Continuing on with profound changes that digital media brings to our civilization, Han makes a comparison with the move between what farmers do and what hunters do to allude to a similar shift in the digital world. “Earth, God, and truth belong to the world of the farmer. Today, we are no longer cultivating the soil; we hunt. Tracking prey, information hunters scour the Net like a digital game preserve. In contrast to fieldworkers, they are mobile. There is no farmland that they must settle. They do not dwell.” Where in the past people would leave their home and go to the fields or the factories, to earn their livelihood, today the digital worker can hunt for information anywhere. In many cases the office is an atavism from an earlier era. “Information hunters are impatient and unabashed. They lurk instead of ‘waiting.’ They ‘go for it’ instead of letting things ripen. The aim is to capture prey with every click. Their temporality is total presence. Anything blocking the view is to be removed, and right away. The word for this panoramic view of the digital game preserve is transparency. Transparency society is inhabited by hunters and gatherers—of information.”
Han offers some critical advice for the modern information hunter: “the real joy of the senses, including sight, is a matter of inefficiency. It means casting a gaze that lingers among the things of this world without preying on them.” for example: appreciating beauty without trying to posse it.
“The digital order is dispelling the nomos [law or custom] of the earth once and for all…. Categories such as spirit, action, thinking, and truth belong to the terrestrial order. They stand to be replaced by the categories of the digital order, where action yields to operation. Operations take place without any decision, in the strong sense of the word, having been made at all….Operations are actomes—atomized actions within a process that is largely automatic. They lack temporal and existential breadth.” Spirit is replaced with mood; real political action is replaced with consumer choice; thinking is replaced by calculation; and truth is replaced by transparency of information.
Imagine how a primitive person from 600 years ago would feel about all the modern sounds in our world: what would they think about disembodied voices emanating from smartphones? The concept of a “ghost” for Han involves communicating with a shadow or intermediary of another human being as opposed to the actual person. Thus a letter received from a loved one through snail mail is a message from “beyond” in the sense that the one who wrote it is not in the here and now. In this sense we live in a word inhabited by an innumerable number of ghosts speaking to us by radio, telephone or TV, etc. We try to combat ghosts by improving our locomotion technologies (thereby making it easier to meet people and communicate with each other face to face) but the breeding grounds for ghosts have far outpaced our transportation improvements. “[T]he new generation of ghosts—digital ghosts—are more gluttonous, more shameless, and noisier than ever. Isn’t it a fact that digital media reach ‘beyond human power’?” Now, with the advent of the Internet of Things there will likely be an exponential acceleration in the number of ghosts being produced and inhabiting our world. “[D]igital communication is not just assuming spectral form; it is also becoming viral. Digital communication is contagious insofar as it occurs on an emotive or affective register, without mediation. Contagion represents a form of posthermeneutic communication that, in fact, offers nothing to think about…Digital ‘content,’ even if it holds very little significance, spreads like an epidemic, a pandemic racing through the Net.” Our spectral world has more ghosts than people. A flash crash is an example of ghosts talking to ghosts (high-speed automated algorithmic trading) that can crash the stock market.
Digitality is detrimentally transforming us from citizen to consumer. “[A] political decision, in the proper sense, always represents an existential decision.” That is a real life and death issue – the legitimate use of force. But internet voting represents an advance of consumer attitudes to existential decisions. When voting becomes like shopping, that is, becomes a consumer experience, responsibility for the community which is a central aspect of citizenship, is lost because consumers lack responsibility – they buy what they like. “[V]oting and shopping will take place on the same screen—that is, on the same level of consciousness. Campaign advertisements will fuse with commercials. Indeed, government already resembles marketing. Political surveys and polls are like market research. Data mining sounds the mood of voters. Negative climates of opinion are eliminated by means of new, more attractive offers. Today, we are no longer active agents—citizens—but passive users.”
Trust is neither necessary nor wanted in the digital world where information is instantly available. Trust is replaced by control and surveillance which are much more secure. Bentham’s notion of a panopticon prison has been realized in our world: “the occupants of the digital panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Total control comes about not through spatial and communicative isolation but through networking and hypercommunication.”
Han ends his book by referencing and expanding on Michel Foucault’s concept of power and control. Foucault introduces the notion of biopower to describe a shift in the execution of power that started in the 17th century. Prior to the advent of biopower, power was entirely negative and was expressed as the sovereign’s ability to deal death to his subjects. “In contrast biopower works to ‘incite, reinforce, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it’—that is, to promote life. Biopower is ‘bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them’ instead of ‘impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.’ The sovereign’s power of death has yielded to the careful administration and control of the population.” Foucault sees the new sciences of medicine, psychology, sociology, criminology, architecture, etc. as having created and organized new institutions with prescriptive power relations at the service of power. Institutions such as hospitals, asylums, clinics, public health, etc. exercise a controlling biopower over the population. They create the new modern soul of humanity and their credentialed practitioners are the new modern priests ministering to that modern soul. Foucault calls this the disciplinary society.
Han introduces the notion of psychopower to describe the next evolution of power and control over people that he sees having developed more recently. Where “biopolitical control seizes exclusively on external factors such as reproduction, mortality rates, and health conditions [i]t is unable to penetrate, much less mold, the psyche of the population….Now a further paradigm shift is underway. The digital panopticon engineers not a disciplinary society along biopolitical lines but a transparency society along psychopolitical ones. Psychopower is taking the place of biopower. With the help of digital surveillance, psychopolitics is in the position to read and control thoughts.” When we feel the need to express ourselves in the digital media presented to us our freedom becomes synonymous with surveillance and control. When external control and surveillance masquerades as our freedom psychopower has taken over. Psychopower is more efficient than biopower because the control is within the individual. “Digital psychopolitics is taking over the social behavior of the masses by laying hold of, and steering, the unconscious logic that governs them. Digital surveillance society—which has direct access the collective unconscious (that is, the future social behavior of the masses)—is assuming totalitarian traits.” Big data is the quintessential institution of psychopower.