Han: The Dictatorship of Transparency

Byung Chul Han   Psychopolitics: Ch. 1 Part 3: The Dictatorship of Transparency

Social Media as The Digital Panopticon 

“Today, unbounded freedom and communication are switching over into total control and surveillance.”

“Jeremy Bentham’s [and Foucault’s] panopticon isolated inmates from each other for disciplinary purposes and prevented them from interacting. In contrast the occupants of today’s digital panopticon actively communicate with each other and willingly expose themselves.”  (p. 8)

Han approaches the problem of surveillance from the perspective of the consumer who volunteers for self-exposure. Tech critics like Shoshana Zuboff and Jaron Lanier examine the surveillance problem from the point of view of the companies that engineer the habituation to self-exposure.

In Psychopolitics (and in later texts), Han is contrasting Foucault’s surveillance and control of the body, under ‘disciplinary society’, with the surveillance of the mind, the surveillance of one’s interior being or ‘soul’ under neoliberal capitalism. This is achieved through multilayered digital surveillance systems that extract behavioral data, and the voluntary exposition of the interior self through social media. This is Han’s ‘psychopolitics’. 

Zuboff examines this process in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2020). In her study of tech giants Google, Facebook and Microsoft, she found that they mutated from ‘software service’ companies to ‘customer surveillance’ platforms. 

“There was a time when you searched Google. Now Google searches you.” (Zuboff, 2020, p. 261).

Zuboff argues that internet users are not just the ‘consumer’, and not merely the ‘product’ which is sold to advertisers: users are the ‘natural human resource’ that is mined for data. Google and other internet platforms have engineered a new means of production, the extraction of ‘behavioral surplus.’ Every time you visit or use one of these sites and services, the company extracts information about you, and rewards you, i.e. shapes your behavior, to return to those sites and services over and over again. This is what Zuboff calls ‘the extraction of behavioral surplus.’ (Zuboff, 2020). 

The extraction of behavioral surplus is accomplished in 4 stages, which Zuboff calls the “Dispossession Cycle”:

1. Incursion into undefended space; [ex. Google Street View, Uber]. Incursion occurs when tech companies enter and extract data from non-market places and interactions where people live. The company launches incursions until it encounters resistance. It then seduces the consumer into compliance with e.g. “free” services. When seduction is insufficient to overcome resistance, the company ignores, overwhelms or legally exhausts its adversaries. (Zuboff, p. 138). 

2. Habituation—The company continues to rapidly deploy and expand its extraction systems, faster than any government agency can regulate. [Uber] Consumers habituate to the incursion under duress, agreeing to one-sided contracts with platform services (contracts of adherence), phony promises of privacy, and resignation. “This is what I have to agree to if I want the “free” services.” (Zuboff, p. 139).

3. Adaptation—The company submits to minimal regulation and ‘consumer feedback’ to make the extraction process more bearable. (Zuboff, p. 139). The appearance of compliance with regulation and ‘legalese’ of privacy promises wears down consumer resistance. In a feedback loop, society ‘adapts’ to the new data environment by adopting software and technology that displace [disrupt] earlier methods of operation [fax machines displaced by email] with users having little regulation or control over the technology; instead, the technology controls the user. 

The company continues incursion and habituation until previous services are vacated, e.g. Uber, Lyft, moving into markets where public transit is failing due to poor planning and hostile transit policy, where taxi services are insufficient, and then replaces those services with the platform. e.g. “market disruption.” In part this process of disruption is successful because tech platforms have been financed with venture capital, massive debt capital at near-zero interest rates, even though few tech platforms have ever returned a profit. The abundant debt financing undercuts the price of previous services, such as buses and taxis, because they are unregulated and have lower overhead costs. 

4. Redirection—The company continues its iteration of marketing and design to shift from ‘service provision’ to advertising income and massive data collection at scale. (Zuboff, p. 139) Getting behavioral surplus to scale as quickly as possible [going viral] is the overriding goal of the tech company. Once the company has captured some aspect of consumer behavior, it “redirects” its technology to capture still more behavioral data, deploy more services, control more market share, and gets the consumer to comply with these new services. E.g. Not only did Google Street View capture the address and view of each house on a street, Google also captured the IP addresses of every household on the street, to track their data service. Moreover, Google Street View then shifted direction and used the Pokemon Go game to get users to map off-street locations. (see Zuboff, 2020).

Algorithms are designed to hook the user into repeated and prolonged use of the “free” services [e.g. Facebook], to be afraid not to participate because family and friends are using them [FOMO]. The consumer then becomes dependent on the services because the platform displaces previous services, such as the telephone [disruption] and becomes the primary way that friendly interactions occur. Even when social media platforms become a hellish experience of forced advertising, privacy invasion, control, and massive data extraction, it becomes extremely difficult to leave the platform [capture]. e.g. Facebook, Twitter/X. (see Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now 2019). 

The argument that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” (Lanier 2019) misses the point. Tech services are offered for free to capture and habituate your use of the product. Zuboff argues that the goal of tech platforms is not to get consumers per se, whether they pay or not; it is to get the “behavioral surplus” that it can extract from consumers and turn into it’s most valuable asset: your data. 

Once the tech platform has learned how to observe and capture your data, your digital behavior, it then actively shapes your behavior to return to the surveillance mechanism repeatedly and endlessly. Social media uses the psycho-addicting mechanism of random reinforcement—the same mechanism used by gambling casinos—which sporadically rewards your usage behavior, so you keep trying until you get the reward. (Lanier 2019). Zuboff describes in Ch. 10 “Make Them Dance” how behavioral surveillance has gone beyond the desktop computer and handheld device to embed digital detection systems in nearly every appliance in our homes (televisions, refrigerators), at work (email, keystrokes), and in the community (security cameras, supermarket checkouts). Lanier calls this process ‘behavior modification’. Tech companies not only want your data, they want to mold your behavior to conform to their systems of data extraction. (Lanier 2019).

So now back to Han and his focus on the “choice” to expose oneself through social media and other internet services, [e.g. profiles, interest check lists, media preferences, etc]. To be fair, Han is trying to situate the compulsion to ‘self-exploit’ in a larger context than just social media and tech platforms, that context being neoliberal capitalism. It’s not so much an attempt to ‘blame the user’, but to argue that neoliberalism developed the cult of the ‘self’ because it developed a market operation that profits from separating and isolating people, thus extracting more profit from each individual and their ‘connections’. Instead of ten people in an intergenerational household, who share goods and resources, neoliberalism steers each person towards a separate household, which multiplies the number of households and the sales that can be made to each one. The neoliberal ‘cult of the self’ then encourages people to voluntarily exploit their ‘freedom to realize oneself’, reducing any resistance to capitalist exploitation.

We can see from both sides of the equation—the tech companies’ aggressive drive to extract from the neoliberal subject, and the neoliberal subject’s voluntary self-exploitation—that both are operating together as a “Dictatorship of Transparency.”

Han calls this process “the neoliberal dispositive”: “turning everything inside out by force and transforming it into information.” (Han, p. 9), what Zuboff calls ‘the new means of production, i.e. ‘behavioral extraction.’ 

Han continues:

“Under the immaterial mode of production that now prevails, more information and more communication mean more productivity, acceleration and growth.” (p. 9))

Furthermore, this process of extraction can be expanded and accelerated almost endlessly:

“The dispositive of transparency effects utter exteriorization in order to accelerate the circulation of information and speed communication.” (p.. 9).

“The negativity of otherness or foreigners [or interiority] is de-interiorized and transformed into the positivity of communicable and consumable difference: ‘diversity.’” (p. 9).

The terms ‘negativity’ and ‘positivity’ are highlighted here because Han uses these terms idiosyncratically and repeatedly throughout his philosophical essays. It’s important to understand what he means by “negativity”. It’s not a “bad thing”, it’s a negation of a social imperative, a refusal—to communicate, to work, to exploit, to be known by others; to have, display and exploit a self, and so on; but the ‘negativity’ can shift slightly depending on the context of the essay. In other texts, when speaking of the negativity of the foreigner, Han means the ‘unknown other’, the other whose interior being cannot be known. The negation of the other comes from Hegel’s definition of ‘negativity’, which is the “other” which reflects only itself, and does not affirm your identity; it thus negates you.

‘Positivity’ means compliance with the demands of neoliberal capitalism, in all the forms stated above. Han argues here and elsewhere that neoliberal capitalism induces excessive ‘positivity’, i.e. the compulsion to exploit oneself, to make oneself ‘marketable’, without regard to one’s social obligation to others. In other contexts, ‘positivity’ indicates the “Yes, we can” ethos: “I’m free to be whatever I choose to be—and I can be anything!” , i.e. ‘positivity’ in the conventional sense; what Han calls ‘achievement society’.

“Ultimately, openness [positivity] facilitates unrestricted communication—whereas closeness, reserve and interiority [negativity] obstruct it.” (p. 9).

Han relates this neoliberal imperative of transparency to his discussion of ‘neoliberal panopticon.’:

“The economy of transparency seeks to suppress deviation. Total networking—total communication —already has a leveling effect per se. Its effect is conformity: it is as if everyone were watching over everyone else. . . (p. 10, emphasis Han).

Then Han elaborates on the political implications of digital transparency:

Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics—in actively shaping the community. . .  They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or services they do not like.” (p. 10, emphasis Han).

This is a perfect description of ‘reactionary’ politics, whether it is reactionary on the right, left (or center). As Han states earlier in the chapter, isolated neoliberal ‘selves’ lack the capacity to participate in a communal, democratic process. 

However, it should be noted here that participation in a democratic process requires both ‘positivity’ and ‘negativity’. It requires both the positivity of communication with the public about the policy one seeks to advance; and the negativity (in the conventional sense) of stating what one objects to or wants to change. In this context, the democratic process can be seen as a ‘negotiation of the negative’, which requires the airing or exteriorizing of hidden or neglected dissatisfactions, conflict resolution and consensus. It is not the ‘negativity’ of refusing to participate. 

Later, when Han discusses the excessive ‘positivity’ of neoliberal politics, he is again referring to the excessive drive to communicate one’s reactions, beliefs, thoughts and feelings, regardless of the harm it might do to others. This is what gives rise to the extreme polarization of political views on social media platforms. Here again, we must take into account that tech companies engineered their social media platforms to induce rage, conflict and polarization, because it drives users back to the site over and over again, allowing ever more behavioral extraction. 

Han concludes the chapter by defining what he means by “psychopolitics””

“Today, we are entering an age of digital psychopolitics. It means passing from passive surveillance to active steering. As such, it is precipitating a further crisis of freedom: now, free will itself is at stake. Big Data is a highly efficient psychopolitical instrument that makes it possible achieve comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of social communication. This knowledge is knowledge for the sake of domination and control; it facilitates intervention in the psyche and enables influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level.” (pp. 11-12).

“Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states. Indeed, persons are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered. . . Big Data has announced the end of the person who possesses free will. (p. 12, emphasis Han). 

Here ‘positivity’ seems to refer to ‘positivism’, or the construction of empirical facts. ‘Positivity’ thus means the operation of turning one’s hidden interior being into an exterior “thing” which can be utilized by neoliberal capitalism. 

Han continues:

“Smartphones represent digital devotion—indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary… When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. . . Facebook is a church—the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital.” (p. 12, emphasis Han). 

Han often makes comparisons to religion in his discussion of psychopolitics. He sees digital psychopolitics as filing the vacuum caused by the ‘death of God’ (Nietzsche),the loss of religion and ritual; and the digital world as the new form of ‘transcendence” that encompasses one’s spiritual aspirations, and unity with a Big Other (Lacan): “Capital is a new God…” (Han, p. 8).