"Every keystroke, each mouse click, every touch of the screen, card swipe, Google search, Amazon purchase, Instagram, 'like,' tweet, scan -- in short, everything we do in our new digital age can be recorded, stored, and monitored. Every routine act on our iPads and tablets, on our laptops, notebooks, and Kindles, office PCs and smart-phones, every transaction with our debit card, gym pass, E-ZPass, bus pass, and loyalty cards can be archived, data-mined, and traced back to us. Linked together or analyzed separately, these data points constitute a new virtual identity, a digital self that is now more tangible, authoritative, and demonstrable, more fixed and provable than our analog selves. . . . today every single digital trace can be identified, stored, and aggregated to constitute a composite sketch of what we like, whom we love, what we read, how we vote, and where we protest."
You may want to read that opening paragraph of this important book again! Bernard E. Harcourt is the founding director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University. With large stores of intellectual energy and insight, the author exposes the social, political and technical features of "The Expository Society" where we are endlessly caught up in our digital existence.
On a day-by-day basis, we thoughtlessly give away information about ourselves by shopping online, depositing a check on our phone, reading an e-book, sharing details of our intimate lives on Facebook, displaying our resume on personal websites, and delineating our political perspective on virtual walls and digital protest sites. In most cases, people are unaware of the risks of digital transparence as gathered by corporate surveillance and the data mining programs of social media, Internet, and retail giants.
Some have described our present situation as a playing out of George Orwell’s Big Brother while others talk about the surveillance state or Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Harcourt probes these metaphors and draws out their relevance to digital pleasures. In a poignant chapter on "The Eclipse of Humanism," he maps the shift from a reverence for privacy to a delimitation of this virtue into a commodity that can be traded, bought, or sold. In another section, Harcourt assesses the perils of digital exposure to the state, economy, and society. He also probes "the mortification of the self" wherein we feel that we have nothing to hide and that surveillance is the price we pay for the advanced technology that is improving our lives.
Harcourt closes with a heady section on digital disobedience where he charts the state of virtual democracy and the options available to those who are not willing to capitulate to those who are rendering us virtually transparent. For those who choose to follow such a path, it takes a potent mix of courage and ethical fiber to go against the tide of our new digital landscape where acquiescence is the name of the game.
