Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)

"Bentham's panopticon reified" is more characteristic of Foucault's concept of disciplinary societies, which defined the 20th century. Deleuze's project here is to extend it into the 21st century, where the disciplinary society changes into "societies of control". While both disciplinary and control societies rely on surveillance, disciplinary societies create compliance through the threat (if not the execution) of punishment, while control societies create compliance through nudges and dark patterns. Disciplinary societies have centralized locations of power (the factory, the school, and the barracks), while in control societies, power is decentralized -- both everywhere and nowhere at once (algorithms, workplace encouraged education and health initiatives, etc).

Furthermore, while disciplinary power creates classes of individuals to control and marginalize (based on race, class, etc.), under neoliberal control societies, all individuals are prima facie accepted. This is not because the control society is less coercive, but because control is exerted at the sub-individual level -- think how advertising algorithms assign each person a constellation of tags which are used to structure their online experience.

I mean, in one sense, a significant amount of philosophy is "some other person's work but with a twist." "All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato." and all that.

But sure, Bentham is a huge influence here; Deleuze is moving forward Foucault's "disciplinary society" concept into the "control society" concept presented here, and Foucault's use of the panopticon is such a meme that even folks who aren't particularly into this stuff often know that it exists.

My sibling commentor has it exactly right:

> disciplinary societies create compliance through the threat (if not the execution) of punishment, while control societies create compliance through nudges and dark patterns.

There's like, a thousand different reasons that this essay meant something to me at the time, but one of them was that I happened to come across this at the time that the industry was getting really into gamification.

To continue to piggyback off of nomadpenguin:

> in control societies, power is decentralized -- both everywhere and nowhere at once (algorithms, workplace encouraged education and health initiatives, etc).

I didn't really appreciate the increasing amount (in both number and degree) of algorithmic control over our lives until reading this essay. I mean, on some level I saw it happening, but I really, truly started seeing it after this.

Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed this quite a bit. It's probably more conceptually accessible for hn's audience too.

I'm... more familiar with Land's more recent works, but in my understanding that is a more recent turn, and the CCRU stuff I'd find more agreeable, but I haven't gotten around to it. I'll read this later, thank you.

Man, I have a hard enough time reading Deleuze, but Nick Land can be totally incomprehensible. At times it seems he takes schizoanalysis a bit too literally - I expect any philosopher I read to have made up at least a dozen words or phrases by the end of a work, but with Land every sentence contains a new concept that remains totally undefined.

And then there's "cooking lobsters with jake and dinos" from fanged noumena.

My impression is that rather than decoding his works rationally, you're supposed to kind of soak in the vibe and the high-level concepts, but I don't know if that's due my incomprehension or if it's the intended way to read him.

Ah! Thank you for clearing that up. Cheers!

That extra historical context provides some fascinating depth to setting of The Difference Engine (1990).