The tsunami of information unleashed by digitization is threatening to
overwhelm us, drowning us in a sea of frenzied communication and
disrupting many spheres of social life, including politics. Election
campaigns are now being waged as information wars with bots and troll
armies, and democracy is degenerating into infocracy. In this new
book, Byung-Chul Han argues that infocracy is the new form of rule
characteristic of contemporary information capitalism. Whereas the
disciplinary regime of industrial capitalism worked with compulsion
and repression, this new information regime exploits freedom instead
of repressing it. Surveillance and punishment give way to motivation
and optimization: we imagine that we are free, but in reality our
entire lives are recorded so that our behaviour might be
psychopolitically controlled. Under the neoliberal information
regime, mechanisms of power function not because people are aware of
the fact of constant surveillance but because they perceive themselves
to be free. This trenchant critique of politics in the information age
will be of great interest to students and scholars in the humanities
and social sciences and to anyone concerned about the fate of politics
in our time.
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Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781509552993
Publisert
2022
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Polity
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter