The book psychopolitics of Byung Chul Han, is a provocative text, in relation to the concept of freedom. In today’s world, without further ado, we consider ourselves free, just because we can say what we want using our mobile phone, on social networks, giving a like at any time, to a protest, complaint, or simply, to make a comment, many times without mediating the slightest responsibility. Byung Chul Han is blunt: “Freedom is the counterpart of coercion. Freedom, which must be the opposite of coercion, generates coercion.”. Shocking!! It sounds paradoxical, the freedom of the neoliberal world, the freedom of our time, that of the Internet, that of social networks, is coercive. And, furthermore, we boast that we live in the “can do” society. It is very different from the freedom of the disciplinary society, the society of “duty”.
The social networks that we can access very easily make us believe that we are free, because we can say whatever we want. From the anonymity that social networks allow us, we can disagree, denounce, accuse and insult without consequences. We believe we are free because we “show our faces” from a digital network. For this reason, when the Internet made its appearance, and then the social networks became scandalously “socialized”, we celebrated digital networks as means of unlimited freedom. We shout: Blessed digital freedom!!
But now we realize that unlimited freedom and communication are turning into total control and surveillance. The socialized digital media are instruments of surveillance and exploitation of the social in a ruthless way, this because today we easily communicate in an intense, even sick way, but at the same time we undress of our own free will, we exhibit our private life, for this you just have to flash and type anything. The information we display has no context, it lacks interiority. We have become simple and mortal consumers. The freedom of the citizen, in this way, becomes a simple merchandise. What do youtubers sell? In the case of politics, voters are not qualified for common political action. Not a few react, they only reproach and complain, as a consumer does when faced with merchandise that they dislike. And he continues to consume.
walter benjamin, one of the most important and influential German thinkers of the last century, conceives of capitalism as a religion. He says it’s the “first case of a cult that is not expiatory but guilty. Capitalism is a system in which it is not possible to settle debts, so the state of lack of freedom is perpetuated”. To Martha Harnecker are “men credit card”. This reminded me of a friend who lives illegally in the US. On one occasion, I asked him if he was not afraid of being deported; He replied that as long as he was responsible for his work, he complied with the law, and above all, owed money in that country, no one would bother him. And he finished off by saying, here you have to owe, have everything on credit. Having debts gives security of stay in the United States.
In the neoliberal regime, exploitation is more like self-exploitation, we attack ourselves. This digital form of self-aggression does not make the exploited revolutionary, but depressive. That is why there are no more revolutions. We no longer work for our needs, but for those of capital. At this stage, current capitalism generates its own needs, which we take as our own. Globalized neoliberalism is not interested in imposing a silence on us. On the contrary, it requires us to share, participate, and communicate our opinions, needs, desires, and preferences; this goes against our life, and we do not perceive it.
In the disciplinary society, the biopolitics it was the form of government, today in the neoliberal regime the psyche is mainly exploited. To increase productivity, bodily resistances are not overcome, but psychic and mental processes are optimized. With the Internet, where the appearance of unlimited freedom and communication dominates, there is no torture, tweeting or posting. The new conception of power does not consist in the control of the past, but in the psychopolitical control of the future.
