This essay had a tremendous impact on me when I first read it. Deleuze died in 1995, and so didn't really get to see the rise of the web, but I've always wondered what he'd write about it...
http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
It's incredible to me that this was published in 1995 rereading it today.
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.
And when you get to his later work and he goes into numerology it gets really weird. It takes a while to get used to but there's some truly insightful stuff in his earlier, more coherent work in particular. And he had an underrated influence on a lot of British cultural figures all across the spectrum.
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.
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.
I'm somewhat relieved readers of Deluze have these critical tools as well, as I hope it will click at some point that we're dealing with something much greater than our respective outgroups.