Deleuze - Control Societies & Cybernetic Posthumanism

[Music] aah [Music] [Music] the time has come my dearest friends to talk of many things of rhizomes nomads territories and of capitalist state machines i delayed starting on duluz because i needed to get a better sense of this medium because delis is not a topic i want to do poorly though it is something i promised a long time ago thanks for your patience ender i'm starting with a short essay here called postscript on the societies of control now i just got to mention real quick here that cuck philosophy has done a video explaining societies of

control this short essay by delis published in the early 90s his video is a great explainer and because of that i'm going to avoid covering the same ground other than some cursory definitions so if i rush through any bit too much you may want to refer to his video which is more step by step i'm going a little elsewhere with it referring back to the groundwork i laid in my video on post-humanism deliza's thesis here is that technological development and network computing in particular undermines corporeal enclosure and individual human agency the world is run by

machines not something like human free will incidentally this is something conspiracy theories almost always get wrong now wait machines here may not mean what you expect they are not just calculators cars and computers machines more generally are systems of information processing that interpret and remake the world according to their particular logics society is made up of many such machines social political bureaucratic the school system is an education machine the legal system is the machine of law in that they use programs to interpret and categorize people a student b student c student there call me a

sucker but i just believe he did his best work citizen versus criminal now here are a few things that go into defining machines a machine may be defined as a system of interruptions they operate along lines that vary according to whichever aspect of them we are considering every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it's connected but at the same time is also a flow itself or the production of a flow a few things to see here first machines are not things they are processes they work on

inputs and produce outputs second they make distinctions they process information machines have a particular interest in some part of the world part that they're designed to interact with third the outputs of one machine can be or usually are the inputs of another you in this definition are a machine of machines also some of your machines perceive your sensory systems some digests your digestive system other machines are unconscious such as your desire each is productive in that it receives information shapes it and feed something back out sensory feedback desire and you're an assembly yet as a

machine you're part of social machines you're a source of input for the education system you're either a good student a mediocre student or a bad student these distinctions are made based on the data these machines have on you and as with all machines the data that they have on you is based on distinctions and differences that your behavior has created in the environment from which they gather their information if you continuously do what the system expects you to do to be a good student you know put effort into your assignments don't plagiarize hand in your

work on time then you'll be considered a good student and you'll get a mark to reflect that this might seem really basic and obvious right now but it does represent a big shift if we look at other institutions and past institutions so stay with me post script on the societies of control considers the new types of machines controlling us and which we submit ourselves to okay we have three types of societies laid out first societies of sovereignty disciplinary societies and newly or most newly societies of control the distinction between these first two was made by

de lisa's sometimes friend foucault who theorized the transition from one to the other whereas the last one control societies is de liz's term for something after disciplinary society as an aside by the time this essay was published foucault was already dead but his later work had moved on also beyond disciplinary societies to something called biopower societies of sovereignty keep people in place by regulating death your sovereign or lord has the right to kill you if you disobey and otherwise they don't care what you do as long as you pay your taxes disciplinary societies conversely regulate

your life and your body by controlling space a society of control however regulates access such that you could not defy its machines and mechanisms even if you wanted to this is due in large part to a high level of technological automation maybe think of a user account password as a good example we are going to be focusing on these two as that is the transition that de luz is trying to map out we still have disciplinary spaces with us these are spaces that are defined by enclosures of time or space authorities and uniforms doctors guards

officers teachers decide where you can go and where you can't where you are and what you're doing with your body is very important stand up sit down stay in your seat stay in your bed stay in your cell only take a half hour break you may think of louis altazer's ideological state apparatuses schools in particular are the preeminent model i have a video on that both your movement and your time are enclosed by space and schedule and restricted by the threat of violence from authorities including teachers prison guards or hospital orderlies in a disciplinary society

you're given the burden of self-discipline that is of voluntarily voluntarily obeying show up to the office on time meet your deadlines don't undermine your superiors obey the police in each case you have the choice only to regulate yourself or be reprimanded from getting fired to getting a beat down you are expected to burden yourself with responsibility to control where you sit where you stand where you walk then the state only has to interfere with your life when you're breaking the rules now enter the world of flows yeah that's height now if you know anything about

deliz you know that his world is not one of striated spaces it's a flow energies vectors everything's always on its way to something else and control is no different you're no longer an individual or a member of a mass of individuals in a space that needs to be disciplined no now instead you're a dividual which means you're a different source of information depending on which system you're interacting with so you are made up of different flows of information to the bank you are your credit score to a university you are an sat score to your

health insurer you are your genetic risk factors to a site like the one you're on right now you are your watch history so let me slow down for a minute here what are we actually looking at well for de las these are much more common types of institutions in advanced capitalism each of these machines collects information about you and what happens in each case is that you're automatically interpreted then classified by that data by the data that a machine has about you and others like you then your access to your own future is limited by

what they decide for example education still has some disciplinary aspects to it for sure but more often the education machine is not about obedience but about filtering you if your parents aren't rich your s.a.t score determines which tier of education you will have access to which in turn determines which kind of jobs you have access to which in turn decides which kinds of lifestyle you will have access to you're probably not punished for doing poorly in school but it will cut off access to possible futures your sat score may prove to be your gate into

the job market which more or less determines your social capital ceiling for life but even getting to this gate has a whole bunch of other access gates that i haven't mentioned like whether your parents are educated and help you with your homework if they have time to do that or if they're able to pay for tutoring for these standardized tests control societies manage access to each of these channels you might be able to guess some of the problems with these types of control societies in perpetuating existing inequalities similarly these scores and this other data determines

your ability to borrow money for health coverage and on social media they prohibit you from calling me a in the comments because your comment will be automatically filtered out see you're not disciplined for calling me but your access to commenting on other videos may be automatically restricted by these machines and what's significant here is that you're not expected to be a good person you're not expected to self-discipline because it's all going to happen automatically now i'm sure some of you are creative enough to figure out ways to get around it but let's please not try

to do that while we definitely still have disciplinary systems around us we are increasingly in a society of control the world is becoming more and more automated which allows for greater and greater control not only of the present but of the future our personal access as individuals with bodies become data without bodies individuated traits like your name body or gender are replaced with non-individuated aggregates such as scores and risk factors this is why i have often referred to de las as a post-humanist contrast this with disciplinary systems where you are your body in a space

alongside other people's bodies there you have to meet with doctors who look at you and tell you what you should and shouldn't be doing instead in a control society you have a watch that tells you how many steps you should be taking and how many calories you should be burning per day based on your demographic information and you can bet your health insurer is going to pay to buy this data to assess your category of risk and increase your premiums accordingly teachers went on strike in the united states because they're going to be forced to

wear these but those dna tests everyone wants to take same thing is going to be done with that data then criminal punishment we still have prisons which are disciplinary but we also have control society punishment where you're confined to your house by an ankle bracelet data rather than space you don't self regulate you're auto regulated here's the main difference according to de las enclosures are molds distinct castings but controls are a modulation like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other that is rules automatically apply themselves to your behavior or

the data that they have about your behavior you don't have to regulate yourself because the options you have within these systems social media standardized testing dna profiles they're controlled in advance before you ever have to make a decision these systems modulate your future possibilities based on data about you control systems channel your access such that you're not really free to misbehave you don't have that option anymore in a fully post human system automated surveillance is going to make this more real than we have ever imagined there's one specialized word i'd like to introduce you to

because it sums up how control systems do their controlling control machines steer your actions qua data into channels now as soon as i say the word steer there's a brave new world to discover cybernetics now i don't know what you think cybernetics means because there's a lot of offshoots from the original word the whole word family of cyberspace cyborg cyberpunk is a sometimes misleading offshoot of this word the word was actually coined first by a guy named norbert weiner its etymology is from the greek word this one kev vernale or in greek to steer as

in steering a trireme for weiner systems are those that function by feedback and they use feedback loops to interpret information and eliminate deviation over time feedback is an important word it maintains a given pattern the difference between this pattern and the actually performed motion is used as a new input to cause the part regulated to move in such a way as to bring its motion closer to that given by the pattern alright so this might seem like word salad but a thermostat is the simplest example of a cybernetic machine it gets feedback from the environment

over time in the form of temperature if the feedback from the environment is that the temperature is too cold the thermostat will turn on the heat until it reaches the level that it's set to and at that point it will turn it off the pattern it's trying to maintain here is that temperature that you set your thermostat to so if a thermostat uses feedback to control the temperature of a room what is it that our social cybernetic machines control [Music] people steering machines behavior steering machines and this is what the liz is talking about capital

health information these control societies don't force you to do anything but as soon as you offer them information they offer their feedback which is then used to steer or adjust your behavior usually this means placing you in a spending demographic or a risk category with further feedback you can refine your placements as a dividual into these societies of control large-scale data mining and the algorithms that learn from these data sets give whoever owns that data access to the future control societies are designed to create the future including your future they are future machines and they

don't just decide what the future is they mine you channel you and steer you into the future their designers designed them to create this is only a partial glimpse into the operations of real forces that are already producing what we will become it's the reason that the world's most valuable companies are data companies that data is subject to these cybernetic mechanisms which are future generating machines and speaking of future generating machines i'd like to thank matt epoch philosophy jw wayne matthew integral rising james louise arthur noel david antonio matthew ian and my other patrons for

their generation of this channel's future if you are interested in learning more about dillas go have a listen to our podcast this is plastic pills i'm glad you got channeled here and if you're wondering what to do next uh here's deliz's advice there is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another there is no need to fear or hope but only to look for new weapons i'm experimenting with media to do that within the epitome of control societies

the site you're on right now and thank you viewer for being a part of that you