Digital Bandung
The turn to empire is notable first for displacing a previously preferred language of mind control. After Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about Silicon Valley’s complicity in mass surveillance triggered the first phase of the so-called techlash, critics gravitated to language of behaviorism and anxieties about brainwashing from the mid-twentieth century. Our internet-connected phones and laptops had put us in Skinner boxes; we were the pigeons pecking at the pellets according to a pattern—at the mercy of “attention merchants” in “the shallows.” “The technology that connects us also controls us,” read the tagline for the influential Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Shoshana Zuboff—who had taken classes with B.F. Skinner himself as a youngster at Harvard—warned in her 2019 bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that Silicon Valley now had “the instruments and methods that can impose Skinner’s technology of behavior across the varied domains of everyday life right down to our depths.”
The shift from psychology to political geography is a good one. It centers questions of power and authority alongside issues of land and energy. The reliance of citizens, states, and pension funds on the financial fates of a small number of US tech companies is a startling development of the recent past. It is sensible to search for a term proportionate to our astonishment—empire talk is a rhetoric of shock.
