glossaLAB - User contributions [en]

Draft:Control society

2025-06-16T01:03:26Z

Christopher Scharnagl: abstract and sources

== Abstract ==
This article is about the “control society” - a description of society for the information age developed by the French philosopher Deleuze in 1990. The disciplinary society on which it is based and a few contemporary examples are also described.

== Background: Deleuze, Foucault and the disciplinary society ==
<ref>''Michel Foucault (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)''. (2022, August 5). <nowiki>https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/</nowiki></ref>

==== Deleuze ====
Gilles Deleuze was a well-known French philosopher who was born in Paris in 1925 and committed suicide in 1995 by jumping out of a window after a long period of lung disease. His texts are relatively abstract with a rather anarchistic way of thinking. He was sympathetic to the 1968 movement and taught at the reform university Paris 8, but he was not a classic political activist. He wrote a lot about other philosophers and reinterpreted them, but also about topics such as psychoanalysis or cinema.

==== Postscript on control societies ====
In his essay “Postscript on the control society” (1990), Deleuze writes about how capitalism and social structures have changed in the second half of the 20th century. He refers to Michael Foucault's concept of the “disciplinary society” and develops it further. The disciplinary society can be seen in institutions such as schools, factories and, above all, prisons. Deleuze sees these institutions in crisis after the Second World War: “we no longer belonged to disciplinary societies, we were about to leave them”. The disciplinary society is turning into the control society: a form of society with a seemingly liberal appearance.

==== Foucault ====
Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) was another famous French philosopher of the 20th century. Among other things, he criticized classical philosophy and humanists (such as Plato, Kant, Freud) for presenting their thoughts as timeless, universal truths. In reality, however, they turned out in retrospect to be influenced by the ideas, language and norms of the society of the time. He was not only ineterested in typical philosophical questions but also writes about homosexuality, violence and madness.

==== Surveillance and Punishment ====
In his book Surveillance and Punishment (1975), he describes the change in society after the French Revolution in terms of how criminals are punished and treated. Instead of analyzing the basic principles of a state by looking at the constitution or important political speeches, Foucault prefers to look at how criminals and prisoners are dealt with in practice:

He contrasts two methods of punishment: Robert-Francois Damiens attempted to assassinate the king in France in 1757. As punishment, he was publicly placed on a stage, then had skin torn from his body with rakes, his wounds filled with molten lead and then quartered. In this way, the king showed his power and ensured retribution. Foucault compares this to a prison 80 years later, after the French Revolution: the prisoners are locked up in a prison and there is a schedule to work and pray, mealtimes, times to wash their hands an face. The desire is not only to punish, but also to educate the criminal to become a better person. The prison is thus symbolic of an entire era: the transition from a “sovereignty society” to a “disciplinary society”. Why did this change develop in this way? For Foucault, not out of humanity, but: “to punish less, perhaps, but to punish better”

==== Panopticon ====
Another example Foucault gives of how modern disciplinary societies function is the panopticon: an ideal prison designed in the 18th century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Here, too, the aim was not only to punish the prisoners, but also to control and change their behavior through constant surveillance.

This works according to the following principle: an observation tower stands in the middle of a round building, with the cells around it. The guards can look out through slits without being seen themselves. For the inmates, this means that they never know whether they are being watched or not and therefore always behave in accordance with the rules.

==== Presidio Modelo ====
A concrete realization of this was the “Presidio Modelo” in Cuba, which was built in the 1930s under the dictator Gerardo Machado. Each building housed 465 cells for 1000 prisoners. There were no doors and every prisoner could be seen by everyone else; there was no privacy. Talking was forbidden in the canteen and a moat with crocodiles was built around the building to prevent escapes.

Fidel Castro also spent two years there before later sending political opponents to this place himself. After several hunger strikes and uprisings, the prison was finally closed and now serves as a museum.<ref>Science Channel. (2024, May 27). ''Cuba’s Abandoned Panopticon Prison | Mysteries of the Abandoned | Science Channel'' [Video]. YouTube. <nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h9Iy40bJ</nowiki></ref>

==== Disciplinary society ====
The panopticon symbolizes the typical exercise of power in a disciplinary society: primarily through observation and control. The aim is not to punish, but to educate and change behavior. To this end, the individual is first analyzed like a broken machine and then repaired. The control extends into the psyche: we begin to take an interest in the thoughts, motives and feelings of the offenders.

These mechanisms do not only affect offenders. They also have an effect at school, at work or in the family. For example, through school tests or in discussions about health in the workplace, often with the aim of maintaining performance.

== The control society ==
<ref>Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. ''October'', ''59'', 3–7. <nowiki>http://www.jstor.org/stable/7788280</nowiki>)</ref><ref>Lars Dreiucker Interviews. (2017, April 12). ''Lars Dreiucker Interviews, Joseph Vogl, 1.04.2017, Deleuze. Post scriptum, Wiederholung/ Revolution.'' [Video]. YouTube. <nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QddENsLFlI</nowiki></ref><ref>PlasticPills. (2020, July 23). ''Deleuze - Control Societies & Cybernetic Posthumanism'' [Video]. YouTube. <nowiki>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4Cq_-bLlY</nowiki></ref>

In his essay “postscript on the societies of control” (1990), Deleuze writes about the change from the industrial age of the 19th century to the [[Information society (preliminary)|information age]]: the “disciplinary society” becomes a “control society”.

==== From the factory to the company ====
Deleuze describes the social changes after the world war using various examples: “These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.” There has been a major change in the world of work: most people no longer work in factories, but in modern companies. By companies, Deluze primarily means service companies such as banks, software companies and consultancies, as opposed to companies that manufacture a real product in a factory.

Typical of work in a company is a certain instability (for example in the form of fixed-term contracts or changing projects) and the associated much higher wage differences between employees than in the past. Work is more flexible and operates through rivalry, contests, and highly comic meetings and continuous training.“The corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation”. Deluze compares the factory to a “body” in which the workforce is in equilibrium between the highest possible production and the lowest possible wage, but the corporation is more like a “gas”. The company likes everything that is “open”, ‘flexible’ and at the same time “competition-oriented”.

==== Control and access ====
The three types of society - sovereignty society, disciplinary society and control society - also differ in the typical way in which power is exercised:

In the sovereignty society, the king ruled by fear of punishment, including death and torture. In the disciplinary society, authorities ruled over the body oft he people through imprisonment and over their minds through education. Their position and schedule were constantly monitored and controlled (in school “stand up, sit down, in prison go into your cell, in favtory only a half hour break”). The ideal goal was self-discipline.

In the control society people are ruled by giving or denying access to information(for example a password). You can apparently move and think freely, but you cannot break the mechanism. A modern example would be a hate speech filter. You can write what you want, but some comments are filtered out and thus have no negative influence.

Deleuze does not define what exactly he means by “acess to information”. However, you can see from his examples that he is not just talking about access to data. Therefore, in this text I use the broad definition “[[information]] can be generally understood as what enables the selection of changes in a system, be the latter of physical, biological, cognitive, technical or social nature” (Díaz Nafría & Zimmermann, 2013, 2013a; Zimmermann & Díaz, 2012). With this definition, I will also write a bit about “selection of changes in the socio-economic system” and situations in which one is no longer instructed or punished to behave ‘right’, but no longer has the possibility to behave “wrong”.<ref>Nafría, D., & María, J. (2014). Ethics at the age of information. ''Systema'', ''2''(3), 43–52. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.17101/systema.v2i3.279</nowiki></ref>

==== Society and machines ====
For Deleuze, “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society”. Not necessarily because technology determines all social changes, but because they are also an expression of the respective time and culture in which they were developed.

The world of the disciplinary society was one of factory workshops, steam engines and motors. It often thought in a language of thermodynamics and industry, of production and productivity, wear and tear and exhaustion, routine or even sabotage. The control society is the age of computers and electronics and we talk about information, data and noise, networks, transformations and security risks as a matter of course.

However, Deluze used the term “machine” not only for real technical machines, but defined it generally as a “system of interruptions”. For example, in computer science this could be a function with input, processing and output, or in a movie the cut between two different scenes. A school can also be understood as an “educational machine”: It takes in children as input, teaches them according to curricula, and releases them sorted by final grades and career options. Similarly, the legal system is a machine of law that examines cases in trials based on laws and issues verdicts.

Describing such institutions as technical systems may sound a little strange, but it is also done in control engineering (or cybernetics), for example. This is a discipline of engineering science that generally deals with the control of dynamic processes through external measures. Here, both technical systems (such as temperature control with a thermostat or the autopilot in an airplane) and some non-technical systems (such as corporate processes or the blood sugar level in the human body) are described using the same terms and equations. Just as the thermostat regulates the temperature, the control society regulates people's future options for action. This way of thinking can also be seen in management language with words from control technology such as process, feedback or targets.

==== A new kind of capitalism ====
Deleuze sees technological developments as a profound mutation of capitalism: “man is no longer the enclosed man, but the indebted man”

In the 19th century, capitalism is defined by property and the concentration of the means of production. Factories emerge as a milieu of enclosure. The capitalist can be the owner of several factories, but also of workers' homes or schools with a similar concept. The conquest of the market takes place through specialization, reduction of production costs and sometimes through colonization.

In the 1990s, the capitalist is no longer oriented towards production, but towards the product, services, trade and the assembly of individual parts. Production itself is outsourced to developing countries.

What has remained the same in capitalism, however, is the misery of the people, three quarters of humanity live in misery: too poor to be in debt and too numerous to be locked up. Control will be confronted with the explosion of slums and ghettos. (fortunately, the share of population living in poverty has been reduced a bit since then, especially in asia)

In his typical writing style Delueze also uses an anmial metaphor: the industrial economy is like an old monetary mole, the new one like a snake.

==== Resistance ====
Most of the essay reads like a dystopian social analysis. But Deleuze did not see the control society as a perfected form of regulation, like the surveillance world of Orwell's [[1984]]. Rather, the control society is a conceptual idea of the perfect way to govern people. In reality, control mechanisms often fail or even provoke resistance, like the Panopticon in Cuba. “There is no reason to fear or hope, only to look for new weapons”.

The dream of hackers and [[Crypto-anarchism|crypto anarchists]] of a truly free Internet without control is an alternative concept to the control society. However, the concrete implementation in the Tor Darknet, initially promoted by the us government and human rights organizations, quickly failed and today has little use behind criminal activities. It would also be interesting to see what Deleuze would have thought about open source software or Wikipedia, founded by American libertarians, where free access to information is a business model.

== Today's examples ==

==== Identity cards ====
Today, ID cards are so digitized that they are a central instrument for access control. It is no longer staff who check identity, but card readers that serve as the key to access. They are used for companies, banks and libraries, for example. Passports can also be read digitally, cameras support identification and enable people to enter and leave the country without being checked by the federal police.

When it comes to issuing visas, the interests of the government, companies and universities are intertwined. Changing entry regulations determine whether foreign students and employees are granted permission to stay. Refugees often have to wait for a decision on admission or rejection in a limbo of lengthy procedures. This is a mix of classic confinement in camps and a control system.

==== Corona ====
During the coronavirus era, there was also a mix of a disciplinary and control society. Attempts were made to contain the pandemic with lockdown discipline, and the population in many states accepted the lockdown. The states had issued different orders. Some, such as China, used state force to enforce them, while others, such as Sweden, left it up to each individual to act sensibly and responsibly. After the lockdown and falling infection rates, the disciplinary society turned into a control society. Vaccination cards and test certificates enabled access to social life. Health data could be stored in an app and people could be warned if a contact person developed symptoms. The vaccination card was also stored digitally and could be scanned in the same way as a passport when traveling abroad, for example. It has been shown that both forms of society can intermingle in our everyday lives.

==== Online companies ====
Many companies operate in parallel to their businesses or only via internet platforms. At Uber, for example, drivers are monitored and controlled in real time using GPS data. Their access to jobs depends on constantly updated customer ratings. Airbnb has a similar principle: hosts and guests move each other around. The visibility of the profile on the platform and booking figures are based on a rating algorithm. Customer cards are also used in traditional sectors such as bookshops, clothing and grocery stores to read customer data and can be used to create individual purchase incentives.

Access to the job market is also changing: applications are made via LinkedIn and application opportunities often depend on automatically generated scores. In crowdworking, jobs are assigned to millions of workers on online platforms like Fiverr. The workers are no longer traditional employees, but freelancers who are constantly competing for jobs.

== Critique and topicality ==
More than 30 years after Deleuze wrote his postscript on the control society, his thoughts are still relevant and can be found in many areas: Big Data, IT and advertising companies are among the most valuable companies in the world. We work from home as a matter of course and use online shopping with algorithm recommendations. The liberalization of the labour market continues, with the German government planning to replace the daily maximum work limit with a weekly one. There is probably also more awareness of problems, from data protection to fake news and filter bubbles, than in the 1980s.

But, like the disciplinary society before it, modern society has changed since Deleuzes. It has become more globalized and there are new problems: Climate change is more about Energy than Information. The factories are still there, they just moved from Paris to China.

It is perhaps also more difficult to find a good symbol for today's world, such as the factory for the dawn of capitalism or the public execution for the power of the king. Or, as Deleuze concludes his essay: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

== References ==
<references />

Draft:Control society

2025-06-15T21:52:26Z

Christopher Scharnagl: final

== Background: Deleuze, Foucault and the disciplinary society ==

==== Deleuze ====
Gilles Deleuze was a well-known French philosopher who was born in Paris in 1925 and committed suicide in 1995 by jumping out of a window after a long period of lung disease. His texts are relatively abstract with a rather anarchistic way of thinking. He was sympathetic to the 1968 movement and taught at the reform university Paris 8, but he was not a classic political activist. He wrote a lot about other philosophers and reinterpreted them, but also about topics such as psychoanalysis or cinema.

==== Postscript on control societies ====
In his essay “Postscript on the control society” (1990), Deleuze writes about how capitalism and social structures have changed in the second half of the 20th century. He refers to Michael Foucault's concept of the “disciplinary society” and develops it further. The disciplinary society can be seen in institutions such as schools, factories and, above all, prisons. Deleuze sees these institutions in crisis after the Second World War: “we no longer belonged to disciplinary societies, we were about to leave them”. The disciplinary society is turning into the control society: a form of society with a seemingly liberal appearance.

==== Foucault ====
Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) was another famous French philosopher of the 20th century. Among other things, he criticized classical philosophy and humanists (such as Plato, Kant, Freud) for presenting their thoughts as timeless, universal truths. In reality, however, they turned out in retrospect to be influenced by the ideas, language and norms of the society of the time. He was not only ineterested in typical philosophical questions but also writes about homosexuality, violence and madness.

==== Surveillance and Punishment ====
In his book Surveillance and Punishment (1975), he describes the change in society after the French Revolution in terms of how criminals are punished and treated. Instead of analyzing the basic principles of a state by looking at the constitution or important political speeches, Foucault prefers to look at how criminals and prisoners are dealt with in practice:

He contrasts two methods of punishment: Robert-Francois Damiens attempted to assassinate the king in France in 1757. As punishment, he was publicly placed on a stage, then had skin torn from his body with rakes, his wounds filled with molten lead and then quartered. In this way, the king showed his power and ensured retribution. Foucault compares this to a prison 80 years later, after the French Revolution: the prisoners are locked up in a prison and there is a schedule to work and pray, mealtimes, times to wash their hands an face. The desire is not only to punish, but also to educate the criminal to become a better person. The prison is thus symbolic of an entire era: the transition from a “sovereignty society” to a “disciplinary society”. Why did this change develop in this way? For Foucault, not out of humanity, but: “to punish less, perhaps, but to punish better”

==== Panopticon ====
Another example Foucault gives of how modern disciplinary societies function is the panopticon: an ideal prison designed in the 18th century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Here, too, the aim was not only to punish the prisoners, but also to control and change their behavior through constant surveillance.

This works according to the following principle: an observation tower stands in the middle of a round building, with the cells around it. The guards can look out through slits without being seen themselves. For the inmates, this means that they never know whether they are being watched or not and therefore always behave in accordance with the rules.

==== Presidio Modelo ====
A concrete realization of this was the “Presidio Modelo” in Cuba, which was built in the 1930s under the dictator Gerardo Machado. Each building housed 465 cells for 1000 prisoners. There were no doors and every prisoner could be seen by everyone else; there was no privacy. Talking was forbidden in the canteen and a moat with crocodiles was built around the building to prevent escapes.

Fidel Castro also spent two years there before later sending political opponents to this place himself. After several hunger strikes and uprisings, the prison was finally closed and now serves as a museum.

==== Disciplinary society ====
The panopticon symbolizes the typical exercise of power in a disciplinary society: primarily through observation and control. The aim is not to punish, but to educate and change behavior. To this end, the individual is first analyzed like a broken machine and then repaired. The control extends into the psyche: we begin to take an interest in the thoughts, motives and feelings of the offenders.

These mechanisms do not only affect offenders. They also have an effect at school, at work or in the family. For example, through school tests or in discussions about health in the workplace, often with the aim of maintaining performance.

== The control society ==
In his essay “postscript on the societies of control” (1990), Deleuze writes about the change from the industrial age of the 19th century to the [[Information society (preliminary)|information age]]: the “disciplinary society” becomes a “control society”.

==== From the factory to the company ====
Deleuze describes the social changes after the world war using various examples: “These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.” There has been a major change in the world of work: most people no longer work in factories, but in modern companies. By companies, Deluze primarily means service companies such as banks, software companies and consultancies, as opposed to companies that manufacture a real product in a factory.

Typical of work in a company is a certain instability (for example in the form of fixed-term contracts or changing projects) and the associated much higher wage differences between employees than in the past. Work is more flexible and operates through rivalry, contests, and highly comic meetings and continuous training.

“The corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation”. Deluze compares the factory to a “body” in which the workforce is in equilibrium between the highest possible production and the lowest possible wage, but the corporation is more like a “gas”. The company likes everything that is “open”, ‘flexible’ and at the same time “competition-oriented”.

==== Control and access ====
The three types of society - sovereignty society, disciplinary society and control society - also differ in the typical way in which power is exercised:

In the sovereignty society, the king ruled by fear of punishment, including death and torture. In the disciplinary society, authorities ruled over the body oft he people through imprisonment and over their minds through education. Their position and schedule were constantly monitored and controlled (in school “stand up, sit down, in prison go into your cell, in favtory only a half hour break”). The ideal goal was self-discipline.

In the control society people are ruled by giving or denying access to information(for example a password). You can apparently move and think freely, but you cannot break the mechanism. A modern example would be a hate speech filter. You can write what you want, but some comments are filtered out and thus have no negative influence.

Deleuze does not define what exactly he means by “acess to information”. However, you can see from his examples that he is not just talking about access to data. Therefore, in this text I use the broad definition “[[information]] can be generally understood as what enables the selection of changes in a system, be the latter of physical, biological, cognitive, technical or social nature” (Díaz Nafría & Zimmermann, 2013, 2013a; Zimmermann & Díaz, 2012). With this definition, I will also write a bit about “selection of changes in the socio-economic system” and situations in which one is no longer instructed or punished to behave ‘right’, but no longer has the possibility to behave “wrong”.

==== Society and machines ====
For Deleuze, “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society”. Not necessarily because technology determines all social changes, but because they are also an expression of the respective time and culture in which they were developed.

The world of the disciplinary society was one of factory workshops, steam engines and motors. It often thought in a language of thermodynamics and industry, of production and productivity, wear and tear and exhaustion, routine or even sabotage. The control society is the age of computers and electronics and we talk about information, data and noise, networks, transformations and security risks as a matter of course.

However, Deluze used the term “machine” not only for real technical machines, but defined it generally as a “system of interruptions”. For example, in computer science this could be a function with input, processing and output, or in a movie the cut between two different scenes.

A school can also be understood as an “educational machine”: It takes in children as input, teaches them according to curricula, and releases them sorted by final grades and career options. Similarly, the legal system is a machine of law that examines cases in trials based on laws and issues verdicts.

Describing such institutions as technical systems may sound a little strange, but it is also done in control engineering (or cybernetics), for example.

This is a discipline of engineering science that generally deals with the control of dynamic processes through external measures. Here, both technical systems (such as temperature control with a thermostat or the autopilot in an airplane) and some non-technical systems (such as corporate processes or the blood sugar level in the human body) are described using the same terms and equations. Just as the thermostat regulates the temperature, the control society regulates people's future options for action. This way of thinking can also be seen in management language with words from control technology such as process, feedback or targets.

==== A new kind of capitalism ====
Deleuze sees technological developments as a profound mutation of capitalism: “man is no longer the enclosed man, but the indebted man”

In the 19th century, capitalism is defined by property and the concentration of the means of production. Factories emerge as a milieu of enclosure. The capitalist can be the owner of several factories, but also of workers' homes or schools with a similar concept. The conquest of the market takes place through specialization, reduction of production costs and sometimes through colonization.

In the 1990s, the capitalist is no longer oriented towards production, but towards the product, services, trade and the assembly of individual parts. Production itself is outsourced to developing countries.

What has remained the same in capitalism, however, is the misery of the people, three quarters of humanity live in misery: too poor to be in debt and too numerous to be locked up. Control will be confronted with the explosion of slums and ghettos. (has not turned out quite so bad in reality).

In his typical writing style Delueze also uses an anmial metaphor: the industrial economy is like an old monetary mole, the new one like a snake.

==== Resistance ====
Most of the essay reads like a dystopian social analysis. But Deleuze did not see the control society as a perfected form of regulation, like the surveillance world of Orwell's [[1984]]. Rather, the control society is a conceptual idea of the perfect way to govern people. In reality, control mechanisms often fail or even provoke resistance, like the Panopticon in Cuba. “There is no reason to fear or hope, only to look for new weapons”.

The dream of hackers and [[Crypto-anarchism|crypto anarchists]] of a truly free Internet without control is an alternative concept to the control society. However, the concrete implementation in the Tor Darknet, initially promoted by the us government and human rights organizations, quickly failed and today has little use behind criminal activities. It would also be interesting to see what Deleuze would have thought about open source software or Wikipedia, founded by American libertarians, where free access to information is a business model.

== Today's examples ==

==== Identity cards ====
Today, ID cards are so digitized that they are a central instrument for access control. It is no longer staff who check identity, but card readers that serve as the key to access. They are used for companies, banks and libraries, for example. Passports can also be read digitally, cameras support identification and enable people to enter and leave the country without being checked by the federal police.

When it comes to issuing visas, the interests of the government, companies and universities are intertwined. Changing entry regulations determine whether foreign students and employees are granted permission to stay. Refugees often have to wait for a decision on admission or rejection in a limbo of lengthy procedures. This is a mix of classic confinement in camps and a control system.

==== Corona ====
During the coronavirus era, there was also a mix of a disciplinary and control society. Attempts were made to contain the pandemic with lockdown discipline, and the population in many states accepted the lockdown. The states had issued different orders. Some, such as China, used state force to enforce them, while others, such as Sweden, left it up to each individual to act sensibly and responsibly. After the lockdown and falling infection rates, the disciplinary society turned into a control society. Vaccination cards and test certificates enabled access to social life. Health data could be stored in an app and people could be warned if a contact person developed symptoms. The vaccination card was also stored digitally and could be scanned in the same way as a passport when traveling abroad, for example. It has been shown that both forms of society can intermingle in our everyday lives.

==== Online companies ====
Many companies operate in parallel to their businesses or only via internet platforms. At Uber, for example, drivers are monitored and controlled in real time using GPS data. Their access to jobs depends on constantly updated customer ratings. Airbnb has a similar principle: hosts and guests move each other around. The visibility of the profile on the platform and booking figures are based on a rating algorithm. Customer cards are also used in traditional sectors such as bookshops, clothing and grocery stores to read customer data and can be used to create individual purchase incentives.

Access to the job market is also changing: applications are made via LinkedIn and application opportunities often depend on automatically generated scores. In crowdworking, jobs are assigned to millions of workers on online platforms like Fiverr. The workers are no longer traditional employees, but freelancers who are constantly competing for jobs.

== critique and topicality ==
More than 30 years after Deleuze wrote his postscript on the control society, his thoughts are still relevant and can be found in many areas: Big Data, IT and advertising companies are among the most valuable companies in the world. We work from home as a matter of course and use online shopping with algorithm recommendations. The liberalization of the labour market continues, with the German government planning to replace the daily maximum work limit with a weekly one. There is probably also more awareness of problems, from data protection to fake news and filter bubbles, than in the 1980s.

But, like the disciplinary society before it, modern society has changed since Deleuzes. It has become more globalized and there are new problems: Climate change is more about Energy than Information. The factories are still there, they just moved from Paris to China.

It is perhaps also more difficult to find a good symbol for today's world, such as the factory for the dawn of capitalism or the public execution for the power of the king. Or, as Deleuze concludes his essay: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”

== References ==

# Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” (1990)
# [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#Aca Foucault, Stanford Online Encyclopedia]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QddENsLFlI&list=PLFxHSIwPyE0WiAjhMHmq9TumO83d3D7gK&index=6 3. Joseph Vogl, Talk with the German translator of the postscript]

3. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4Cq_-bLlY&list=PLx5jMl5-m5ZSyaYg7hTBynO6iDFlrDUtr&index=4 Deleuze - Control Societies & Cybernetic Posthumanismtroduction to control society and cybernetics]

Draft:Control society

2025-06-15T21:19:26Z

Christopher Scharnagl: edit complete article

== Background: Deleuze, Foucault and the disciplinary society ==

==== Deleuze ====
Gilles Deleuze was a well-known French philosopher who was born in Paris in 1925 and committed suicide in 1995 by jumping out of a window after a long period of lung disease. His texts are relatively abstract with a rather anarchistic way of thinking. He was sympathetic to the 1968 movement and taught at the reform university Paris 8, but he was not a classic political activist. He wrote a lot about other philosophers and reinterpreted them, but also about topics such as psychoanalysis or cinema.

==== Postscript on control societies ====
In his essay “Postscript on the control society” (1990), Deleuze writes about how capitalism and social structures have changed in the second half of the 20th century. He refers to Michael Foucault's concept of the “disciplinary society” and develops it further. The disciplinary society can be seen in institutions such as schools, factories and, above all, prisons. Deleuze sees these institutions in crisis after the Second World War: “we no longer belonged to disciplinary societies, we were about to leave them”. The disciplinary society is turning into the control society: a form of society with a seemingly liberal appearance.

==== Foucault ====
Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) was another famous French philosopher of the 20th century. Among other things, he criticized classical philosophy and humanists (such as Plato, Kant, Freud) for presenting their thoughts as timeless, universal truths. In reality, however, they turned out in retrospect to be influenced by the ideas, language and norms of the society of the time. He was not only ineterested in typical philosophical questions but also writes about homosexuality, violence and madness.

==== Surveillance and Punishment ====
In his book Surveillance and Punishment (1975), he describes the change in society after the French Revolution in terms of how criminals are punished and treated. Instead of analyzing the basic principles of a state by looking at the constitution or important political speeches, Foucault prefers to look at how criminals and prisoners are dealt with in practice:

He contrasts two methods of punishment: Robert-Francois Damiens attempted to assassinate the king in France in 1757. As punishment, he was publicly placed on a stage, then had skin torn from his body with rakes, his wounds filled with molten lead and then quartered. In this way, the king showed his power and ensured retribution. Foucault compares this to a prison 80 years later, after the French Revolution: the prisoners are locked up in a prison and there is a schedule to work and pray, mealtimes, times to wash their hands an face. The desire is not only to punish, but also to educate the criminal to become a better person. The prison is thus symbolic of an entire era: the transition from a “sovereignty society” to a “disciplinary society”. Why did this change develop in this way? For Foucault, not out of humanity, but: “to punish less, perhaps, but to punish better”

==== Panopticon ====
Another example Foucault gives of how modern disciplinary societies function is the panopticon: an ideal prison designed in the 18th century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Here, too, the aim was not only to punish the prisoners, but also to control and change their behavior through constant surveillance.

This works according to the following principle: an observation tower stands in the middle of a round building, with the cells around it. The guards can look out through slits without being seen themselves. For the inmates, this means that they never know whether they are being watched or not and therefore always behave in accordance with the rules.

==== Presidio Modelo ====
A concrete realization of this was the “Presidio Modelo” in Cuba, which was built in the 1930s under the dictator Gerardo Machado. Each building housed 465 cells for 1000 prisoners. There were no doors and every prisoner could be seen by everyone else; there was no privacy. Talking was forbidden in the canteen and a moat with crocodiles was built around the building to prevent escapes.

Fidel Castro also spent two years there before later sending political opponents to this place himself. After several hunger strikes and uprisings, the prison was finally closed and now serves as a museum.

==== Disciplinary society ====
The panopticon symbolizes the typical exercise of power in a disciplinary society: primarily through observation and control. The aim is not to punish, but to educate and change behavior. To this end, the individual is first analyzed like a broken machine and then repaired. The control extends into the psyche: we begin to take an interest in the thoughts, motives and feelings of the offenders.

These mechanisms do not only affect offenders. They also have an effect at school, at work or in the family. For example, through school tests or in discussions about health in the workplace, often with the aim of maintaining performance.

== The control society ==
In his essay “postscript on the societies of control” (1990), Deleuze writes about the change from the industrial age of the 19th century to the information age: the “disciplinary society” becomes a “control society”.

==== From the factory to the company ====
Deleuze describes the social changes after the world war using various examples: “These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.” There has been a major change in the world of work: most people no longer work in factories, but in modern companies. By companies, Deluze primarily means service companies such as banks, software companies and consultancies, as opposed to companies that manufacture a real product in a factory.

Typical of work in a company is a certain instability (for example in the form of fixed-term contracts or changing projects) and the associated much higher wage differences between employees than in the past. Work is more flexible and operates through rivalry, contests, and highly comic meetings and continuous training.

“The corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation”. Deluze compares the factory to a “body” in which the workforce is in equilibrium between the highest possible production and the lowest possible wage, but the corporation is more like a “gas”. The company likes everything that is “open”, ‘flexible’ and at the same time “competition-oriented”.

==== Control and access ====
The three types of society - sovereignty society, disciplinary society and control society - also differ in the typical way in which power is exercised:

In the sovereignty society, the king ruled by fear of punishment, including death and torture. In the disciplinary society, authorities ruled over the body oft he people through imprisonment and over their minds through education. Their position and schedule were constantly monitored and controlled (in school “stand up, sit down, in prison go into your cell, in favtory only a half hour break”). The ideal goal was self-discipline.

In the control society people are ruled by giving or denying access to information(for example a password). You can apparently move and think freely, but you cannot break the mechanism. A modern example would be a hate speech filter. You can write what you want, but some comments are filtered out and thus have no negative influence.

Deleuze does not define what exactly he means by “acess to information”. However, you can see from his examples that he is not just talking about access to data. Therefore, in this text I use the broad definition “information can be generally understood as what enables the selection of changes in a system, be the latter of physical, biological, cognitive, technical or social nature” (Díaz Nafría & Zimmermann, 2013, 2013a; Zimmermann & Díaz, 2012). With this definition, I will also write a bit about “selection of changes in the socio-economic system” and situations in which one is no longer instructed or punished to behave ‘right’, but no longer has the possibility to behave “wrong”.

==== Society and machines ====
For Deleuze, “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society”. Not necessarily because technology determines all social changes, but because they are also an expression of the respective time and culture in which they were developed.

The world of the disciplinary society was one of factory workshops, steam engines and motors. It often thought in a language of thermodynamics and industry, of production and productivity, wear and tear and exhaustion, routine or even sabotage. The control society is the age of computers and electronics and we talk about information, data and noise, networks, transformations and security risks as a matter of course.

However, Deluze used the term “machine” not only for real technical machines, but defined it generally as a “system of interruptions”. For example, in computer science this could be a function with input, processing and output, or in a movie the cut between two different scenes.

A school can also be understood as an “educational machine”: It takes in children as input, teaches them according to curricula, and releases them sorted by final grades and career options. Similarly, the legal system is a machine of law that examines cases in trials based on laws and issues verdicts.

Describing such institutions as technical systems may sound a little strange, but it is also done in control engineering (or cybernetics), for example.

This is a discipline of engineering science that generally deals with the control of dynamic processes through external measures. Here, both technical systems (such as temperature control with a thermostat or the autopilot in an airplane) and some non-technical systems (such as corporate processes or the blood sugar level in the human body) are described using the same terms and equations. Just as the thermostat regulates the temperature, the control society regulates people's future options for action. This way of thinking can also be seen in management language with words from control technology such as process, feedback or targets.

==== A new kind of capitalism ====
Deleuze sees technological developments as a profound mutation of capitalism: “man is no longer the enclosed man, but the indebted man”

In the 19th century, capitalism is defined by property and the concentration of the means of production. Factories emerge as a milieu of enclosure. The capitalist can be the owner of several factories, but also of workers' homes or schools with a similar concept. The conquest of the market takes place through specialization, reduction of production costs and sometimes through colonization.

In the 1990s, the capitalist is no longer oriented towards production, but towards the product, services, trade and the assembly of individual parts. Production itself is outsourced to developing countries.

What has remained the same in capitalism, however, is the misery of the people, three quarters of humanity live in misery: too poor to be in debt and too numerous to be locked up. Control will be confronted with the explosion of slums and ghettos. (has not turned out quite so bad in reality).

In his typical writing style Delueze also uses an anmial metaphor: the industrial economy is like an old monetary mole, the new one like a snake.

==== Resistance ====
Most of the essay reads like a dystopian social analysis. But Deleuze did not see the control society as a perfected form of regulation, like the surveillance world of Orwell's [[1984]]. Rather, the control society is a conceptual idea of the perfect way to govern people. In reality, control mechanisms often fail or even provoke resistance, like the Panopticon in Cuba. “There is no reason to fear or hope, only to look for new weapons”.

The ANARCHIST dream of a truly free Internet without control is an alternative concept to the control society. However, the concrete implementation in the Tor Darknet, initially promoted by the us government and human rights organizations, quickly failed and today has little use behind criminal activities. It would also be interesting to see what Deleuze would have thought about open source software or Wikipedia, founded by American libertarians, where free access to information is a business model.

== Today's examples ==

==== Identity cards ====
Today, ID cards are so digitized that they are a central instrument for access control. It is no longer staff who check identity, but card readers that serve as the key to access. They are used for companies, banks and libraries, for example. Passports can also be read digitally, cameras support identification and enable people to enter and leave the country without being checked by the federal police.

When it comes to issuing visas, the interests of the government, companies and universities are intertwined. Changing entry regulations determine whether foreign students and employees are granted permission to stay. Refugees often have to wait for a decision on admission or rejection in a limbo of lengthy procedures. This is a mix of classic confinement in camps and a control system.

==== Corona ====
During the coronavirus era, there was also a mix of a disciplinary and control society. Attempts were made to contain the pandemic with lockdown discipline, and the population in many states accepted the lockdown. The states had issued different orders. Some, such as China, used state force to enforce them, while others, such as Sweden, left it up to each individual to act sensibly and responsibly. After the lockdown and falling infection rates, the disciplinary society turned into a control society. Vaccination cards and test certificates enabled access to social life. Health data could be stored in an app and people could be warned if a contact person developed symptoms. The vaccination card was also stored digitally and could be scanned in the same way as a passport when traveling abroad, for example. It has been shown that both forms of society can intermingle in our everyday lives.

==== Online companies ====
Many companies operate in parallel to their businesses or only via internet platforms. At Uber, for example, drivers are monitored and controlled in real time using GPS data. Their access to jobs depends on constantly updated customer ratings. Airbnb has a similar principle: hosts and guests move each other around. The visibility of the profile on the platform and booking figures are based on a rating algorithm. Customer cards are also used in traditional sectors such as bookshops, clothing and grocery stores to read customer data and can be used to create individual purchase incentives.

Access to the job market is also changing: applications are made via LinkedIn and application opportunities often depend on automatically generated scores. In crowdworking, jobs are assigned to millions of workers on online platforms like Fiverr. The workers are no longer traditional employees, but freelancers who are constantly competing for jobs.

== V. Critique and topicality ==
More than 30 years after Deleuze wrote his postscript on the control society, his thoughts are still relevant and can be found in many areas: Big Data, IT and advertising companies are among the most valuable companies in the world. We work from home as a matter of course and use online shopping with algorithm recommendations. The liberalization of the labour market continues, with the German government planning to replace the daily maximum work limit with a weekly one. There is probably also more awareness of problems, from data protection to fake news and filter bubbles, than in the 1980s.

But, like the disciplinary society before it, modern society has changed since Deleuzes. It has become more globalized and there are new problems: Climate change is more about Energy than Information. The factories are still there, they just moved from Paris to China.

It is perhaps also more difficult to find a good symbol for today's world, such as the factory for the dawn of capitalism or the public execution for the power of the king. Or, as Deleuze concludes his essay: “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.”
<references group="Postscript on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze" />

Draft:Control society

2025-06-13T22:34:30Z

Christopher Scharnagl: new article

'''Background: Deleuze, Foucault and the disciplinary society'''

Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze was a well-known French philosopher who was born in Paris in 1925 and committed suicide in 1995 by jumping out of a window after a long period of lung disease. His texts are relatively abstract with a rather anarchistic way of thinking. He was sympathetic to the 1968 movement and taught at the reform university Paris 8, but he was not a classic political activist. He wrote a lot about other philosophers and reinterpreted them, but also about topics such as psychoanalysis or cinema.

Postscript on control societies

In his essay “Postscript on the control society” (1990), Deleuze writes about how capitalism and social structures have changed in the second half of the 20th century He refers to Michael Foucault's concept of the “disciplinary society” and develops it further. The disciplinary society can be seen in institutions such as schools, factories and, above all, prisons. Deleuze sees these institutions in crisis after the Second World War: “We no longer belonged to disciplinary societies, we were about to leave them.” The disciplinary society merges into the control society: a form of society with a seemingly liberal appearance

Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) was another famous French philosopher of the 20th century. Among other things, he criticized classical philosophy and humanists (such as Plato, Kant, Freud) for presenting their ideas as timeless, universal truths. In reality, however, they turned out in retrospect to be influenced by the ideas, language and norms of the society of the time. He was not only ineterested in typical philosophical questions but also writes about homosexuality, violence and madness.

Surveillance and Punishment

In his book Surveillance and Punishment (1975), he describes the change in society after the French Revolution in terms of how criminals are punished and treated. Instead of analyzing the basic principles of a state by looking at the constitution or important political speeches, Foucault prefers to look at how criminals and prisoners are dealt with in practice:

He contrasts two methods of punishment: Robert-Francois Damiens attempted to assassinate the king in France in 1757. As punishment, he was publicly placed on a stage, then had skin torn from his body with rakes, his wounds filled with molten lead and then quartered. In this way, the king showed his power and ensured retribution. Foucault compares this to a prison 80 years later, after the French Revolution: the prisoners are locked up in a prison and there is a schedule to work and pray, mealtimes, times to wash their hands an face. The desire is not only to punish, but also to educate the criminal to become a better person. The prison is thus symbolic of an entire era: the transition from a “sovereignty society” to a “disciplinary society”. Why did this change develop in this way? For Foucault, not out of humanity, but: “to punish less, perhaps, but to punish better”

Panopticon

Another example Foucault gives of how modern disciplinary societies function is the panopticon: an ideal prison designed in the 18th century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Here, too, the aim was not only to punish the prisoners, but also to control and change their behavior through constant surveillance.

This works according to the following principle: an observation tower stands in the middle of a round building, with the cells around it. The guards can look out through slits without being seen themselves. For the inmates, this means that they never know whether they are being watched or not and therefore always behave in accordance with the rules.

Presidio Modelo

A concrete realization of this was the “Presidio Modelo” in Cuba, which was built in the 1930s under the dictator Gerardo Machado. Each building housed 465 cells for 1000 prisoners. There were no doors and every prisoner could be seen by everyone else; there was no privacy. Talking was forbidden in the canteen and a moat with crocodiles was built around the building to prevent escapes.

Fidel Castro also spent two years there before later sending political opponents to this place himself. After several hunger strikes and uprisings, the prison was finally closed and now serves as a museum.

Disziplinargesellschaft

Das Panoptikum steht symbolisch für die typische Machtausübung in der Disziplinargesellschaft: Vor allem durch Beobachtung und Kontrolle. Das Ziel ist dabei nicht Bestrafung, sondern Erziehung und eine Veränderung des Verhaltens. Dazu wird das Individuum ähnlich wie eine kaputte Maschine erst analysiert und dann repariert. Die Kontrolle erstreckt sich dabei in die Psyche: Man beginnt sich für die Gedanken, Motive und Gefühle der Straftäter zu interessieren.

Diese Mechanismen betreffen dabei nicht nur Straftäter. Auch in der Schule, am Arbeitsplatz oder in der Familie wirken sie. Zum Beispiel durch Schultests oder heutzutage in der Diskussion um (auch mentaler) Gesundheit am Arbeitsplatz, oft mit dem Ziel, die Leistungsfähigkeit zu erhalten.

''II. the control society''

''Starting from this disciplinary society, Deleuze describes what had changed in society by the 1980s. He describes these changes using various examples: “These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.”''

''Work''

''Today, people often no longer work in factories, but in (service) companies. While the industrial factory knew clear times, spaces and tasks, work is h - workers took up firmly defined positions and behaviors - today the company functions like a gas. It expands, adapts and changes shape.''

''In this new setting, stability can no longer be taken for granted. Fixed-term contracts, constant project changes, internal competition and rivalry (“contests”, “highly comic meetings”) characterize everyday working life. People no longer take on a clear role, but compete for visibility - the company shouts loudly: “Whoever emulates wins!” Competition is celebrated as an innovative driving force and simultaneously elevated to the norm.''

''But this flexibility is accompanied by a new discipline. It is no longer the physical constraint that quietly admonishes - it is the prospect of exclusion, dismissal or missing out on the next promotion. The company becomes a permanent testing and selection machine.''

''Modulation: the new formal principle of control''

''Foucault's disciplinary society resembled a cast - hard and firm, with clear, narrowly defined forms. Deleuze, on the other hand, describes an almost limitless modulation in the control society. Control is a flexible network that is constantly changing. It adapts, opens, closes, transforms - depending on the situation.''

''Changing forms are a good image: A sieve whose mesh widens or narrows as required; a form that reshapes itself in a matter of seconds. Schools, companies, hospitals, prisons - they all use the same control techniques: Data collection, psycho-social control, emotional standardization. The boundaries between these institutions are becoming increasingly blurred - what began at school continues in the workplace. Universities are mentally merging with the economy, clinics are becoming social spaces for self-optimization.''

''Society as a machine: input, interruption, output''

''Deleuze invites us to understand our society as a series of machines: The school is an educational machine, the judiciary a legal machine, the company a labor machine. These machines take input, interrupt the flow, transform the raw material and spit out a modified “product” - people who are optimized, evaluated, categorized.''

''The disciplinary society showed these processes openly - with uniforms, guards and clearly defined hierarchies. In the control society, on the other hand, these processes disappear: They run in the background. Access is determined by codes such as passwords, credit scores, insurance risk - or simply by algorithmic filters. People are no longer disciplined by their physical presence, but by their digital shadow, which is constantly generated, recorded and evaluated.''

''The shift from the individual to the “dividual” subject''

''Deleuze coined the term “dividual” - an existence that can be simultaneously divided, fragmented and reassembled. Unlike the classic individual, the dividual is nothing stable: it offers different pieces of data in different contexts - creditworthiness for the bank, grades for the university, genetic risk markers for insurance companies, surfing behavior for social media.''

''This data determines your future: access to jobs, loans, education - no longer primarily by human decision-makers, but by programmed systems, algorithms and filters. You don't have to actively behave “well” - it's simply impossible to act badly. Control is automatic, through self-regulation. Your scope of action is limited in advance, your options are already defined by data. You decide freely - only within what the system allows you to do.''

''Technology, feedback and control technology''

''Control is not just social or medial - it is technical. Feedback loops from control technology are embedded in algorithms. A thermostat measures temperature, compares it with the setpoint, makes corrections - analogously, digital systems measure deviations from the setpoint (the desired behavior), automatically compensate for them and reduce them over time.''

''This logic is now appearing in everyday language: “feedback”, ‘flow’, “process diagram” - normal terms that originate from measurement technology. AI and statistics take responsibility for functioning, even if the data is imperfect - because it is better to make mistakes than to do nothing at all. Facebook's hate speech filters are an example: no human judge decides - a program blocks or allows. You act cleanly without being noticed - or are simply filtered out.''

''New capitalism''

''For Deleuze, the control society is a new form of capitalism. The industrial capitalism of the 19th century with its factory halls, fixed hierarchies, work routines and trade unions had workers and means of production as capital. In the control society, on the other hand, capital is information, data and services. In the financial world, too, the “stable” gold currency has been replaced by a flexible currency system based on exchange rates''

''However, the problems remain: Many are in debt, three quarters of humanity live in poverty, living in slums and ghettos''.

'''Kontrollgesellschaft im Alltag'''

1. Ausweise

Ausweise sind heute so digitalisiert, dass sie ein zentrales Instrument für Zugangskontrollen sind. Nicht mehr Personal kontrolliert die Identität, sondern Kartenleser dienen als Schlüssel zum Zugang. Sie werden z.B. für Firmen, Banken, Bibliotheken benutzt. Auch der Reisepass kann digital ausgelesen werden, Kameras unterstützen die Identifikation und ermöglichen eine Ein- und Ausreise ohne Kontrolle der Bundespolizei.

Bei der Visavergabe vermischen sich die Interessen von Regierung, Unternehmen, Universitäten. Sich ändernde Einreisebestimmungen entscheiden über die Bewilligung des Aufenthalts für ausländische Studenten und Arbeitnehmer. Die Entscheidung über Zugang oder Ablehnung müssen Flüchtlinge oft in einem Schwebezustand aufgrund langwieriger Verfahren abwarten. Hier ist ein Mix aus klassischer Einschließung in Lagern und dem Kontrollsystem.

2. Corona

During the coronavirus era, there was also a mix of a disciplinary and control society. Attempts were made to contain the pandemic with lockdown discipline, and the population in many states accepted the lockdown. The states had issued different orders. Some, such as China, used state force to enforce them, while others, such as Sweden, left it up to each individual to act sensibly and responsibly. After the lockdown, the disciplinary society turned into a control society. Vaccination cards and test certificates enabled access to social life. Health data could be stored in an app and people could be warned if a contact person developed symptoms. The vaccination card was also stored digitally and could be scanned in the same way as a passport when traveling abroad, for example. It has been shown that both forms of society can intermingle in our everyday lives.

3. Digital control organization

Companies such as Uber and Airbnb are typical examples of current control systems. Uber drivers are monitored using GPS, algorithms and customer ratings. His digital ID not only contains his identity but also his rated performance. A ranking constantly evaluates his performance and his orders depend on it. Airbnb is also constantly rated on the platform, you have to collect good ratings, these are your digital ID. The ratings can be described as access controls. Platforms have become established. They provide access to the job market, applications are submitted via them and algorithms filter profiles. Access to profile platforms, e.g. LinkedIn, can be granted or denied. These platforms are digital ID cards. In the education sector, they regulate the qualifications of people, who are recorded as "individuals". Control is exercised with algorithms, via access to accounts

Deleuze's "Control society"

2025-06-13T22:34:30Z

Christopher Scharnagl: new article