Everyday life is an empty signifier of Ernesto Laclau . It is a nodal point that somehow brings together Everything and makes life meaningful to us as individuals as well as communities. It is Jacques Lacan’s point de capiton. We can transcend everyday life and critically look at it. Yet we stay immersed in this stream of life that touches everything that we are. As the world became a global village, everyday life is on a continues dislocation or translocation. We seem to be unable to step in the same flow of everyday life again. We are living in an accelerated society. The speed of life is only on the increase. The speed of life has taken something beautiful away. Paul Virilio teaches us that speed is political. Unstoppable acceleration of our society makes the social elite experience the positives of speed where as those that fail to keep up with the speed are at a disadvantage. It has diminished our freedom and privacy. Internet has become second nature and is intruding into our everyday life without our fuller awareness.
Everything seems to be merging and coming together. We are finding a new simultaneity where space and time are merging. It allows us to work from home or cut global distances. Binaries like public and private are blurring. Although life is coming together, the new stream also scatters life and divide humanity. Big Tech has colonized our everyday life and there is no road to return back. It seems to be a one-way street. It is difficult to reverse, rewind and begin anew. Path is only leading further but it is not leading to integral human development. Each of us have become worker. We exploited and unpaid. We are proletarianized. The future is famine. Without offence to women, maybe we may have to contest this reduction. Like the patriarchal society , even males are feminized to become data producing like unpaid ‘reproductive laborers’.
Big Data monetizes our data producing everyday life and markets it for profit. We have to critically see feminism, labor and the digital world together. Our privacy is put on sale and paradoxically we ourselves have become its customers. It does affect everyone but does not affect everyone equally. It dehumanizes some more than others. Big Tech thus is a mixed bag. It also has emancipative potentials but can drive hatred, exclusion, misinform and polarization. We cannot lose sight of the emancipative potentials while we look at its poisonous fangs.
We cannot allow us to be enslaved by the Big Tech industry. Old feminist (1970s) adage that declares the personal as political can ignite our prophetic response. Personal is political. It is indeed relevant in our data extractivist digital age. This social media platforms engages us intimately and hence the personal space intersect with the public space. How we connect with ourselves, others and the world is deeply influenced by Big Tech. Although, the Big Tech enables us to connect and socialize, it also becomes a setting that brings about social scattering (individualization and polarization) . Social scattering affects how we associate alone and also do so along with others.
We, therefore, have the challenge to understand everyday life. Everyday life is not non-philosophical, innocent day to day life. It is not an uneventful, left over of time which is left after our productive engagement with the day. Everyday life thought this way remains undifferentiated and appears disorganized. Everyday life is not what remains outside our organized life. Thought in this manner, everyday life belongs mainly to the private sphere. But the Big Tech has broken this separation. The private is now public on the wings of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
No longer does the individual has the luxury of generating his /her private life as before. The private space, therefore, is not so private anymore. In fact, the public life is personalized by us. Thus, what was public has also become private. We do not have to go to the theaters to watch movies or universities to learn or to hotels to eat food. These public spaces have walked into our private life. This is why there is truth in what Mark Zuckerberg says, when he states : ‘the future is private’. But there is a catch. Our future is owned by private firms. It is owned by those who own Big Tech. While we access public life as private individuals, we leave our footprints on the internet enabling what is called the datafication of life. Thus, privatization of life in all its senses (also in the sense of it being controlled by Big Tech) goes hand in hand with datafication of life. Our everyday life is , therefore, not just privatized but is dataized.
Everyday life apparently gives us more freedom. We can be ourselves. Choose what we enjoy but the data driven world has eyes that sees. We are trapped in a panopticon and hence have the challenge to become Anti-Oculus who is ready to become a disassemblage that refuses the world of the spectacle offered by the Big Tech. The Big Tech is an machinic assemblage. It links us to people, culture and power. But we are enslaved and dataized when we link ourselves to the assemblage. We are continuously interpellated / called to join the assemblage. We are not just living in Disciplinary Societies of Michel Foucault but have come under the siege of Societies of Control of Gilles Deleuze.
Big Tech have become a post-State apparatus that controls us and remains outside the control of the state. It threatens to take the functions of the Government and disrupts the citizen- Government relations. Hence, these Big Tech platforms are used to influence political choices of the people. they are also employed to influence our political choices. Our private life is divided, digitized and quantified. This is why Deleuze rightly says we have moved from in-dividual to dividuals. In a digitized arena, we have become a human code that is sold to highest bidder who uses the same to influence our choices and divisions. This means our behavior as well as life is ordered and organized in accordance to the norms of the market. We have to therefore, be aware of the fantasy of good life that enslaves us. Becoming an Anti-Oedipus who is courageous enough to say no is the need of the hour. It is only then we maybe enabled to have control over our everyday life. Controlling everyday life enables us to take charge if our life.
