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On the Societies of Control, Attention Economy, Nation State Sovereignty, and Digital Censorship

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On the Societies of Control, Attention Economy, Nation State Sovereignty, and Digital Censorship 1 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
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