We are living in a society of control. It is not an exaggeration to say that today our imagination, thinking and expression is controlled . It seems these controls are automated because of the AI and therefore, it also appears that we cannot automate our way out of the traps of these machines that seek to impose themselves as totality. We are conditioned by such a thinking because we think that our liberation lies on the other side of this invasion of automation and surveillance. It is in this manner, that we are controlled of the possibilities of revolt against the systems of control.
This is why, we have the challenge to reverse-engineer our way to freedom from the society of control. We need to begin with philosophy that will become a weapon that is aimed at the order of things. A philosophy of escape is not itself an escape but to transform our world, we have to transform the way we conceive it. This means we have to work to create conceptual weapons against the order of things. Anything else is nothing more than a collaboration.
We need to arise above the techstasy that is taking us into a world without limits that we may describe as cyberia. We have been using machines. We were flyborgs. But now machines are entering our bodies. We are already seeing implantations and bionic augmentation. We are fast becoming cyborgs. We almost becoming disembodied and are celebrating our condition as an escape from the limits of our body. Some say that the meat is coming out of itself. The prison will soon be reimagined as a wireless ankle monitors, hospitals and health care will be health checking apps and the school will be endless online classes to be taken at one’s leisure.
We seem to have reached the final frontier where life is fast being automated out of living. To access this life, we have to provide ourself a name or a code which divides us into various ‘accounts’ of ourselves. We have become dividuals and no longer individuals. Our data feed creates a database and it may know more about ourselves than we do. We are put under the gaze of surveillance and are being policed and thrown into predictive analysis. This analysis is a face-recognizing technology. It gives us a face and sells it to the highest bidder.
How are we to revolt against this oppression? How are we to disable our very own exploitation? We can do so by understanding the thermostatics of society of control. Society of control collects our data through various technologies of surveillance. We have freedom not outside of these systems but within the systems. Since these systems are machinic. That is. They take a certain kind of input to produce an output. In societies of control they take our inputs that become raw data to produce our digital profiles. It is in this production of digital profile that we can stage our revolt by taking control over our input to the systems of surveillance.
We can use our namelessness or anonymity to disrupt the input/ output of the surveillance machines and lead them astray. Besides, we can also detach and deactivate ourselves so that we live what may be called cyber disobedience. It is a kind of sabotage and withdrawal. We have to do all these operations collectively. This new form of community and new form of solidarity with new points of rest and car thus activate new forms of blockade that suffocates the cyber capital flow. Think about senor that reads the sugar of type 1 patient of diabetics to inject insulin. If the sensor gets wrong reading, it will inject insulin also wrongly. This is what we have to get the data feeds to do. It is in our hands and we can escape the tyranny of the digital gaze by using the same for our advantage. We can cultivate ourselves away from the delimitation of data analytics by refusing to become objects of data. By producing wrong feed-back, we can also disrupt and disorient predictive analytics that seeks to pre-empt and control our self-production.
The challenge is to become imperceptible to the eye of surveillance. Becoming imperceptible is a position of strength. We can become imperceptible by not becoming predictable. Hence, we have to resist the lures and temptations of the digital world. in this sense, our data that is picked up by surveillance technologies become noise. Noise it is unclassifiable. We cannot be buddled into some or the other digital profile/ identity to be sold. Therefore, we do not have any designer self-production to suit the market. What is regarded as noise can become a spark for revolution. Thus, what the slave master regarded as simply noise of the slave went on to become a cry for the liberation of the slave. Thus, the accumulation of noise might explode cyber capitalism that is feeding on the data that we leave while using cyber services in the web.
Going astray from the Web is a value. We do not have to conform to the ways of the web. We can produce our selves differently. Thus, going astray is freedom. It can neutralize the apparatus of our oppression and exploitation. Instead of becoming docile-bodies and minds , we have the challenge to rebel and revolt against regime of power that has its gaze on our bodies and mind. Thus, against this normalizing apparatus of power, we have the challenge to embrace rebellious and insurgent ways of being in the worlds of the web. Instead of being objects of policing surveillance, we have to learn to self-police ourselves to resist from falling into the traps of worlds of the web. This other life is a new way of being human in our world. Going astray is embracing that other life, the other way of being human.
