity by consistently and subliminally rewarding users with small joys upon arriving at unexpected media discoveries (Buchanan,
Deleuze and the Internet 157). Benign and primarily fun-inducing in Web 1.0, this uncovering of
hidden gems has been considerably commercialized as a tool to deliver users to advertisers within Web 2.0 (Lister et al. 172).
This means that whereas the internet’s capacity to transfer information has largely remained constant since its inception — the quantity of the information that it houses has increased
significantly as time has gone by, however — it is not a stretch to say that users’ agencies to craft their own web journeys have diminished in the face of increased nudging business practices presently utilized within the globe’s oversaturated attention economy. Exaggerated headlines, click bait, and fake news are some prominent examples of such media manipulation efforts for attracting user attentions. And this is without getting into the global presence of several large
ubiquitous web platforms that present themselves as empty spaces for users to interact on yet constitute a heavily influential profit-making politics unto themselves (Srnicek 47). The names of the platforms and their influences might differ from one location to another across the world, yet the one similarity among all of them is what Mary Samouelian has called the beating heart of the internet: the ability to leverage social connections through people and their own worlds (43). That beating heart did not exist in Web 1.0. In fact, information shared on the web in its
formative years was considerably less personal than that presently marking the medium.
The cause of this functional metamorphosis can in many ways be traced back to the internet’s early days at the start of the 1990s. The sociopolitical transformations facing the world at the time, with the end of the Cold War being chief among them, saw economics join forces with marketing to begin shaping what was known as an “information economy” — a forbearer to the attention economy — that viewed information presented on the internet as the foundational currency of a fast-moving new world order (Crogan and Kinsley 3; Lister et al. 185). The digital world was broadly seen at the time as contemporary societies’ most vibrant socioeconomic arena and the one most likely to stimulate further future innovation due to its borderless informational facilitation — a view that continues to be maintained to this day (Lister et al. 185; Srnicek 5). The foundational basis of this line of thinking was outlined by Martin Lister and his coauthors in “New Media: An Introduction” as an older version of global society attempting to use the power of technology to construct a technology of power (185).
It might be no wonder then that Deleuze wrote his influential societies of control hypothesis around that time to mark what he felt was the end of the preceding disciplinary societies. Viewed from that Deleuzian prism, the internet can be identified as one of these disciplinary societies’ final enclosures, one that was at least partly responsible for heralding the shift to the societies of control. This view of the internet as being enclosed is fairly prominent in Deleuzian analyses of the medium (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 149). The web’s ever-expansive capacity for both sharing information and leveraging social connections is after all predicated on a certain fluid timelessness that is fairly characteristic of the previously explained attributes outlined by the French thinker in his definition of the societies of control. The medium’s rise in influence has brought with it various levels of interlinked subjectivities and power relations (Lister et al. 176; Bucher 481). Arguably representative of a flat ‘commons’ at its outset, the internet has grown
ever more stratified with the passage of time as the migration from disciplinary societies into societies of control has unevenly taken shape across the world. Websites and platforms of the global west have largely dominated the medium from the get-go and, through their hierarchal categorizations of the web within efforts to turn it into an unrelenting machine of capital realization, could be seen to have arguably laid the groundwork of what the world’s post-societies-of-control future might look like (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 155).
In its analysis of digital censorship as a state sovereignty tool, this paper will now attempt to examine and elaborate on a few of these intangible power threads through overviewing their overarching structural dynamics, starting with an analysis of the globe’s hegemonic capitalist economic model and then examining how the web’s open informational flow has impacted the world’s main sociopolitical organizing schemas.
Money, Information, Behavioral Modification: A Capitalist Story
Capitalism is an elaborate economic system. Boiled down to its core, its guiding ethos appears rather simple: accumulate capital and value to gain power. A deeper dive into its almost
inescapable prevalence to varying degrees across the world, however, shows that it is a far more complex system than could be imagined at first.
Its power is in many ways built on partially contradictory foundations. On one hand, capitalism relies heavily on the straightforward logic of giving and taking that characterizes economic thinking, one that has historically been spread to all societies, be they capitalist or otherwise, around the world. And yet on the other hand, it is designed to create outcomes that occasionally run counter to all of its participants’ intentions, even if they are all being fully rational in their decision making (Read 9; Mason 12). This means that in spite of its omnipresence within a fairly structured world order, capitalism is a system that cannot be fully controlled by any of its
participants. As Karl Marx has famously noted, a further contradiction involved within its foundational principles is that it relies on the exploitation of the labor of workers, who also double as the consumers that are responsible for pumping capital back to its markets (Shaviro 9). Here, capitalism paradoxically necessitates the suppression of its own primordial ideological principles, as the more exploited workers are, the less money they have to spend as consumers.
These complexities, among others, have prompted several thinkers to argue that it is more than an economic system, that it rather encompasses a multiplicity of functions — “social, economic, demographic, cultural, ideological” — that operate the globe’s everyday motions (Mason 12; Lazzaratto 172). The crux of these arguments is that capitalism’s ubiquity and the sheer power of its neoliberal spread mean that it cannot be simply reduced to an economic system. Its mere presence, whether fully embraced by a society or not, is viewed as an overarching guiding system for the formation of sociocultural and ideological building blocks.
It is hard to entirely disagree with these arguments. Capitalist economic thinking as well as some of its core ideas, debt for example, is deeply embedded into every facet of global societies, from business transactions and personal relations all the way to common language and notions of morality (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 26; Graeber 8). What may be important to note is that it really is impossible to completely separate capitalism and its influence from any of the world’s
other supra-structures such as nation states, international governing institutions like the United Nations, or even ubiquitous technologies like the internet. The interconnectedness of today’s globalized world — not to mention the fact that, despite capitalism’s ongoing global dominance, the presence of a few scattered left-leaning nation states means that it is not the governing economic system everywhere across the world — signifies that it may be somewhat problematic to outline the pursuit of capital as the sole drive for the creation and maintenance of the globe’s authoritative structural apparatuses. Metaphorically speaking, capitalism is an indispensable ingredient that nonetheless cannot be fully isolated from the overall sociocultural recipe that makes up the world’s main structural course nowadays.
Taken away from these holistic overtones, the economic system does have an abundance of theoretical profoundness that allows it to be a useful analysis tool in various areas of study.
In sociopolitical examinations, capitalism’s structural flexibility, one which allows it to evolve through continuously absorbing fair chunks of its critique, permits it to serve as a unique historical tool for outlining the broad cultural and ideological dynamics of a given period (Srnicek 10). The incessant chase for profit at the root of capitalism is seen in this prism to have built a totality of relations that set hard barriers to possible systemic, social, or ideological transformations (Chun 73). This adaptability and capacity to change in response to danger typically creates new economic patterns and structures that are at times barely recognizable vis-à-vis the economic system’s earlier iterations. The capitalism that caused the Great Depression, for instance, is very different from the one that caused the global economic recession of 2008.
In the eyes of Deleuze and Félix Guattari, said ability to evolve through accepting outside critique has been built on one of the economic system’s chief foundations: the fact that all potential for ideological change is contained within the relational spectrum of capital itself (Shaviro 23). To put it differently, the two French thinkers believed that a crucial element of capitalism’s durability has been its ability to phrase any critique to it in monetary terms that it can ideologically absorb through its inherently fluid logic of capital accumulation.
The ensuing progress in its practical applications is then compounded by its reliance on
technological advancements that are themselves linked to any relevant era’s common thoughts and attitudes (Mason 12). Max Weber viewed that capitalist capacity as one not driven by new
technologies that inevitably tend to shape the time period in which they arise, but rather by a spirit of how they could be used to primarily bring about socioeconomic advancements (Mason 270). The German sociologist believed that capitalism characterizes the possible uses of
available technologies to better serve its spirit of economic thought and to create new ways for accumulating capital. This is to say that capitalism could be seen to heavily influence the technological developments that arise within its wide socioeconomic scope of actions. Through its logic of capital accumulation, the economic system implicitly molds the expression of technological affordances from the get-go through demarcating what newly produced tools can measure, produce, pass over, or value (Zuboff 77). Weber’s viewpoint certainly rings true when applied to the rise of many technologies during the economic system’s now-long history. A turning point, though, could be delineated when overviewing the internet-driven globalization that has marked the world since the beginning of the 1990s.
The rise of the internet has heavily contributed to an unprecedented surge in technological advancements over the past 30 years, one that has been arguably responsible for bringing about the fastest-ever rate of human progression during that time (Mason 12). Within the context of this period, Weber’s view of capitalism as being responsible for the way that new technologies are used might have been at least somewhat muddled by an arising technology sector that now seems intent to invent for innovation’s sake, without necessarily knowing that a monetary payoff awaits — it cannot be definitively known that self-driving cars will bring back enough capital to justify the exorbitant outlay splurged on developing the technology behind them, for example (Thoburn 2). The outsized budgets of research and development departments within large technology conglomerates as well as the international startup prioritization of growth over profit could be read as illustrations for such shift. This restructuring of capitalism’s relationship with technology would not be outside the scope of the economic system’s flexible nature. It could instead be read as a signifier that capitalism is again morphing itself to better suit the needs of its related supra-structures through creating new types of jobs and organizational schemas, modes of exploitation, and ways for accumulating capital (Srnicek 36; Zuboff 77).
For Nick Srnicek, this gradual reconfiguration has been driven by “a long decline in
manufacturing profitability” that has caused capitalism to turn to data to drive itself forward, in the process pushing every facet of today’s economy to integrate somewhat intangible digital
layers within everyday operations (6). Here, the traditional factory can be seen to have been conceptually replaced by networks and communication grids that make up the internet’s
infrastructural foundations as capitalism’s chief socioeconomic playground (Mason 16). The rise of the internet and the technology boom of the late 1990s are considered to have set the wheels in motion for this shift towards a digital, immaterial, and information-based capitalism iteration (Han 30; Srnicek 37). The raw material at the heart of today’s ensuing economy is data that can only be mined through user interactions with online information (Srnicek 40).
Within this digitized world, Steven Shaviro has argued that capitalism is moving towards robbing humanity of the capacity to think ahead by turning everything into an “eternal present” whereby businesses continuously talk up and prioritize forward-thinking buzzwords within efforts to competitively stand out and reap present-day rewards (14). The foundation for such thinking is that for all the current talk about the value of innovation and creativity, the global populace’s capacity to promptly access the same information or tools via the internet has created a homogeneity of thought that typically only brings back more of what is already out there rather than true unbridled inventiveness (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 153). No matter how original an idea might seem, it usually stands to reason that someone else has already thought it, in essence. Adding weight to this reasoning is the visible worldwide fascination with concurrent technological advancements within the same fields that appear likely to shape the future.
The America-based big five of GAFAM once again lend themselves for analysis in exploring this competitive tendency. Each of the dominant conglomerates had somewhat clearly distinct scopes of interest in the not-so-distant past: informational search for Google, ecommerce for Amazon, social networking for Facebook, product manufacturing for Apple, and general
computing for Microsoft. As time went by, however, their growing statures and the increasingly zero-sum technological competition that now defines capitalism has seen them enter in different capacities into fields as varied as virtual reality, cloud computing, driverless cars, navigational services, voice assistants, and artificial intelligence near simultaneously. And while unique variations exist within each of the ventures, it is not a stretch to say that the creativity involved is typically confined to a fairly defined range of competitive possibility (Zuboff 77).
Along the same lines, ideas currently being formulated across the world on an individual level are largely derived from a new kind of hyper-digitized people that have been molded by
networked economies to continuously and simultaneously think of themselves in the multifaceted roles of consumers, communicators, and laborers (Mason 266). Here, a person never has just one persona at any given point in time but is always viewed to encapsulate several. This has given rise to views of modern-day consciousness as being an “assemblage” through which technologically supported communication systems come to be synonymous with natural brain functions (Lister et al. 168). The high average frequency of intermittent interactions with smartphones coupled with the abundance of popups and notifications on the internet certainly provide backing to these arguments. Studies have affirmatively shown that the unending supply of information being spread online is likely to cause a rewiring of primary brain functions — whereby neural activity shifts towards the prefrontal cortex, which is mainly linked to short-term memory, and away from the long-term-memory-associated hippocampus — for seasoned and casual internet users alike (Terranova 5; Crogan and Kinsley 14).
It is in this sense that arguments for capitalism’s shift to an attention economy have been built. The crux of thought outlining the move towards this iteration of capitalism is not new. In fact, its foundational origins can be traced all the way back to 1971 when Herbert Simon viewed
informational wealth as entailing a scarcity in what it consumes, namely attention (Tufekci 850; Crogan and Kinsley 4). His ideas were then built on by post-Marxist critiques of capitalism by the likes of Jonathan Beller and Christian Marazzi, who viewed the economic use of human cognition to be a manifestation of immaterial labor in what they defined as “cognitive
capitalism” (Crogan and Kinsley 3). Scholars such as Tiziana Terranova and Bernard Stiegler then used these ideas and helped construct a more contemporary understanding of what can now be generally defined as the attention economy (Crogan and Kinsley 2).
The main difference between the previously outlined information economy of the 1990s and today’s attention economy is that whereas the former was responsible for the mass introduction of a new type of capital commodity into the economy in the form of information, the latter has brought with it the basic economic principle of scarcity into the equation (Terranova 1; Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 144). This is to say that the internet’s burst into global consciousness at the end of the twentieth century and the ensuing demarcation of information as a monetary asset introduced added value to the global economy. The rise of the attention economy, on the other hand, has signified a recoding of that informational commodity into the more traditionally
quantifiable economic basis of supply and demand (Crogan and Kinsley 3; Tufekci 849). As Terranova has noted, “by consuming attention and making it scarce, the wealth of information creates poverty that in its turn produces the conditions for a new market to emerge” (4).
It bears mentioning here that Shoshana Zuboff has put forth a compelling argument for viewing today’s digitized economy as constituting a “surveillance capitalism” rather than an economy of attentions. Zuboff’s thesis revolves around the fact that surveillance of user interactions with online information is what allows datasets to be extracted and subsequently sold to advertisers to generate revenue for any relevant digital entity (81). Surveillance is simply read here as the capacity to gather personal information on individuals. The value of the practice is not only predicated on the wealth of information that it provides its extractors, but also on its panopticon capacity to influence behavior from a single point of observation. Zuboff views that clandestine extraction of user data to constitute the chief monetary process that drives today’s capitalist economy. Backing her argument is that the business models of numerous digital players are affirmatively built on these one-way extractive surveillances of online user activities.
The reason that this paper has chosen to view the capitalist economy’s changing nature to reflect an attention economy rather than the surveillance capitalism model outlined by Zuboff, however, is because user attentions represent the very first layer of today’s digital economy. Surveillance of online activity can only take place once users’ attentions are obtained. Attention is hence the principle currency upon which surveillance elements could be utilized to extract value.
Moreover, as Zuboff states, “surveillance capitalism thrives on the public’s ignorance” (83). This is to say that as public awareness of data-extractive practices increases, online users could
generally change their behaviors to limit the use of their cognitions in covert for-profit measures. As noted by Zuboff herself, there are indications that internet users in the western world have in fact begun to alter their digital behaviors to protect their privacy vis-à-vis digital surveillance practices (84). It is not a stretch to say that modifying attention-based behavioral tendencies is more challenging than such privacy protection attempts. Whereas individual measures to decrease surveillance entail making certain alterations to the method of interacting with media, ones aimed at controlling attention are more binary and are likely to necessitate not interacting with the relevant media altogether. And that is to say nothing of the complex subconscious terrain linked to attention’s neural foundations (Han 32; Crogan and Kinsley 7). It is on these
grounds that this paper has seen it more fit to view today’s capitalism as being in an attention economy phase rather than in Zuboff’s thoughtful surveillance capitalism hypothesis.
Simply put, the intersection of a growing number of informational choices on the internet with one-way, capture-seeking market conditions has caused attention, memory, and the relationship in which they are actualized to above all become crucial socioeconomic forces (Zuboff 79; Lazzaratto 185). In today’s globalized economy, digital businesses are constantly aware of the multifaceted personalities that internet users are drifting through at any given moment and try to strike the right chord to divert attentions to areas from which they can derive value.
Value in this attention economy is not always monetary in nature in the classical capitalist sense but is instead derived from metrics that could theoretically be turned into capital (Zuboff 81). That potential is truly the key to the equation set forth by capitalism’s ongoing attention economy era. It is for that precise reason that large digital businesses such as Uber or Netflix could continue to be in the red on the balance sheet while remaining industry leaders in their respective fields. The business models of these large conglomerates mirror the ones that are globally defining present-day capitalism on the whole: driving product engagement through building identifiable corporate brands (Zuboff 75; Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 139).
Deleuze cleverly predicted that move in his societies of control thesis, asserting that the idea of a corporation would, through marketing, evolve to have a soul of its own that is more centered on selling ideas and services rather than products and merchandise (6). The French thinker named this economy a “capitalism of higher-order production” that signifies that humans are no longer enclosed but are rather constantly in controlled debt. That indebtedness is not just monetary; it is in fact more centered around attentions and ideas.
In his reading of Deleuze, Buchanan has concurringly argued that the global online society is not marked by divisions of body, race, gender, and class as was the case in preceding disciplinary societies; instead, it is segmented by more hidden distinctions relating to debt, credit, and online profiles (Deleuze and the Internet 144). This digitally native apparatus of the societies of control is primarily driven by commercializing some, yet not all, social interactions on the web into a system of profit extraction that has been built on online engagement with supplied information (Srnicek 54). Attracting user attentiveness to drive engagement is naturally paramount in this
respect. And this is where scarce user attention comes in as a digital economy currency, with the number of entities competing for the right to deliver information to users within the open internet on a seemingly continuous upswing (Terranova 2; Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 139).
The cause of such monetization, so to speak, of the neural notion is that the supply of
information on the web is simply seen by most digital entities to exceed the user demand for it (Crogan and Kinsley 8). There is a consistent competition for obtaining the attentiveness of users who, facing an endless barrage of information, are in a constant state of networked mental drift (Terranova 3). Identifiable corporate brands are important elements of this process, as attention within today’s economy is an enduring form of property that, when obtained, will put a digital enterprise in a favorable position to get more of it in the future (Crogan and Kinsley 5). The more esteem a company can build while attracting attentions, the more attentions it will have for its digital products on the long run.
The impact of this economic dynamic on the internet has been considerable. As alluded to earlier, the ongoing attention economy phase of capitalism within Web 2.0 has brought with it a distinct socialization of thought. This global homogeneity of ideas, while problematic in certain respects, has nonetheless helped contribute to greater overall social production capacities through increased levels of internet-led information sharing on a worldwide level.
From a leisure perspective, the attention economy has likewise facilitated a continuously rising and near infinite range of media offerings for users to browse through at any given point in time, in turn creating scenarios where web users are constantly urged to choose one option over another (Lister et al. 172). While self-interested at heart, capitalist economic subjects are consistently responsible for defining their personal online motives in the face of mass digital contagion effects (Terranova 9; Zuboff 82). It is as such not a stretch to say that the user agencies that were once a hallmark of Web 1.0 have been severely diminished nowadays. Generally rising in their place are new forms of networked consciousness that heavily influences both the supply and demand sides of capitalism’s attention economy.
There have naturally been several consequences for this behavioral modification shift. Among the more major ones has been the changing role of nation states in attempting to maintain their sovereign powers over individuals whose attentions cannot be fully contained or controlled.
Sovereignty in Motion: The Changing Governance of Nation States in a Digital World
In investigating the nature of nation state governance of citizens in the online world, examining the sovereign origins that shape today’s general global ruling apparatuses is pertinent. A quick overview of Mbembe’s previously cited contemporary definitions of nation states and
sovereignty is a good place to start within the framework of this analysis.
In “Necropolitics” the Cameroonian thinker viewed the nation state as a model of organization that functions as an embodiment of political unity both locally and internationally (24). Building on Foucault’s work, Mbembe asserted that sovereignty principally stands for the manifestation of power through defining who gets to live or die within societies (11). Putting the two definitions together, present-day nation states can be broadly seen to exercise their sovereignty through serving as the overarching structures that set the general parameters of citizens’ day-to-day lives. The scope and boundaries of such role may well differ from one location to the next around the world, but one constant across the board is that nation state sovereignty currently has an essential representational function for the power dynamics that shape the globe’s structural core.
The origins of such potent organizational stature can in many ways be linked back to the seventeenth century. The Peace of Westphalia treaty that ended the 30 Years’ War in Europe in 1648 is considered by most political analysts to have roughly marked the conclusion of feudal societies and to have brought with it the birth of nation states as they are known today (Farr 156). Before the crucial treaty, the world was mostly ruled by emperors, religious authorities, rich clergymen, and feudal lords (Farr 156; Anderson 13). Religion was the fundamental unit of cohesion in Europe and beyond, with the principal language used within its parameters often considered sacred due to its holy connotations (Anderson 14). It is from that scope that borderless feudal cultures were formed across the world prior to the Peace of Westphalia.
In his influential book “Imagined Communities” Benedict Anderson saw these lingual and cultural foundations to be the building blocks that allowed modern nation states to come into existence. He argued that the new organizational formulations brought forth by sociopolitical transformations in the seventeenth century cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and that preceding societies had similar cultural characteristics that were nonetheless not as wholesomely organized (Anderson 11). Nationalism, in his mind, thus did not just arise from a weakening of the feudal
and religious ties that previously bound societies together; it also came from an alignment with these large cultural structures as well as through changes in modes of comprehending the world that made thinking of a nation possible in the first place (Anderson 22).
Largely apt in describing the theoretical foundations that allowed nationhood to come to be, Anderson’s analysis nevertheless suffers from a slight overemphasis on European societies. Ideas shaping the continent’s Enlightenment era contributed a great deal to formulating the conceptual basis that led humanity to its first understanding of nation states. Yet, viewing their structural foundations to have been uniform around the world is an overgeneralization, albeit an
understandable one given the impossibility of tracing their origins across individual societies. Notwithstanding such Eurocentric lean, Anderson’s sociopolitical examinations in “Imagined Communities” do present an important purview from which several crucial historical steps can be linked to the gradual shift in thought that would lead to the global rise of nation states.
For starters, the erosion of the power of religious and monarchial authorities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — first in Europe, and then gradually across the world — weakened the cultural and linguistic foundations that had previously tied heterogeneous societies together across large swaths of lands. Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau contributed heavily to this transformation. Their emphasis on ideas such as tolerance, reason, and freedom not only led to questioning rulers at unprecedented rates, but also
revolutionarily brought the notion of sovereignty to a people-first dimension (Grotenhuis 59). This is to say that, rather than being solely viewed as the governed within a territory as was the case in the Foucauldian societies of sovereignty that shaped later feudalism, inhabitants began to be seen as the area’s governors as well. To ensure homogeneity in thought within this budding social structure, defining stricter borders came next on the agenda. Territorialized nation states, characterized by sovereign autonomy and interstate competition, were thus marked out as the primary method for political organization (Anderson 19; Farr 156).
Arising in Europe, the world’s first nation states were built on a theoretical “social contract” whereby they had to fulfill their obligations to political subjects that had to reciprocate the same commitment towards the betterment of an imagined greater whole (Farr 157; Grotenhuis 63). It was at this point that defining what it meant to be a citizen became of growing importance. Citizenship was after all the basis for setting the rights and obligations that were to mark nation
states as well as to whom these laws would apply. Citizens differ from societies of sovereignty inhabitants in that they are continually implored to understand the value of channeling their activities into serving something bigger than themselves (Grotenhuis 62). A nation state
consequently began to be viewed as a sociological entity moving linearly in history, with citizens having confidence that they are sharing a matching journey across time with other individuals represented by the same language, culture, ideals, and borders (Anderson 26). The rise of the newspaper in Europe in the eighteenth century consolidated this imagined community concept through creating and propagating a shared sense of identity among local societies (Anderson 25).
For Foucault, the main factor behind the development of these elemental nation state dynamics was the constitution of individuals as “species of biological entity” that, grouped together, form a population that can be utilized for the production of goods, riches, and other individuals (161). The fundamental role of early nation states in his eyes was to oversee such grouping of citizens and to use the ensuing “bio-power” — a Foucauldian concept standing for governments’ capacity to demographically organize ruled subjects, influence their sociobiological decisions, and define who gets to live or die — to govern and regulate a population to ensure maximal societal productivity levels (Mbembe 16; Han 30). Given that discipline was the main nation state mechanism through which citizens were pushed to intensify productivity, the French thinker used the term “disciplinary societies” to mark the move towards sociobiological governance taking place at the end of the seventeenth century (Foucault 159; Lazzaratto 178).
In these societies, the power of the nation state was primarily juridical in nature, which is to say that rulers mainly exercised their authority through the rule of law. Juridical power, in essence, concerns itself with the regulations of where power lies in a society, who controls that power, the rules for governing the power, and the legal system through which power is established over citizens (Foucault 154). Juridical power’s entrenchment into western societies was viewed by Foucault to have arisen from a combination of bourgeois and monarchial efforts to formalize their authority in the period roughly between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century (155). The legal discourse that it provided was largely unequally utilized to legitimate claims to power by upper classes vis-à-vis proletariats. Indeed, when the French Revolution — the event widely seen to have allowed nationalism to truly blossom around the world — brought new notions of democracy to the western world, the languages inscribed within these juridical power
apparatuses were used by the bourgeoisie against the monarchial authorities that were supposed to enact the rule of law themselves (Farr 157; Foucault 155).
This serves to illustrate that, in spite of its considerable influence — particularly in disciplinary societies — juridical power has never been the sole form of power within modern nation states. As Foucault explained, viewing it as such overly privileges any ruling government by using historical bourgeois thought to wrongly envision power as solely constituting a juridical fact (158). The reality of power within any nation state is much more complex than that. Timeless power relations that are not entirely embedded in the scope of state-mandated juridical power can be viewed within both loosely regulated labor relations and any form of illegal activity, to name two examples. Putting aside such presence of power dynamics outside their scope, it is important to note that the related notions of bio-power and juridical power have historically granted nation states considerable sovereign capabilities to exert influence over their citizens.
What that sovereignty entails, though, has been a debated topic in and of itself throughout the years. In older conceptions, sovereignty was seen as the exercise of power by a central authority over imperceptibly bordered lands (Anderson 19). The emergence of nation states in the
eighteenth century is what gave the notion operative capacity over every inch of clearly defined territories. The ensuing people-first sovereignty shaping the implicit social contract tying the modern nation state and its citizens to the rule of law does not have legitimacy on its own; its conceptual validation is rather tied to the inherently democratic presence of a ‘we’ that requires both equality among the people of any given land as well as their backing of selected leaders (Mbembe 13; Grotenhuis 60). Without the popular support of citizens, a nation state’s
sovereignty is no more than fabricated. Dictatorships, thus, are by and large failed nation states masquerading as legitimate ones (Grotenhuis 60).
In many such cases, the nation state makes its bio-power-derived sovereignty of cultivating, managing, and protecting life synonymous with its right to kill (Mbembe 17). The existence of an ‘other’ that poses a perceptual threat to the lives of citizens is at the heart of this practice (Mbembe 18; Grotenhuis 61; Ruddick 29). Without the theoretical presence of an enemy that needs to be bordered away to a safe distance, the authority of any nation state would be diminished. That idea of a common enemy, whether real or otherwise, has defined the sovereignty of nation states since their conception. In fact, it is the one constant within the
socially constructed foundations, ones that are built and routinely altered by citizens to define their identities within continuously changing sociopolitical settings, which make up a nation state (Grotenhuis 26). Guiding the perceptions of its citizens through sovereign practices that define who does or does not represent an enemy is hence a crucial task for any ruling government.
Before tying this function to this paper’s analysis of state-enforced censorship and its relation to both the attention economy and the societies of control, a small yet important distinction needs to be made between ‘nation’ and ‘state.’ While traditionally bound together, there is a difference between the two terms. Within the regulations of international governing institutions, ‘nation,’ despite being colloquially used, is officially undefined. ‘State,’ on the other hand, has a firm definition in 1933’s Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which states: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government; and d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states” — attributes that are all easy to prove (Grotenhuis 25).
From that lens, a differentiation between the two intertwined notions can be made by broadly viewing the state as representing a government’s ruling authority and the nation as the intangible country symbol bonding citizens together under the guise of a greater whole. The state is the institution that maintains binding authority over its citizens, has a jurisdiction that extends across demarcated lands, and serves as the only legitimate source for the use of force within its borders. Conversely, a nation is a primarily local notion that causes citizens to have personal connections to their state that, if contested, could lead to internal or external conflict (Farr 157). Deleuze and Guattari argued that the state did not abstractly arise in stages but was rather born as a fully formed idea from the outset (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 26). This is contrasted with the idea of the nation, which was constructed unevenly in societies around the world starting in the eighteenth century. A nation state can be seen as an amalgamation of the two concepts whereby the idea of a nation creates the sense of belonging that makes citizens willingly accept the sovereign authority of the state. Without nationhood, in other words, states would likely have little alternative but to resort to coercive measures to establish their authority (Grotenhuis 29).
Moving these theoretical foundations to a tangible realm, it is clear that the primordial functions of nation states have been altered by the changing of times. The origins of what led nation state sovereignty to be what it is today can be traced back to the period immediately following World
War Two, a time when fervent ideological, anticolonial, and rebuilding global sentiments combined to make state-mandated bio-power reach its historical peak (Lazzaratto 179). Around that period, ideas by the likes of American mathematician Norbert Wiener had led many to begin thinking of the world as an information system due to fast advancements in computation that had seen machines develop capacities that allowed them to regulate themselves through cybernetic feedback systems (Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture 15). This computational ability was akin to human cognition in that it continuously relied on trial and error.
Such technological advancements of the post-World War Two era were coupled with a newfound prevalence of target marketing and information sharing arising from the increased availability of televisions. By the early 1950s, nation states had come to be occasionally thought of as individuated entities with unique psyches that represented the nature of the mass media being shared within their borders (Turner, The Democratic Surround 165). The one element tying together man with the fast-developing world of machines was seen by Wiener and others to be the exchange of information (Turner, The Democratic Surround 254). Succinctly put,
humanity’s path towards the internet had begun to be formulated.
Heading into the 1970s, these sociotechnical transformations had not only led individuals around the globe to begin seeing themselves more as consumers than as citizens, but also drove societal intellect to be viewed as an instrument of national value (Lotz 231; Turner, From Counterculture
to Cyberculture 12). The impact of the Cold War should not be understated here due to the
competition that it instigated across both of its dominant factions. At its end, the ideological showdown had set into motion the active commoditization of information and crowned capitalist neoliberalism as the main nation state system for socioeconomic regulation.
As a form of governance, neoliberalism encourages nation states to rule with as little active authority as possible, instead setting the conditions for fair market practices to take shape and encouraging individuals to pursue their own self-interest above all (Read 6; Mason 272). The socioeconomic system views the efforts of citizens to continuously better their own living standards to represent the best path towards reaching greater societal prosperity for any nation state (Mason 6; Turner, The Democratic Surround 257). What that meant was that nation states around the world, while still retaining considerable sovereign authority, had begun to be broadly
bound by a system whereby they needed to have a more withdrawn socioeconomic governance role as the Cold War ended towards the beginning of the 1990s.
The introduction of the internet at that time combined with suddenly uncontested neoliberal thought to create a general global order with a greater emphasis on the individual than at any previous point in history. The individuality afforded by the merging of the medium with neoliberalism did not provide citizens with newfound political power in relation to their nation states, however. Instead, the numerous hidden intricacies of neoliberal governance as well as unprecedented levels of globalization left many with a feeling that they lacked meaningful sociopolitical agency (Grotenhuis 62). Concentrating on individual goals thus generally began to be viewed as citizens’ best strategy for improving their personal living conditions. This is to say that visions of the greater whole that had marked the imagined communities of nation states began slowly dissipating around the world in the period following the end of the Cold War.
As aforementioned, it was at that time that disciplinary societies and their clearly defined enclosures started fading into societies of control characterized by continual and subliminal power controls. Nation state sovereignty began to not only be challenged by heightened levels of individuality, but to also be similarly confronted by the growing statures of international
governing institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund tasked with preserving peace and spreading neoliberal ideals (Farr 156). It is in that sense that nation states can begin to be viewed as enclosures within the societies of control. As Maurizio Lazzaratto has noted in his examination of Deleuze’s work, the societies of control subject through modulating brains and constituting habits in spiritual memory (186). Active, explicit governance is consequently not a characteristic of these societies. Furthermore, while societies of sovereignty were marked by mechanical technologies and disciplinary societies by thermodynamic ones, the societies of control are characterized by more distant technologies that cannot be reduced to any political or economic ideology (Lazzaratto 180). The internet’s free-for-all structure allows it to be a snug example of such societies of control technology.
In this framework, the state is not the primary source of power as was the case in disciplinary societies, but rather derives from it (Lazzaratto 173). The technology of power in the societies of control is subtle and interiorized, taking the form of freedom and self-optimization under a
hyper-individuated capitalist drive (Han 32; Chun 73). Power and control, as such, can no longer be solely summarized by the centralized symbol of a nation state (Zuboff 82). As Foucault has noted, there have always been different power layers in any society (156). These hierarchies of power that shaped disciplinary societies and granted nation states their upper echelons through bio-power and juridical power have gotten considerably flatter in the societies of control.
Nation states have generally reacted to such shift by moving their power away from the rigid conditions that shaped disciplinary societies, now defining their power primarily through the capacity to claim exception to any given rule or law. In short, nation state power in the societies of control is defined not by the ability to use juridical power, but by claiming exception to its binding legal obligations (Mbembe 16). To use a straightforward national example, while killing is outlawed in all countries, governments typically have the capacity to claim exception to this standard rule whenever they consider themselves as facing a threat to national security — oftentimes without having to deal with any major local repercussions. The American
government’s decision to disobey international law and go to war with Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11 World Trade Center bombings is an illustration of such exceptional capacities on an international scale. The underlying key to these exceptional power tactics is that it is not always clear where the line between what can be considered an exception or an enforcement of a rule is drawn (Thacker and Galloway 38). And this is not just limited to acts of aggression, but extends to nearly every facet of life, including regulations of the supposedly open internet.
Exceptional state practices within the media arena can be seen as a reaction to the waning influence of what once constituted the national layer of governance in the face of heightened participation in the online world (Zuboff 81). The internet’s role here has primarily revolved around removing the sense of imagination involved in the bond that citizens are supposed to share with one another; individuals can instead use the medium to find whatever niche might suit their interest without having to resort to a constructed symbol of greater identity formation.
The ever-expansive capacity of large digital players to influence behaviors within today’s attention economy has contributed greatly to this shift. This is to say that the gradually growing impact of behavioral modification business strategies in the online world has led to the belief that the power of nation states has sustained growing leakages in recent times (Warf 4). With that gradual erosion of their national layer, states have occasionally come to be seen as embodiments
of evil that have to be curbed both nationally and internationally (Dean and Villadsen 17). At the heart of such thinking is a firm rejection of the juridical authority that nation states have in serving as societies’ main source for coercive order and security (Dean and Villadsen 19).
Zuboff has affirmed that said online practices aimed at manipulating behaviors constitute “a coup from above” — in reference to the internet’s ubiquitous supra-structure status — that has installed a new brand of sovereignty in the world (86). Her hypothesis is built on a blurring of public and private boundaries in societies around the world that has led to various collaborations between nation states and high technology firms in data-extractive practices of entire populations (Zuboff 79). This intermingling has allowed large digital corporations to exploit the limited understandings of both general populations and governmental authorities in regulating highly profitable surveillance practices that on the whole take away from a nation state’s sovereign dominion (Zuboff 83). The dwindling authority of nation state sovereignty is directly linked here to its bio-power capacity to influence citizens’ day-to-day lives. The more a digital player
manages to sway people’s attentions and minds, the less a nation state can, in essence.
Zuboff’s argument is largely fitting in describing the new wave of sovereignty that is coming to define the concept nowadays. The notion, like most important sociopolitical ones, is becoming growingly digitized. Such shift — combined with continuing globalization, the rising influence of neoliberalism and international governing institutions, and a constantly expansive emphasis on individuality — has on the whole seemingly curbed the sovereignty of nation states in today’s societies of control vis-à-vis that of disciplinary societies.
But this is not to say that nation states are dead. They are far from it. Nation states today still retain their Deleuzian enclosure status as the chief method of sociopolitical organization across the world. And whereas globalization and the internet have somewhat clouded what it means to be a citizen, individuals around the world still represent themselves first and foremost by their nationality and continually resort to the state to defend their everyday rights (Farr 158;
Grotenhuis 69). Nation states likewise still retain their authority within international organizations and always have a choice in whether to join the global institutions in the first place. If they do decide to take part in any of them, nation states typically do so to maintain their own sovereign authority and to increase their wealth through inter-state trade (Farr 158).
institutions such as the United Nations are commonly respected, nation states are still the ones that provide these overarching organizations with the funding needed to run their day-to-day operations (Memon 161). In spite of their changing and arguably weakened sovereignties then, nation states are still the world’s dominant method of sociopolitical and sovereign organization — and are likely to remain so in the foreseeable future (Grotenhuis 69).
The biggest challenge to this claim in the very long run might well come from connective technologies such as the internet. Nation states are seemingly aware of such possibility and have in recent times begun to attempt to govern the historically unregulated medium at growing rates in efforts to maintain their authoritative statures. Digital censorship perhaps represents the oldest and most enduring form of these nation state initiatives.
