In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.
-----
The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.
In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.
If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.
And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.
The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.
Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.
We are lustful and hooked on projecting ourselves onto the public screen. Even when we resist and try to tame that lust, it becomes obvious, so utterly obvious that it is practically impossible to live an active life today without shedding our data and leaving traces everywhere. Searching the web, buying online, finding directions—the truth is, we are exposed even when we try to resist. Yes, you can start the search on DuckDuckGo, but pretty soon you’ll be on another site that installs cookies and culls your data, or you are inputting personal information into another service provider without any way to avoid it. There are, to be sure, ways to protect yourself, but you need the time, expertise, and resources to buy your server or learn TOR (as if that were safe!). And most of us are already so distracted and stimulated by the next ping, alert, popup, or notification that we’ve already forgotten what the problem was and ignore the greatest risk.
That risk is not just Big Brother or Foucaultian discipline, but the larger mode of governing that all the collected data feed into: the NSA surveillance that enables total information awareness as the first prong of a counterinsurgency warfare paradigm of governing our own citizens. We are so distracted by our digital screens and by the “attention merchants”—and now by a presidential Reality-TV management style that produces early morning Twitter screeds and daily TV episodes—that we cannot even see the new danger we face, our new form of governing through fictitious internal enemies.
Facebook’s business model works because we thrive on it. We love to see ourselves projected onto the screen. We like to be liked. We want to be shared. We thrive on that attention.
And now that we are locked into this digital pleasure circuit, there won’t likely be a way out, in terms of our privacy—or the privacy of the vast majority of us—unless and until we find a template that pleases us more. That is more gratifying. There will not be the political will, even less the political space, to address the privacy issues until we discover a better design to lever our pleasure centers.
That’s what we need to figure out now. That’s where we need to invest. We need better, more seductive platforms that satisfy our libido and protect our privacy. It’s not going to happen by putting ourselves on a diet—our digital lust is too virtual, unlike our weight. We need to invent entirely new possibilities.
One option might be to privatize personal data so that the digital subjects would be the ones making the profit and controlling the information flow—in effect, to increase the stimulus, but motivate it toward privacy. This was an approach pioneered by the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment—the method of unleashing self-interest to tame the passions so artfully described by Albert Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. But I will confess, that feels too crass and base. It would involve embracing the worst of our natures in order to fix our addictions. And it’s also hard to imagine that the small monetary sums at the individual level—it’s the aggregate that really matters in this business—would be sufficient to motivate proper monitoring of our privacy on our part. There could be aggregators, to be sure; but we would have to study closely what business model they would operate under, too.
Another option would be to nationalize the social media and Internet companies, turn them into non-profits, and treat them as public utilities. Pull the plug on the financial drivers, set up a range of non-profit businesses, and give free reign to reputational competition and rewards. Here we might turn to other critical traditions to cultivate the commons. And here too, of course, there are endless possible objections. But that can’t stop us.
None of these options will be uncontested. None of them will be unopposed. But the first step, the essential place to begin, is by recognizing that we’re in this spot because of our desires and appetites. It’s because these digital platforms are so seductive and pleasurable. And until we recognize and address those libidinal dimensions and our own narcissism, we will not be able to interrupt the flow of digital pleasure and exposure.
