The internet would seem to be the perfect mechanism of the control society. The reduction of (online) behavior to information makes its control nearly effortless. When we create online characters we do the work of fragmentation and reduction to ourselves, we molecularize ourselves, and succumb ourselves to the framework of whatever range of options we’re offered. Eve points out that the internet doesn’t erase the experience of living raced simply by replacing real-life visuality with whatever fragments are offered up, and that this experience in certain ways bleeds through. If our goal is to understand one another as humans, I think we should probably just talk to each other. My online persona and your online persona can have a ball, but if anything the more time I spend looking at a screen the worse I’m going to be at having a real conversation with a person. Having a conversation means gaining some insight into a person’s experience and finding ways to relate to it.
If Deleuze’s control society makes honest human conversation more difficult or more rare in the way that it structures our lives, then our resistance to this must lie in part in building (non-virtual) communities, and building structures that sustain these communities.
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