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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.

Keywords: Internet; attention economy; societies of control; Deleuze; digital censorship; Egypt 2

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 sociopolitical dynamics that the internet has presented to nation state sovereignty. The hope here 3 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 4 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 retained their important societal stature around the world, yet are routinely marked by calls for 5 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. 6

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 7 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.

8

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). 9

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 10 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 11 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.

12

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 13 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 14 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 15 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 16 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 17 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 18 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 19 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. 20

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 21 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 22 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 23 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 24 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 25

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 26 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 27 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 28 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). Furthermore, while the authorities of the procedural rules set forth by global governance 29 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.

30

Politics of Desire: Power, Digital Censorship, and the Societies of Control

Unlike other media arenas, the internet’s open and deregulated nature has theoretically implied an equality of opportunity for anyone that has access to it from the get-go. Whereas the internet did have such egalitarian foundations at its inception, hierarchies of power on the corporate, nation state, and international levels have developed within the medium throughout the years.

As previously touched upon, the internet was viewed as an emancipatory tool that can promote democracy and give a voice to the voiceless when it first became a public tool in the early 1990s (Warf 2). The medium after all promotes collective action, diversity of thought, and information sharing by considerably lowering the costs of individual participation (Tufekci 851). What adds credence to such thinking is that the internet cannot be fully controlled by any one person, nation, or entity. This, in the minds of many, has meant that the internet is synonymous with freedom (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 148). In its early years, these utopian foundations blocked critical examinations of the medium. The importance of the link between the timing of the internet’s global growth and these idealistic visions of it should not be understated.

At the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism’s status as the main hegemonic socioeconomic governance system around the globe drove American political scientist Francis Fukuyama to famously proclaim that the world had reached the end of history. Globalization similarly led to the generally accepted idea that humanity was approaching a new world order (Memon 160). The rise of the internet in that time allowed it to be viewed under the same light due to its encompassing of both the concrete and the abstract (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 156). That vision of the internet’s flatly open structure has largely endured to this day, despite a greater general awareness that a truly neutral systemic design is a myth (Thaler and Sunstein 3).

Among the more significant elements of the infrastructural design at the base of the internet has been its gradual reconstitution of individuals as users. Rather than being primarily identified as citizens, the internet has allowed individuals to have a clearly defined user position in a system without which they have no fundamental role or identity (Bratton 251). In doing so, the medium has, according to Benjamin Bratton, elevated individuals to a more privileged and practical position as both political and economic subjects (254). Under this framework, the internet provides individuals with avenues to be more active participants in defining their living 31 conditions through user capacities that never ask them to have any responsibility towards a greater whole as they do as citizens. Whereas citizens are bound by an implicit social contract to their nation state’s sovereignty, users theoretically have the capacity to set whichever rules of access they would like to have in their internet-mediated existences in the societies of control.

As the internet grew in socioeconomic stature, social contagion and behavioral modification practices have somewhat altered that individual capacity for defining the rules of online existence. And yet, users still always have a choice in whether to use the medium. Being a citizen, on the other hand, is a fact of birth in most cases — at least until individuals come of age. It is thus important to note that nation state influence through bio-power began to wane as neoliberalism and the internet reconstituted what it means to be an individual in the early 1990s.

Along the same lines, the proclaimed end of history had been seen to have arisen from a growingly globalized political realm. This is to say that nation state regulation of citizens’ day- to-day lives had become heavily affected by globalization as disciplinary societies faded into societies of control. Authority started dissipating from central sources into unevenly diffused peripheries across different borders (Memon 161). Exerting sovereignty was no longer a chiefly autonomous process for ruling regimes. Globalization instead meant that nation states had to take into consideration the global ramifications of their political actions. Nationalism began to be occasionally seen as a form of resistance to globalization in that vein (Memon 163). The internet’s growth went hand in hand with such political shift to consolidate the free-flowing impact of globalization across the world (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 137). Governments largely controlled the medium’s integrations into varied spheres of life at first. But as time went by and the internet’s importance grew, worldwide markets began to turn it into a predominantly commercial arena that treats its users as consumers (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 144).

The tech boom of the late 1990s and subsequent dot-com crash were the two main events leading to this transformation. The former spread the internet into virtually all walks of life, while the latter brought heightened monetary practices to the internet in response to the worldwide market’s overly enthusiastic embrace of the medium. It would not be a stretch, though, to say that — even had the erratic conditions that led to the interrelated events been in line with steady business activity — this commercialization of the internet was inevitable given its rising importance within the globe’s generally neoliberal climate at the start of the new millennium. 32

Indeed, for Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and several other leading French intellectuals of the twentieth century, the transformations that would lead to the internet’s increased influence were to be primarily explained by capitalism (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 14). The economic system’s relentless search for new markets had been seen to stimulate unprecedented interest in global communications that were to connect the entire world through arising technologies.

Deleuze and Guattari were of the opinion that capitalism’s contradictions do not bring societal structures down, but rather act as the main motor for allowing the world to retain its dynamism (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 29). The ebbs and flows of the economic system were seen to necessitate continuous reconfigurations of the globe’s structural basis, changing capitalism itself along the way in a system akin to the cybernetic feedback loops outlined by Wiener and his contemporaries at the end of the 1940s. Individuals flow from citizens to economic subjects to internet users as part of that loop (Bratton 253). The foundation for this capitalism-driven mode of unending structural modulations was seen by Deleuze to be a consistent human drive to create something unforeseen or, as he put it, a “long-lasting affair with experimentation” (Ruddick 36).

The role of the nation state was viewed to be regulating this system and providing citizens with reasons to believe in the world’s legitimacy (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 32). Active governance in the capitalist societies of control was seen by Deleuze to only be necessary in times when sovereignty needs to be exerted. Other instances would regulate themselves through the societies of control’s embedded prioritization of self-interest above any communal motive.

Power in these societies is not merely a matter of repression, coercion, or juridical capacities, but mainly resides in ordinary traditions and languages that implicitly subject the mind. Deleuze viewed power from that lens as requiring a layer of complicity on the part of its subjects for it to serve its authoritative function (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 13). As Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn have pointed out, power was obvious for Deleuze; what was not was why it is collectively tolerated by the masses (7). That “mystery of voluntary subservience” was at the heart of the French thinker’s political examinations. Deleuze agreed with Foucault that power, by necessity, has a totalized and global range in the world’s modern history (4). From that prism, nation state sovereignty or other holistic authoritative schemas cannot be seen to hold power in a vacuum without it being related to some of its other forms and manifestations. 33

Contrasting with Foucault’s view that there is nothing outside the scope of power, Deleuze and Guattari viewed desire to be the building block of contemporary politics (Buchanan and Thoburn 7; Ruddick 34). Desire here has a different connotation from its Freudian significance of representing the wants of the unconscious mind. Desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is an impersonal concept that represents humans’ historical interactions with both nature and machines to define an intangible order of production that is rooted at the base of the world’s modern existence (Buchanan, Deleuze and the Internet 145). Naturally then, this desire is ubiquitous.

In beginning to envision the concept through that indelible lens, Deleuze and Guattari were of the opinion that binaries that draw a distinction between the powerful and powerless rigidly cloud the complexities of power dynamics (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 16). For the two thinkers, the ostensibly powerless in any hypothetical scenario can only be seen as such due to a desire-based choice that was made, by them or by someone else, in the past. Many developing nation states in Africa and Asia, for instance, currently suffer from economic difficulties due to past desire-based colonization efforts that utilized power to advance the goals of European colonizers. Deleuze and Guattari thereby viewed power as a non-linear relationship. The notion, for them, simply accounts for a history of desired actions, which is to say that desire — not power — represents the bedrock of all societal infrastructures (Buchanan and Thoburn 9).

In the world’s modern history, such status is primarily linked to capitalism’s logic of capital accumulation and its production of the subjects that inhabit the world that it creates. Desire and capitalism are simply inseparable in this regard. Politics, while conceptually preceding existence in the eyes of Deleuze and Guattari, can similarly never be entirely detached from the desire- based logic of capital accumulation that drives it forward (Buchanan and Thoburn 7). Deleuze viewed the political arena as a process for facilitating engagement with capitalist relations as well as the invention and organization of socioeconomic subjects (Thoburn 6).

As the main form of political structuring in the world’s modern history, nation states are the ones responsible for overseeing such seamless process. And this is not just limited to neoliberal nation states that explicitly follow capitalism; rather, all nation states were regarded equal by Deleuze and Guattari insofar as they serve as vehicles for global capital realization (Patton 400). Whereas citizen subjectivity was largely mechanic across different nation state ideologies within disciplinary societies, with individuals moving through clearly defined enclosures, the more 34 uniform capitalist spread of the societies of control — driven by neoliberalism, globalization, and the internet — has seen the process of subjectivity covertly revolve around fluidly dynamic individualism across the board. Nation state sovereignty within the societies of control, as such, has not been diminished as much as it has been implicitly altered to become more withdrawn.

The legacy of disciplinary societies here is their construction of the necessary building blocks for capitalist desires to flourish in new ways. The intangible nature of the modern global capitalist economy would not be possible without such tacit disciplinarian trainings of the minds. The techniques of subjugation within the societies of control did not replace those of disciplinary societies but were superimposed onto them to better serve capitalist accumulation (Lazzaratto 182). This process of gradual subjugation, starting with cybernetics and then moving towards the information economy and now into the attention economy, is responsible for developing long- lasting collectives that make the world’s structures function based on contradictory, desire-based capitalist notions. Nation states are simply the main grouping mechanism within this process.

As Deleuze and Guattari have argued, desire is primarily socialized on a human level through the attribution of symbolic meaning (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 20). The imagined construct of a nation is an excellent example of just that. And while the social contract backbone of nation state sovereignty implies an inherently democratic existence of a ‘we’, political representation within modernity has always been based around a multiplicity of desires that claims to speak for a population’s general consciousness without ever lending a truly equal voice to all of its members (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 15). It is for that reason that Deleuze and Guattari never placed much value on democracy in their mostly “minoritarian” political analyses.

As Paul Patton has noted in his reading of their work, even the most democratic nation states, to them, are governed more by capitalism than they are by the will of their people (400). The two French thinkers simply considered the governmentality of nation state sovereignty to be secondary to the universality of capitalism (Patton 411). The role of a nation state in their eyes was to act as one of the world’s “social machines” that are responsible for “capturing and coding” the flows of desire (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 18). These social machines are statistically defined and bound by a law of large numbers (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 17). Tribes, monarchies, and empires are three historical examples of such organizational structures. 35

Upon their conception in the seventeenth century, nation states took over as the world’s most prominent social machines and have remained as such as disciplinary societies made way for the societies of control. Their regulations of markets along with their organizational capacities and juridical authorities have seen to that. The rise of the internet within the societies of control, though, has presented a different form of social machine that has increasingly begun to challenge nation states in that realm. The similarities between the two are in many ways considerable.

For starters, while the internet was originally seen as a form of liberation technology, there is no evidence that it has in fact helped democracy flow within societies (Rød and Weidmann 345). Heightened commercialization of the media arena has similarly seen it encode more and more of the capitalist flows of desire throughout the years (Lister et al. 172). The rising influence of behavioral modification practices within the attention economy has also seen the medium begin to house some of the classical bio-power capacities of nation states. Its reconstitution of citizens as users has likewise amplified the neoliberal emphasis on individualism. The gradual formulation of all these internet characteristics signifies that there are several stark conceptual commonalities between the media arena and nation states within today’s globalized world.

And although nation states of varied political orientations have limited capacity to dictate what transpires on the internet, they are nevertheless capable of setting the ground rules — who gets to utilize it, what individuals encounter when they do, and what kind of laws are to be followed — for its usage (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 139). Put simply, governments have the ability to regulate and oversee their citizens’ interactions with the medium, which is to say that nation states lie a step above the internet in today’s societies of control social machine pecking order.

The rising power of digital players such as GAFAM within the attention economy presents challenges to such status on the long run, however — the impacts of which have been a long time coming. Indeed, to understand how hegemonic online conglomerates have come to exert such influence in the world today is to, in more ways than one, comprehend the difficulties that nation states have had to face in regulating the internet throughout the years.

Unlike other media arenas that rely on central points of access that allow them to be easily managed by a nation state, the internet’s decentralized nature presents great difficulties for governments seeking to control it. Control in internet terms is after all not primarily related to its 36 pervasiveness, but to the content that it houses (Thacker and Galloway 36). Regulating the internet often leaves few options for a nation state but to censor specific websites or features within efforts to funnel citizens’ attentions away from undesirable inclinations. The practice has recently also become confronted with a hybridization of the virtual and analog that has led many to start considering internet access as a nonnegotiable necessity, not a luxury (Warf 1).

Nation states that censor the medium thus usually have to provide citizens with articulated reasons for doing so. Some of the more commonly used ones throughout the years have been claims of protecting public morality from perceived sins such as gambling or pornography, shielding national security from vague threats, or combatting terrorism and extremism (Warf 4). At the heart of censorship practices are not just fears that the internet could facilitate citizen mobility aimed at political change, but that the medium could even grant such movements with a visible platform that could tarnish a government’s international reputation (Tufekci 854). The impact of globalization should not be understated within this reputational regard.

Whereas authoritarian regimes in disciplinary societies largely had the capacity to openly spread nationwide propaganda and to act violently in local and international settings within their exertions of sovereignty, the hyper-connected nature of the societies of control has made such processes considerably more difficult. In a world globally connected by capital flows and international media arenas, aggressive nation state tactics could lead to undesirable outcomes such as a brain drain, decreased foreign investment, or lower value for a country’s currency (Guriev and Treismany 5). Authoritarian states in the globalized societies of control thereby usually rely on digital censorship and simulate democracy through phony elections in their aims to maintain their sovereign authorities (Guriev and Treismany 2). Violence is generally only used against local populations as a last resort as it is perceived to indicate a high level of incompetence on a government’s part (Guriev and Treismany 4).

To prevent a situation from escalating in such fashion, fostering an efficient self-censorship apparatus is usually seen as the best method for controlling the flow of information among populations, in turn limiting their capacity for collective political action (Warf 4). Constructing such often-intangible structure typically entails a few public governmental crackdowns on dissidents and using public media to frame everyday state activities as unquestionable successes. 37

The usefulness of the practice is mainly based on the fact that citizens are not always aware that censorship is at work as not talking about the government gradually becomes the local norm. In a few cases, with China arguably being the most famous example, self-censorship is consolidated by regulations that legally prevent online and offline media from discussing the government in any negative capacity (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 139). In these instances, criticizing the government becomes frowned upon given the existence of one uniformly stable media narrative.

The subtle nature of self-censorship fits in neatly with the societies of control’s subliminal subjugations insofar as it achieves desirable nation state outcomes without resorting to the easily spotted propaganda tactics employed in disciplinary societies. The internet’s growing ubiquity, though, has presented unique challenges to self-censorship enforcements. Whereas individuals living under authoritarian regimes could only read, see, and listen to what governments permitted them to in the past, the internet has made such state-sanctioned media control more difficult.

As noted by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treismany, authoritarian leaders survive by convincing the public, rightly or wrongly, that they are competent (1). Citizens, while capable of inferring their leaders’ totalitarianism through their own living conditions, are nonetheless occasionally blinded from seeing the full truth if the media does not bring it to their attention. At the core of this historically pervasive concealment of the truth is not a lack of understanding of reality on the part of the masses; rather, it is a systemic invalidation of their discourse through a more powerful and knowledgeable one (Deleuze and Foucault 2). Self-censorship is in many ways the ultimate reflection of such process for convincing the public of leaders’ legitimacy. Under this framework, only the authoritarian leaders and a small subset of the population, intellectuals and the informed elite in most cases, are capable of viewing the sociopolitical situation for what it is (Guriev and Treismany 3). Nation state sovereignty and power are unevenly distributed along varied lines of population repression in these instances (Deleuze and Foucault 2).

The inequality of knowledge that has traditionally been at the base of any self-censorship apparatus is similar to the one embedded in the juridical authority of nation states within disciplinary societies insofar as it values and further reinforces historic bourgeois ideologies (Deleuze and Foucault 4). The rich and privileged understand what information is closest to the truth and know how to get it, amplifying their economic, social, and cultural standing in the 38 process; the rest of the population, on the other hand, has little choice but to take the truth that it has been given as fact, in turn consolidating the authoritarian state’s power.

The internet, in spite of having shown no positive correlation with democracy, theoretically has the potential to at least equalize — if not eliminate — the impact of self-censorship through facilitating access to information. The internet, in other words, provides citizens with avenues to gain new perspectives that may run counter to the narrative favored by any ruling government. Self-censorship might continue to remain prevalent regardless, but the freedom of access afforded by the internet not only has the capacity to limit the unequal spread of information at its base, but to also present possible alternatives to what is being nationally disseminated as well as inform the outside world of any untenable local sociopolitical situation. Wendy Chun’s view that “freedom makes control possible, necessary, and never enough” certainly rings true when it comes to the internet from this perspective (66). And that is why digital censorship, while prominent to varying degrees in currently affecting around a quarter of the world’s overall population, is less effective than the censorship that afflicts other media arenas (Warf 5).

Even in instances where governments block a plethora of websites and online features locally, internet users can bypass any restrictions through a virtual private network (VPN). Nation states seeking to exert their sovereignty digitally through censorship often also have to deal with unintended economic consequences such as diminished tourism, limited citizen innovation, or angry corporations (Warf 4). The interconnected competitiveness of today’s world implies that important information can never be truly prevented from being spread online. But this is not to say that digital censorship is an entirely ineffective authoritarian nation state practice, however. There are indications that it does hold some totalitarian benefits, albeit ones that are not as pronounced as those provided by censorship in media arenas such as the print press or television.

By overseeing censorship on the internet, nation states can locally and internationally obscure some of the events that take place within their borders. Such concealment can stop the full truth of any situation from being aired out. Moreover, despite the internet’s theoretical capacity to allow individuals to access any digital information — normally or through VPNs — there are many users, particularly in the censorship-ridden third world, who lack the technological acumen required to bypass even basic online filtering practices. It similarly bears mentioning that just as much as the internet could assist in the coordination and expression of oppositional movements, 39 it could also provide authoritarian leaders with information that would allow them to track and punish dissidents (Guriev and Treismany 7). Succinctly put, the internet is a double-edged sociopolitical sword for all of its users. And it is for this reason that opposition to digital censorship is usually limited to small groups of citizens, diasporas typically, that have little impact on their nation state’s sociopolitical climate (Warf 3).

It is consequently important to note that the Deleuzian mystery of voluntary subservience at the core of citizens’ relationships with nation states still holds strong to varying degrees around the world. That method of subliminal subjugation was chiefly concerned with identity formation and juridical authority in the past. Now, it is more related to a nation state’s role in setting free market conditions and defining how self-interested citizens interact with media that could improve their living conditions in the capitalist attention economy. This is to say that the basis governing the citizen-state social contract within today’s neoliberal climate is that of exchange.

In this framework, citizens implicitly trade certain rights and freedoms to the nation state in exchange for allowing them to pursue their self-interest to its maximum capacity (Read 4). Laws and regulations are replaced by interest and competition as the main source of the sovereignty tying a nation state to its citizens, and state power becomes mainly derived from channeling flows of interest, making desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable ones costly (Read 6).

All of which is to say that, putting aside increasingly untenable violent exertions of sovereignty, the modern-day nation state still has the capacity to alter citizen behaviors through affecting their socioeconomic conditions. Digital censorship is a clear example of such capability as it does not completely halt the spread of information, but instead makes the process more challenging. In these instances, citizens are typically either slightly burdened by or entirely unaware of the censorship and by and large only rally politically when major economic downturns destroy the view that their totalitarian leaders are competent (Guriev and Treismany 29). It is for this reason that nation state sovereignty cannot be seen to have been entirely diminished in today’s globalized, internet-led, and capitalist societies of control. Nation state sovereignty nowadays is more withdrawn, subliminal, and arguably just as in touch with reality as it has ever been. 40

To overview why that is the case in a more practical light, this paper will now utilize the historically censorship-ridden Egypt as a case study for examining historical progressions in nation state sovereignty and its relation to the internet.

41

Think like an Egyptian, Rule like a Pharaoh: Egypt, Censorship, and Nation State Sovereignty

Media has historically had an important role to play in any nation state. As previously alluded to, the rise of the newspaper in the eighteenth century contributed to the formulation of an imagined national identity for citizens around the world. By the time bio-politics reached its zenith at the end of World War Two through the wide spread of contrasting fascist and socialist ideologies, nation state use of media to sway the hearts and minds of citizens had grown commonplace. This was not just limited to authoritarian right-wing regimes such as Nazi Germany; it also extended to liberal and left-leaning governments across the globe (Turner, The Democratic Surround 214).

The world’s sociopolitical structures generally underwent considerable transformations in the mid-to-late 1940s. The end of World War Two brought with it an end to colonial European empiricism. Numerous anticolonial efforts began to take shape in Asia and Africa soon thereafter. As the movements grew, the role that the media was to play in independence efforts became a heavily contested topic among indigenous populations. Communal elites, often with strong ties to colonial rulers, were accustomed to loyal local press that continuously reaffirmed their societal authority (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 550). This was contrasted with popular demands for the media to serve the interests of all locals and for it to function as a platform for greater unity against colonial administrators. Media, in this sense, was a considerable source of fragmentation and marginalization in many colonies (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 551).

In Egypt, such incoherent media narrative was quickly stamped out of print after the 1952 Revolution brought the country its independence (Kalathil and Boas 120). Following a period of political turmoil post-revolution, the country was ruled by President Gamal Abdel Nasser up until 1970. A socialist with strong beliefs of pan-Arabism, Nasser nationalized the entirety of Egypt’s media sector in 1956 (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 551). The sovereignty of the country, in his mind, needed to be extended to every layer of society so as to build and affirm a post-colonial national identity. Media, which at the time consisted of the print press and a burgeoning radio industry, was to play a crucial role in educating the masses and spreading Egyptian hegemony across the Middle East. Nasser’s government hence did not censor the media as much as it owned nearly every facet of it. The national press celebrated Nasser’s many accomplishments at every turn and criticized his opponents relentlessly (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 551). 42

By the time Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat came to power in the early 1970s, state control over the media had been all that Egypt had known in its independent history. More westernized in comparison to Nasser, Sadat did not place much value on notions of socialism or pan-Arabism, instead electing to align the country with more liberal ideas and institutions. State control over the media was thus relaxed within his 11-year reign as Egyptian president. Crucially, his government’s legalization of the partisan press led to the emergence of independent media organizations within the country for the very first time (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 552). During Sadat’s tenure, Egyptian media, while still timid in its sociopolitical coverage, nonetheless retained noticeable agency over framing the country’s everyday narratives. Such setting mirrored the global nation state trend of relaxing control over media activities taking place in the 1970s.

After Sadat’s assassination in 1981 ascended Hosni Mubarak to the Egyptian presidency, media freedom seemed to be in good hands. Mubarak, who would end up ruling the country for three decades, showed promise from a media freedom standpoint at first, with his early years seeing increased liberties extended to newly formed private radio and television stations (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 552). Problematic, however, was the fact that restrictions on the terms of ownership of these outlets meant that Egyptian elites, with interests directly linked to the government’s, were the ones in control of the flow of information. Compounding the issue was that the number of employees working for the state-run Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) gradually began to swell up under Mubarak, with recent estimates showing that it is home to over 25 television channels and more than 40 thousand employees (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 551; Schwartz, Kaye, and Martini 19). Managed directly by the Minister of Information, ERTU has traditionally crowded out more independent opinions in the country. Its growth throughout the years in many ways went hand in hand with the ruling tactics employed by Mubarak’s regime.

A military man with a keen diplomatic mind, Mubarak led a government that consistently aimed to distance itself from explicit information filtration, rather relying on instilling self-censorship within all Egyptians (Kalathil and Boas 121). But this is not to say that formal censorship did not exist during his time in office; it did. Indeed, even though freedom of expression was a constitutional right in Mubarak’s Egypt, there were more than 35 articles in several laws that assigned penalties, including imprisonment, for journalism-related offences (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 552). The language used in these laws, ones that are still mostly enacted to this day, 43 is largely arbitrary. Perceived offences that individuals can face penalties for include instances when they might have criticized the president, published content that could be considered defamatory for the general public, or utilized anti-military rhetoric. The government is the one that gets to decide whether a particular case falls under any of these criteria. Treading lightly has thereby been consistently seen as the safest option for most Egyptians. In this sense, Mubarak’s government can be viewed to have imposed a strong self-censorship apparatus that in many ways continues to have an enduring legacy in present-day Egypt (Schwartz, Kaye, and Martini 22).

Notwithstanding such clandestine sovereign exertion, Mubarak’s reign did bear witness to the internet’s introduction to the country. In fact, Egypt was one of the first nation states in the Middle East to welcome the world of digital. Mubarak’s government first began to develop an informational infrastructure in 1985 as part of a modernization of Egypt’s telecommunication systems (Kamel and Hussein 2). The country’s internet connection was then set up in 1993 and has remained available ever since (Kamel and Hussein 6; Kalathil and Boas 122).

Unlike other nation states in the region that initially feared the medium’s emancipatory potential, Mubarak’s Egypt heavily promoted internet usage from the start. The enthusiasm for the online world primarily revolved around the economic possibilities that it was viewed to offer. The internet was seen to bring forth growth to the private sector as well as greater worldwide exposure to the tourism-reliant country, all without necessarily having any harmful political effects for the ruling regime (Kalathil and Boas 126). Upon its introduction, the internet was even provided on a trial, free-of-charge government subsidy to entice public and private organizations to venture into the new technology (Kamel and Hussein 7). The medium was viewed not only as a tool that could extend Egypt’s cultural hegemony regionally, but also as a means to advance the country’s historically stagnant economy through its information sharing.

Whereas digital censorship was limited at first, Egypt’s economic ties with some of its more conservative Middle Eastern neighbors gradually consolidated the country-wide tendency to sanitize published content (Schwartz, Kaye, and Martini 23). This propensity for self-censorship continued to grow as Web 2.0 brought a greater variety of websites to the global mainstream.

Despite his long autocratic rule of the country, Mubarak was hardly ever criticized within the national media. The industry, by and large, continued to be a tool utilized by his regime to 44 mislead the public and spread propaganda (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 553). Fears of religious extremism and malicious oppositional movements were the two main cited causes for the government’s oppressive media tactics, ones that saw it cut stories from local and Egypt-based foreign media — both online and offline — whenever deemed fit (Kalathil and Boas 121).

The Egyptian government had control over several crucial channels of the nationwide flow of information through its tacit set-up of what could be considered a modern-day panopticon that prevented popular dissent from gaining momentum. What Mubarak’s regime failed to account for, however, were the external contagion effects that had increased in influence both within Egypt and across the world as Web 2.0 began to truly take form. That authoritative misstep would contribute greatly to bringing the 30-year autocracy down as part of the Arab Spring.

Indeed, Mubarak’s rule began to approach its conclusion after an internet-driven revolution in Tunisia brought down the similarly totalitarian 24-year regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in early 2011. The Egyptian public quickly took notice. Millions of Egyptians started utilizing social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, to not only connect and organize protests, but to also solicit advice from their Tunisian counterparts on how to deal with governmental tactics aiming to squash any possible uprising (Tufekci 854). Whereas censoring specific websites or media outlets might have been relatively commonplace, justifying the need to restrict access to popular, user-based social media giants was a different matter altogether.

Social media would only grow more prominent as the revolution raged on. Demonstrators utilized the platforms to organize protests and spread critical information about them in a timely fashion. The Egyptian government, on the other hand, failed to extend its repressive or propaganda-based tactics to these large online platforms (Stepanova 2). Facebook and Twitter provided avenues for information sharing in areas that traditional media outlets had limited access to and generally expanded what could be considered public spaces in the country (Tufekci 857; El-Issawi and Cammaerts 555). Despite the governmental decision to briefly cut off nearly all nationwide communication channels — both telephone and internet — in an effort to stifle the protests, the damage had been done (Stepanova 2). The internet had broken the Egyptian self- censorship barrier. After two-and-a-half weeks of protests, Mubarak’s government was ousted. 45

In the transitional period that followed, media censorship was virtually non-existent around the country. Government officials began to be challenged at unprecedented rates across all mediums — even within state-run media (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 552). Private local media considerably grew in size during that time as well. This newfound period of media liberation continued after Mohamed Morsi’s Islamist government won the 2012 presidential elections. Remarkably perhaps given the country’s history, most mainstream media organizations consistently attacked Morsi with little regard to any possible state-mandated retaliation (El-Issawi and Cammaerts 557). A few journalists were put on trial for their publicized opinions, but Egypt’s general media climate was nevertheless in its freest iteration during this post-revolution presidency. Morsi’s reign would only last for a year, however, being ended by a military coup d’état in 2013.

After another interim period, current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi assumed office in 2014. A military strongman, el-Sisi quickly moved to reinstate media censorship in Egypt. Arrests of journalists continued, and private local media outlets unabashedly reverted to praising the government at every turn (Schwartz, Kaye, and Martini 17; El-Issawi and Cammaerts 557).

The legal framework currently used by the government to censor the media is largely similar to the one that was utilized by Mubarak’s government. The Ministry of Culture has the authority to censor any visual or audiovisual material “to protect the public system, morals, and the higher interests of the state” (Schwartz, Kaye, and Martini 15). This means that whereas the Egyptian government does not explicitly censor the internet nowadays, it still routinely performs a number of crackdowns on what it considers inappropriate uses of the medium (Kalathil and Boas 106).

Moreover, the continued use of the internet by international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to make public criticisms of the Egyptian government’s alleged human rights violations further contributes to the view that the media arena could present hazardous outcomes for el-Sisi (Kalathil and Boas 127). The Egyptian government has blocked the websites of both international organizations. The two are part of the estimated 500 websites blocked in Egypt as of February 2018, per Freedom House. While self-censorship is still largely prevalent in the country, el-Sisi’s government has also opted for a take-no-prisoners approach to its sovereign authority digitally possibly out of fear of a second internet-driven revolution. 46

Egypt’s digital ecosystem, while democratically problematic in this sense, is far from unique when viewed as part of the greater Middle Eastern regional setting. The almost indiscriminately authoritarian bloc is home to censorship practices across the board, with few exceptions. At the heart of it all are governmental fears that the internet could provide avenues for unwanted notions, liberal or western ideals for instance, to gain traction and pose a threat to ruling regimes’ sovereignties (Warf 12; Kalathil and Boas 103). Historically autocratic, the Middle East has generally been a region where local governments have utilized carefully manipulated discourse to censor the flow of information on the internet. The covert practices are broadly excused on grounds of protecting Islamic values against allegedly conspiratorial western decadence and frivolity (Warf 12). Overtly secular messages relating to religion or sexuality are continuously subjected to aggressive censorship in most of the region’s nation states (Schwartz, Kaye, and Martini 16). Combined with lower-than-average literacy rates and a historically dominant oral culture that does not encourage putting new ideas into writing, such practices have traditionally made information a commodity that is primarily controlled by the Middle East’s ruling classes (Kalathil and Boas 105). The region has consequently been home to considerable anti-western conspiracy theories that nation states have frequently used to consolidate their power over majorly unsuspecting citizens throughout the years. Democratic and liberal notions are routinely framed as western attempts to exert undue influence over unsuspecting citizens that governments can only protect through a media censorship shield. The internet has thereby been mainly used to its full potential by regional elites with a vested interest in upholding the status quo (Kalathil and Boas 129). In addition, the economic arena has consistently been highlighted as the medium’s most significant playground (Kalathil and Boas 131). Information, in this sense, has been traditionally and subliminally demarcated as not having much value outside the workplace.

The Arab Spring of 2011 was the first major turning point in the region’s relationship with the internet. Along with bringing down the long-ruling regimes of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and others, the wave of revolutions not only contributed to encouraging non-violent forms of mass political protest, but also presented citizens with a reminder of the power that alternative, non-state- controlled channels of information could have (Stepanova 6; Kalathil and Boas 105). While several governments such as el-Sisi’s Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey have responded by subliminally promoting self-censorship through a slew of public crackdowns on online activists, there is now a general regional understanding that no nation state will remain 47 truly immune to the impact of information and communication technologies such as the internet (Kalathil and Boas 103; Stepanova 3). In spite of its failure to engrain long-term democracy into the Middle East, the Arab Spring has thus still had a significant impact on both the ways that the region’s inhabitants think of themselves and on how political authorities attempt to govern them.

One only needs to look at internet penetration rates for proof. These metrics are significant in digital censorship analyses as the lower they are, the more easily controlled the internet generally is (Warf 6). The medium’s growth into a ubiquitous tool has seen a noticeable link emerge between its range of coverage and the democratic possibilities that it theoretically offers (Rød and Weidmann 342). While internet studies have shown no definitive correlations between penetration rates and the intensity of social movements in the Middle East, there has nevertheless been a recent significant uptick in internet usage in the region, which is to say that the medium has at least grown more difficult to control through censorship practices (Stepanova 3; Warf 7).

In Egypt, the number of internet users totaled nearly 50 thousand in the beginning of 1997 (Kamel and Hussein 7). At the end of 2000, the country had 450 thousand. By 2010, Egypt had about 17 million users (Stepanova 2). Today, it is estimated that over 50 percent of the country’s population, around 50 million, uses the internet. With Egypt’s penetration rate approaching its full potential, digital censorship practices might prove less effective in maintaining state control over the flow of information. This is to say that the ruling regime’s sovereign authority might well be compromised should the public turn its attention away from individuated self-censorship.

As previously touched upon, Egypt has historically been a nation state where media is constantly used to defend ruling regimes rather than to question them. And whereas many citizens utilized social media to help bring down Mubarak’s regime during the Arab Spring, the total number of identifiable Twitter and Facebook users merely numbered a few thousand, possibly signifying that the revolutionary role of these connective platforms might have been somewhat overemphasized (Stepanova 4). This implies that the impact of the internet in shaping the country’s sociopolitical settings might only be beginning to scratch its surface. As internet penetration rates rise, that impact might grow and pose challenges to the sovereignty of el-Sisi’s ruling regime. Conversely, increased individuation could cause citizens to fear governmental tracking of their digital activities, in the process limiting the scope of potential collective actions. 48

Neoliberalism’s global influence looms large in this respect. Through the internet, citizens nowadays have the capacity to individually report on some of the everyday realities — what goes on in a school or a police station for example — that have been traditionally missing from popular media arenas (Deleuze and Foucault 4). And yet, those same citizens are often more bound to maximizing their self-interests, which could be compromised through the internet’s facilitation of governmental tracking of their activities. Here, neoliberalism does not repress sociopolitical actions aimed at arriving at a greater communal good as much as it delimits their importance by making citizens better served at prioritizing their individual interests (Read 13).

The capitalist attention economy is a crystallization of that neoliberal influence. A digital environment that deals in individual attentions not only consistently presents scenarios where internet users have limited agency in authoring their online narratives, but also emphasizes a form of short-term thinking whereby self-interest in the present trumps any potential long-term collective gains. Digital players are aware of that shift and have recently grown in influence vis- à-vis nation states. Through that lens, Srnicek’s previously outlined view that large online platforms’ portrayal of themselves as empty user spaces can be read as a representation of a modern-day politics is largely apt in describing today’s globalized climate (47).

The current strength of this politics in relation to the one characterizing the authorities of nation states is that it has been built primarily on capitalist intentions from the get-go. The impact of the internet’s reconstitution of individuals as users is crucial in this respect for providing digital conglomerates with bio-power capabilities through online profiling as well as subjecting persons to an insatiable chase for information as part of the attention economy (Bratton 260; Zuboff 82). These are the new political settings that nation states have to navigate nowadays.

Deleuze and Guattari’s view that modern politics is inherently inseparable from capitalist desires fits neatly in analyzing this sociopolitical metamorphosis. The clearly defined enclosures of disciplinary societies had largely drawn a clear distinction between the economic and political arenas insofar as the juridical sovereignty of a nation state had little impact on the activities of the factory. The fluid nature of the societies of control has contrastingly blurred the two to a great extent. Through its dynamic subjugation of the minds through undefined enclosures, the societies of control have heightened the scope of capitalism by making it more intangible, culminating in today’s attention economy. That process has left the traditional bio-power 49 capacities of nation states at a fairly perilous condition. Digital censorship of the internet has proven somewhat effective in attempting to fill that sovereign void, but heightened globalization as well as the rise of technologies such as VPNs have so far ensured that the practice has been less effective than past propaganda-based nation state endeavors. New capitalism-driven technological advancements are likely to diminish its influence even further in the future.

The Egyptian case is unique in this regard due to the consistent sovereignty that has marked it in its independent history. Unlike those of many nation states in the global west, the social contract binding Egyptians to their state has not been built on any totality of citizen desires, instead revolving around more disciplinarian and authoritative notions from the get-go. The only outlier throughout the years has been the brief three-year period between Mubarak’s internet-driven ousting in 2011 and el-Sisi’s rise to the Egyptian presidency in 2014. In spite of that timeframe’s democratic promise, the country reverted to a more familiar totalitarian climate in its immediate aftermath in a possible indication that Egyptians might not view democracy as a crucial element of their individual wellbeing. Such stance could have arisen from the country’s deeply engrained self-censorship culture, one that has limited the possibility of opening up the communication channels needed for democracy to flourish. The internet’s growing importance within the country might change that in the long run, but it seems more likely that Deleuze’s idea that democracy is secondary to the economy in most nation states will prove more applicable to the Egyptian case (Patton 401). There do exist, however, several socioeconomic sovereign challenges for el-Sisi’s regime that the internet might prominently highlight in the future.

As aforementioned, the increased global emphasis on individuals has seen disciplinary societies’ industrial capitalism uprooted by more fluid and mediated forms of economic life. This transformation has not only led to the broad displacement of production by leisurely consumption as the chief element of individual identity formation but has also meant that labor can now be framed as any activity that strives to reach a desired end (Binkley 17; Read 8). For individuals to be able to freely form their own identity and engage in self-interested activities, an array of equally valid lifestyle choices is hence necessary (Binkley 16). It is safe to say that this is not the case in el-Sisi’s Egypt. The historically conservative nature of the country coupled with its propensity to self-censor have served to limit citizens’ ability to define their living conditions in an unconstrained fashion throughout the years. And whereas no consequent sociopolitical 50 difficulties have arisen thus far, growing internet penetration could provide motivation for citizens to start considering the exchange value of their social contract with the state. The economic interests involved are considerable and are likely to become even more pronounced in the future as the attention economy heightens the amount of information being spread online.

Digital censorship is not a permanent solution here but is rather a stopgap option at best for maintaining the nation state’s sovereignty. Just as much as the government can theoretically control what citizens read, see, and listen to on the web, it also has to account for new practices seeking to evade that control in a continuously evolving cat-and-mouse game (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 143; Warf 7). Problematic for the nation state in this sense is that, upon its publishing, digital media is always somewhere even if it does not appear to be accessible at first (Chun 95). A real long-term challenge to any nation state’s sovereignty then is providing citizens with as full of a range of individuated choices for them to select from as possible, with digital censorship unlikely to entirely cloud the full scope of possible options in this respect.

Another sovereign challenge for el-Sisi’s regime that is emblematic of that which face many nation states in today’s attention economy is copyright. In Egypt, state-mandated censorship has combined with a weak legal infrastructure for protecting intellectual property to pose problems for artists and creative industries. There is a limited number of laws for safeguarding intellectual property, particularly digitally, and the few ones that are there are rarely enforced by the judicial system (Schwartz, Kaye, and Martini 25). As a result, copyright infringement is rampant. Self- interested citizens seeking to creatively utilize the digital world to obtain greater socioeconomic standing are as such confronted by a systemic governmental failure to protect their rights.

Intellectual property has always presented various regulatory difficulties in this perspective, but capitalism’s move towards a zero-sum attention economy is likely to further exacerbate the issue. This is to say that the subliminal subjugation of human minds in today’s societies of control has placed a premium on dynamic capitalist relations that nation states have to pay a great deal of attention to if they are to not lose any sovereign authority to digital conglomerates that typically better understand — particularly in today’s attention economy — the value of creative production. Neoliberalism is after all not just a system built on protecting individual freedoms; it is also one that governs people, corporations, and nation states through a unified zero-sum logic 51 of competing interests (Read 13). Finding a permanent solution for copyright infringement is thus paramount for the sovereignty of Egypt and other nation states in the long run.

It bears mentioning here that today’s global sociopolitical climate is on the whole constrained by a greater volume of divergent interests than it had at any other point in the past. The considerable influence of large online players as well as the mental subjugations of the societies of control and the attention economy have presented nation states with a large array of interests that they need to cater to in efforts to retain their sovereignties. The internet exemplifies that difficulty insofar as it serves as a melting pot of cultural, economic, and political interests that combine with one another to determine how the medium may be used (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 139).

As the world’s foremost Deleuzian social machines, nation states are the ones chiefly tasked with justly regulating the medium. Doing so is easier said than done, though, given that it wrongly frames sovereign power as a simple matter of interest when, in reality, there are many other varieties of it at work in any given point in time (Buchanan, Deleuze and Politics 16). Citizens and businesses could perceive regulatory efforts as instances where power is exercised to the overall detriment of the nation state, which is, historically speaking, a sociopolitical recipe for sovereign disaster (Deleuze and Foucault 4). The individuated nature of today’s world simply means that it is harder than ever for any consensus to be reached on matters of national interest.

It is for this reason that bloody regimes, with el-Sisi’s Egypt being a noteworthy example, remain plentiful in a globalized world that is largely in agreement on the importance of human rights (Guriev and Treismany 2). In these instances, ruling regimes claim exception to the constitutional carrot by advocating for the necessity of the authoritative stick in maintaining their sovereignties. And despite the fact that political violence is often considered an indicator of governmental incompetence, the list of instances where it has led to popular uprisings on its own, without the presence of economic downturns, is a short one. Deleuze and Guattari’s view that human rights have always been secondary to capitalism is poignant in this respect (Patton 404).

Authoritarian leaders that utilize violence to maintain their sovereign authority do so knowing full well that the economic arena is what will ultimately make or break their regimes. While such measures could see governments perceived as being incompetent at first, there is evidence that extended time in office could allow them to be viewed as competent in the long run, thereby 52 diminishing the possibility of being overthrown (Guriev and Treismany 4). Much like how time could equal money for individuals in the attention economy, it is also valuable in today’s sociopolitical climate in that it reinforces the prioritization of stability over democracy.

All of which illustrates that, despite its changing nature, nation state sovereignty is still alive and well in today’s societies of control. The internet, as seen through Egypt, has presented challenges thus far and is likely to combine with neoliberal individuation to produce even more sovereign difficulties down the road. And yet, the organizational prowess of nation states is likely to remain virtually unrivaled in the near future given that no better alternative exists for regulating a global market of self-interested subjects than an imaginary symbol that derives its power from a totality of communal desires. While a societies of control enclosure in this respect, nation states are a modulated structure that will survive as long as capitalism requires it to. The link between the two is what determines what media forms come to exist after all (Chang, Himelboim, and Dong 142). The internet was not an exception to that when it was conceived. For it to prove to be one moving forward would be for its main players to, much like nation state sovereignty nowadays, find a way to claim exception to the rules of the capitalist game of thrones.

53

Conclusion

This paper sought to investigate if digital censorship can be considered an attention economy extension of the societies of control. The research utilized particularly aimed to study the practice from a nation state sovereignty perspective to overview the interrelated nature of the changes affecting the world’s main social, economic, and political structures.

The societies of control, having been superimposed on the more clearly defined closed environments of disciplinary societies, primarily subject the mind through seemingly unending enclosures. These subliminal subjugations, this paper found, have combined with the internet to provide fertile ground for intangible developments in the globe’s dominant neoliberal capitalist model of socioeconomic governance to take hold. As a result, the world today features a greater emphasis on individuality than at possibly any other previous point in history.

This has posed several difficulties for the sovereignties of nation states, which are now challenged not only by hegemonic digital players that have the ability to alter the behaviors of individuals in capitalism’s ongoing attention economy phase, but also by self-interested citizen desires that do not place as much of a value on the imagined symbol of a nation that was so crucial to state power within disciplinary societies.

Several nation states around the world, as shown in the Egyptian case, have attempted to stem these perceptually troublesome tides through both censoring the internet and instilling self- censorship within citizens as part of attempts to control the flow of information within their borders. These endeavors are somewhat different from previous censorship efforts in that they are less obviously restrictive and binary, instead revolving more on tacit attempts at controlling citizen behaviors. While somewhat successful in some instances, these tactics are unlikely to prove effective in the long run given the competitiveness of the capitalist attention economy. The gradual commoditization of information as well as the rising importance of diversified individual thinking are both critical in this respect.

Whereas modern nation states can thereby be conceptually viewed as overextended Deleuzian enclosures and social machines, their regulatory authorities are still likely to be the ones to move the world forward given the absence of any other viable alternative for governing the contradictory flows of capitalism. Nation state sovereignty, as shown in this paper, has in this 54 sense not been weakened as much as it has been made more subliminal, withdrawn, and in touch with political and economic realities within the societies of control.

To ensure that their sovereign power is maintained long term vis-à-vis the internet and its dominant global players, nation states will need to primarily account for neoliberal capitalist features that have both encouraged competition between individuals, companies, and governments as well as changed the nature of the implicit social contract tying citizens to their states to have it revolve around exchange value.

The influence of the societies of control here has been combining with neoliberal ideals to turn nation states into drivers of the capitalist engine that, while in command of the steering wheel through their sovereignties, are nevertheless increasingly bound to the roads constructed by the economic system’s desires. The internet might continue to add hurdles along the journey, but the roadblocks are all navigable so long as attention and control are exerted to set a sovereign path to an imaginatively enclosed destination beyond the end of history.

55

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