You like your cell-phone; your laptop; your webmail, your iPad, your credit card? You do? Good. You can pay your bills, check your bank accounts, communicate with relatives and friends, move money from point A to B, pull out cash from ATMs digitally. You can combine multiple digital platforms, create synergies, carry hundreds of books in your briefcase, buy tickets, check-in electronically, search databases, check medical records, notch fliers’ miles, log on to Facebook, tweet etcetera. You can be uber connected and uber social.
Man was never so free, you say, enjoying the spring in your gait. It’s just fantastic. We have all experienced this feeling. I remember mine, four years ago, when, sitting in a bus and going to Colonial Williamsburg, I was gchatting real-time on BlackBerry with my colleague Qasim Nauman, at his work-desk in Lahore, discussing that day’s articles. There was a definite wow feeling about it.
But are we really freer as a result? Michel Foucault answered this question in 1975 in the negative. We are not. The digital processes that make life so easy also mean Orwell’s Big Brother is watching us every moment of our lives. Being with a cell-phone can often be less secure than not having it.
The Soviets, as someone said during the Cold War, were in the habit of visiting “friendly” countries in tanks and APCs. Generally, their tourist activity went well for them, the only exception being Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a hauntingly beautiful place but the Soviet excursion’s failure, among other reasons, had much to do with the inability of the Afghan state to trace its own citizens. And when you can’t trace everyone, you can’t be very effective.
Soviet Union was, of course, a totalitarian state. The Big Brother had an overt, oppressive presence. This is why the free world decided to fight it in the name of freedom. Democracy, free-market economy, modern schooling, medical facilities, food chains, free media, free judiciary, social networking and social media – this template is supposed to be the antithesis of the Big Brother approach. Perish that thought. The covert, subtle Big Brother is worse than the overt, in-your-face one. Covert control is more effective because all contribute to strengthening the Big Brother – and happily too.
Every digital platform we use allows us to be tracked. Every document, every national ID Card, every car registration, every title document, puts us in the spotlight. The only way one can lose oneself is by losing one’s electronic signature.
Britain has been rocked by the phone-hacking scandal; some top officials have resigned. Others, as inquiries proceed, will be put through the wringer. The UK parliament had to convene a special session and the British prime minister had to face tough questions. Ethical questions have been raised. Like all such questions, they are complex and the answers lead to their own sets of questions. Drawing lines is always difficult. The collusion of media, big business, politicians, and the police is a problem that continues to recrudesce like bad eczema. Why?
Because people are more traceable than before; because such collusion cannot be eradicated even as we try to control it; because controls can always be bypassed (with new technologies); because tackling an unbridled media can always lead to calls and measures for unnecessary controls; because it is difficult to figure out who should control whom when, as in the case of the current scandal, everyone seems to have been on the nude beach at least once; because competition is in man’s nature and some are more ferocious about it than others; because there are no final solutions.
But most of all, as it should be noted, the exercise of power and influence has taken a different form, more insidious than when King Louis XV decided to make a spectacle of Robert-François Damiens on the charge of attempted regicide, the scene which opens Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. That culture of spectacle is no more, except where the Taliban rule. The modern state creates the carceral system, Bentham’s Panopticon which allows for “unequal gaze”. The human body is no more the site of conflict between the masses and the sovereign. Instead, we have docile bodies, disciplined institutionally and for particular purposes, Auden’s unknown citizen.
This is an egalitarian set-up. In many ways even those who rule are as much a part of the carceral system as the ruled. The Big Brother is now pervasive. It now resides in our cell-phone, credit card, webmail, laptop, and other gizmos, handheld and desktop.
But the best part of this system is our belief that we are free! The point is not to say that what we have does not bring us multiple conveniences. It does. But it would be gullibility at its most gullible to think that what we have has a greater moral value and offers us greater liberté, égalité, fraternité, the ideals for which France went through its convulsions.
We take too much for granted. Free-this and free-that is what we are constantly striving for. There’s always a sense that each battle is gaining us more freedoms. That is only partly true, if at all. Foucault was incisive in identifying the trajectory from the spectacle to the carceral but in attempting to escape the latter he got it horribly wrong when he supported the Iranian revolution.
That’s the paradox. Everything can be problematised. And if that is correct then what guarantee is there that by some miracle man shall arrive at a point where he will be truly free? Yet, for the purpose of ordering our existence, individual and collective, we need to have baselines. We even defend them. And when we do, we also imply coercion.
Defend them we must because order is important. But to reduce complexities to linearity is to lose sight of subtleties. The worst offender in this regard is the media, television being the new deity that resides in Hades. That’s the negative side of just one freedom for you, dear reader. Thank you!
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.