Although modulated according to different figures and in a falsely polyphonic manner, the uninterrupted refrain that the society of the spectacle repeats through its unified networks—“the existing society is the only possible one, as it always has been and always will be”—ends up stripping theoretical criticism of its foundation at the level of the collective imagination and, with it, the possibility of practical reversal. It persuades us of the non-existence of anything outside the cave and, ultimately, of the inevitability of the cave itself, which turns us into boarders on a global scale. In each of its representations, the spectacle seeks a transformation: on the one hand, that of the space of the cave into an iron cage with stainless steel bars and no exit to prevent possible escapes; and on the other, that of the prisoners, potentially in search of their own liberation, into mere passive spectators and, moreover, into devotees unaware of their own chains. This is the prevailing condition in the sad times of Facebook, Twitter, and all the other postmodern egospheres, digital and rigorously solitary variations on Plato’s Cave.
The “perfect cave” of the digital solitudes of the technomorphic civilization and the new “surveillance capitalism” with its Smart slavery, to which it condemns its happy Servants on a daily basis, seems to be reducible to this model. The totalitarian systems of the “short century” oppressed freedom, whereas surveillance neoliberalism exploits it and subjects it to a regime of profit, thus appearing as the first cool regime. The two opposing Hegelian figures of the Servant and the Lord, of the Master and the Slave, come together in a single figure, that of the homo neoliberalis who, as an “entrepreneur of himself,” relentlessly exploits himself in order to be as performative as possible. Each, as “Master,” demands maximum productivity from himself as “Slave,” taking capitalist exploitation to its hyperbolic level.
The homo digitalis increasingly takes on the appearance of a subject of the “cyber empire” in integral technification, populated by oceanic tides of loneliness connected via the Internet, dedicated to the posthuman language of “emoticons” in the society of likes. Socialism, a political form centered on the dyad of freedom and equality, declines to the rank of mere individual activity on social media. More precisely, “real socialism” is defenestrated by the “digital socialism” of social media and cyber platforms, new “smart” prisons that trap the subject in the mechanisms of connective loneliness and the uninterrupted valorization of value.
The digitized space, smooth and seemingly free, looks more and more like a huge smart concentration camp, a non-community community where subjects are controlled and tracked, exploited and deceived, deluded into thinking they are having fun and entertainment experiences when in reality they are working tirelessly—and without exchange of equivalents—for the neoliberal order. In the digital bubble, where connection replaces contact and the loneliness of social networks replaces sociability, one is alone and watched, since almost every gesture, in addition to generating profits for capital, is panoptically monitored and tracked. Gamification, enabled by persuasive emoticons and the spiral of likes, hides the fact that the unwitting user of social platforms, deceiving themselves into thinking they are communicating and having fun, is working for capital without exchange of equivalents and, therefore, in the ultimate form of exploitation.
Digitalization and the infosphere not only contribute to the decline of the object world (thereby producing the paradox of a hyper-materialistic society in an increasingly dematerialized order of things), but also promise exponential growth in freedom that is quickly reversed into a regime of total surveillance, a smart prison whose invisible bars are made of the same material as the tracking and data collection applications scattered across our technical devices. Consider the emblematic case of the smartphone, “the mobile work camp in which we imprison ourselves of our own free will,” as defined by Byung-Chul Han: it de-realizes the world and, at the same time, in the form of a peephole on reality, presents itself as an informant that relentlessly monitors its owner, who is controlled and happy to be so through the voluntary surrender of data and information on almost every aspect of their life.
In the sub specie speleologica history of humanity, the last cave—awaiting others that may possibly come—is made of glass. The new digital and smart prisons of the technomorphic civilization are transparent and glassy, like the Apple flagship store in New York, evoked by Byung-Chul Han: a glass cube, a true temple of transparency, which makes human beings—rectius, consumers—completely transparent and visible, eliminating every shadow zone and every angle hidden from view. Everything must be seen and exposed, and, moreover, subjects must desire nothing other than their uninterrupted spectacularized display in the form of merchandise. The ideal slave of the glass cave—reduced to a profile without any identity—constantly communicates and shares data and information, occupying every space with their presence and working at all times for informational capitalism. The new “surveillance capitalism,” the realm of infocracy and “dataism,” exploits not only bodies and energies, but also—to no lesser extent—information and data: thanks to the total transparency of the new glass cave, access to information means that it can be used for psychopolitical surveillance and biopolitical control, but also for predicting behavior and generating profits.
Like Plato’s darkened cave dwellers, the ignorant prisoners of the glass Smart cave also consider themselves free and creative in their gestures, systematically stimulated by constant performance and the uninterrupted display of themselves in the shop windows of this virtual community which, inhabited only by consumers, is nothing more than a commercialized version of the community. The more data digital subjects generate and the more actively they communicate their tastes and activities, their passions and occupations, the more effective surveillance becomes, so that the smartphone itself appears as a smart prison or even as a device of surveillance and submission that does not repress freedom but exploits it relentlessly for the dual purpose of control and profit.
Byung-Chul Han has written that the history of domination can also be described as the domination of various screens. In Plato and in the cave he imagined, we find the prototype of all screens: the archaic screen on the wall that displays shadows exchanged and confused with reality. In 1984 by Orwell, we encounter a more evolved screen, called the telescreen, on which propaganda broadcasts are transmitted incessantly and thanks to which everything that subjects say and think in their homes is scrupulously recorded. Today, the latest form of domination through the screen seems to be implemented with the touch screen of mobile phones: the smartphone becomes the new medium of submission, the individualized and glassy cave in which human beings are no longer passive spectators, but all become active transmitters, continuously producing and consuming information. They are not forced to remain silent and not to communicate, but, au contraire, to speak and transmit relentlessly, “selling” their own stories and their own lives, their own data and their own behavioral attitudes on behalf of capital (storytelling becomes storyselling). In short, communication is not prohibited, as in the ancient caves, but is promoted and encouraged, provided that it serves capital and its valorization, preservation, and progress.
In the old caves—from Plato to the panopticon of Bentham and Foucault—boarders were watched and punished; in the new glass cave with touch walls of the digital age, they are motivated and performative, encouraged to show off and communicate. Just think of the postmodern paradigm of the highly technologically advanced Smart Home, with sophisticated devices—jealously installed by the owner—that transform the apartment into a digital prison, where every action and every word is meticulously controlled and transcribed. Control, surveillance, and monitoring are perceived and experienced in this way as convenience and expressions of the coolness of the technologized world, and not, on the contrary, as tools and, at the same time, expressions of the comfortable, convenient, and gentle captivity of the homo globalis. The perfect cave is glass not only so that its prisoner can be observed at all times and in every remote corner of his consciousness, but also so that its walls cannot be seen and, consequently, its existence cannot be known in any way.
On this basis, the narrative so beloved by the champions of the neoliberal discourse should be rethought, which always presents East Germany and the Soviet Union as gray empires controlling the “lives of others,” as the title of a successful film on the subject puts it; with the aim, needless to say, of contrasting those empires of total control with their own glittering ideal of freedom in the form of a commodity. It is of course true that in Berlin beyond the Wall or in Soviet Moscow, citizens were constantly spied on and monitored (we do not really know to what extent and how they were spied on in West Germany or in the US by the CIA, simply because both survived the fall of the Wall and the ignominious demise of the USSR). But it is no less true that today the inhabitants of the glass cave without borders are spied on, tracked, and monitored in ways and to an extent that are immeasurably greater, made possible by that techno-scientific progress which—as should be clear by now—tends to coincide with the progress of man’s submission to the technocapitalist apparatus. The Stasi of the GDR is, in every respect, archaic and amateurish compared to Alexa, the “virtual assistant” and “smart speaker” of the new smart homes. Prisoner of the umpteenth manifestation of the necessary false consciousness, the homo neoliberalis condemns as oppressive surveillance, in East Germany and in the Moscow of real socialism, the very domination he suffers daily in incredibly more radical and invasive forms, experiencing it instead, with senseless joy, as “comfort” and “progress.”
A model that was challenged by modernity and has now been updated in digital form is being reconsidered, mutatis mutandis. The new figure of the perfect cave coincides with that in which prisoners are totally controlled and—this is the decisive novelty in the age of the technonarcotized masses—are happy to be so, actively collaborating in their own imprisonment. This is the paradigm originally developed by Jeremy Bentham in the ideal prison he designed in 1791, the Panopticon as a high-security cave that isolates and controls in a total manner. Perfect surveillance, characteristic of the ideal fortress from which escape is impossible, is entrusted to a single guard: hidden in the central tower, surrounded by a circular construction where the prisoners’ cells are arranged, lit from the outside and separated by thick walls, the mysterious guard, whom no one can see, observes everything and everyone (this is alluded to in the synthesis between πᾶν and ὀπτικός) without allowing the inmates to know whether, at any given moment, they are actually being observed. The inmates are potentially controlled at all times, since they can never see the controller: the trajectory of the gaze is, in effect, one-way, since the observer is not observed and the observed are not observers.
This asymmetrical relationship, in which the nexus of domination and servitude crystallizes in Bentham’s “cave,” admirably analyzed in 1975 by Foucault in Surveiller et punir, means that prisoners must behave as if they were under constant surveillance, without necessarily being so in concrete terms: the tower could, in fact, be unguarded, but since the prisoners cannot know this, they must continue to behave as if the guard were at his post. In fact, they must assume disciplined and almost automatic behaviors, as if they were truly under total surveillance. This paradigm, revived by Bentham, had already been outlined by the sophist Critias—one of the Thirty Tyrants—when he went so far as to argue that the very invention of the “all-seeing” gods was functional to the moral behavior of individuals, who were potentially always being watched from above.
In the age of the new technomorphic order, control is total without, in general, the problematic nature of its presence even being noticed, which is thus sought and desired by the new technonarcotized subjectivities. Once again, according to Adorno’s theorem, the omnipotence of repression and its invisibility are reversed into one another. In the glass panopticon of the digital age, the inmates do not know they are inmates and are induced to communicate everything about themselves without restraint: in none of the previous caves of historical adventure had it ever happened that the subjects themselves enthusiastically registered and provided the powers that be with all kinds of information about themselves and their own lives.
