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Exposed

Exposed

Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age

Bernard E. Harcourt

ISBN 9780674504578

Publication date: 11/17/2015

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Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care.

Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society—a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual.

We are not scandalized by this. To the contrary: we crave exposure and knowingly surrender our privacy and anonymity in order to tap into social networks and consumer convenience—or we give in ambivalently, despite our reservations. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist. Disobedience to a regime that relies on massive data mining can take many forms, from aggressively encrypting personal information to leaking government secrets, but all will require conviction and courage.

Praise

  • The problem, as Harcourt observes, is that where once autonomy and anonymity were part of a humanist ‘ecology,’ privacy has now ‘itself been transformed into a type of good that can be traded, bought, or sold… Privacy has been privatized.’ …Even so, many people are not particularly bothered by what faceless corporations or even governments can learn about them from their data exhaust. Many who are not celebrities or other high-profile snooping targets trust in ‘security through obscurity’: why would anyone be interested in my personal information anyway? Harcourt’s approach is illuminating. Rather than trying to resolve the argument one way or the other, he suggests that there is a new digital class distinction between two kinds of people: those who feel comfortable with implicit surveillance ‘because of their privilege’ in other spheres, and those who feel harmed because their lives are precarious anyway—they feel that they are ‘potential targets, the usual suspects.’

    —Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement

Author

  • Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University and Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.

Book Details

  • 384 pages
  • 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
  • Harvard University Press

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