“So Batman, Guy Fawkes, and Andy Warhol walk into some bar called Echelon…”: Personalised Communication, Media Consumption, and Political Agency

The realization of an authentic self is the principle challenge for the subject within contemporary (post)modernity. According to Habermas, the project which developed and realised the Western human subject, as inaugurated by the Enlightenment, was a process in which an entity’s status as an individual was defined and increasingly fore-grounded. Over the course of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, both the symbolic and the practical conceptions of the individual as a self-sufficiency, as an agency, and as a unique will inhabiting a unique body propelled by its own will-to-power was gradually extended to all citizens from its origins as a uniquely aristocratic privilege. Simultaneous with the development of the individual defined against the fabric of the public sphere was the individuation of nation-states against the fabric of geography and the geo-political, and which has ultimately resulted in the liberation of multinational financial and industrial entities from the legal and geographical limitations posed on citizen-humans.

         As Paul Virilio notes, digital technologies articulate a means of controlling and defining subjects by imposing a globalized sense of time and environment informed by a simultaneity which makes obsolete any local analogues. Unlike the monolithic rigidity of prior systems of control, the proliferation of information production technologies allows subjects to be interpellated as individuals, their differences rationalized as ‘personal profiles’ intended to catalyze modes of consumption. The Western philosophical tradition has prided itself on liberating the individual from hierarchical circumscriptions dictated by social protocol and into a space where the modern subject is expected to realize and satisfy their own needs in society. Such is certainly the myth of foundation by which the ‘American Dream’ can be seen to operate, and to which the Occupy Wall Street protesters gestured in their criticism. And while the spirit of protest and rebellion is currently manifesting with a popular interest and sympathy not evident since the 1960s, this paper will argue that such enthusiasm for revolutionary change has (so far) been entirely co-opted by mechanisms which interpellate subjects as consumers in a manner which limits their potential as citizens who can express political agency.

         In this capacity, mobile telephony is situated at the intersection of personal agency and systemic control. While cell phones can be seen to have recently enabled protests for democratic reform in several Arab countries to flourish, simultaneously, however, mobile telephony as used by police and government agencies allows a degree of surveillance and behaviour modification seemingly at odds with the democratic and philosophical traditions associated with a liberated human subject. Following Frederic Jameson’s reclamation of Adorno’s critique of the capacity for self-agency within mass culture, this paper will conclude that in the 21st century, individualism is the precise means by which rigid social conformity will be achieved.

         In postmodern consumer culture, the freedom to realise a process of wilful self-individuation derives in large part from the social and political transformations which occurred in the 1960s, or more importantly which have been periodised and branded as the 1960s. The 60s counterculture begat the self-awareness of the consumer initially as a process rejecting the vulgarities and corruptions of consumer culture, best manifest in the ubiquitous use of plastics in manufacturing and incessant miniaturization in electronics which brought to market an increasing number of consumer distractions. In fact, the alleged austerity of the hippie who rejected mass culture in favour of the primacy of the natural world does not align with the actual expansion of consumer capitalism in the years leading to the 1970s oil crisis in the West, when consumption was momentarily depressed, and the fallacy of this particular narrative is further evidenced by the subsumption of nature-centric, ostensibly anti-modernist hippie idealism into the full flourishing of contemporary consumer capitalism and the reactionary but consumer-centric environmental movements which emerged over the 80s and 90s and continues to flourish into this century.

         The political agency which enabled the expression of dissent in the 1960s evolved into the free market individualism in which the very same expression of dissent is refocused upon uncovering the market value of the self; in this context both dissent and conformity are acts of self-realisation within the material terms of the economic. We can speak of this process as a Heideggerian uncovering and disclosure of being as resource and potential, and the desire which grounds such potential in materiality in this sense quantifies the self within an order of value. The process of uncovering thus reveals and quantifies subjects as individuals while at the same time aggregating them under the aegis of a collective desire itself rationalised and historicised as abstract transcendent ideas such as patriotism (understood as brand loyalty), “freedom”, and “terror”. In other words, the historic-technological configuration which can be conceived as the “project of Western civilisation” simultaneously liberates the human-subject into individuality at the same time as that individuality is used to further conform individuals to the will, if you like, of the system as a whole. Due to the conflation within the market of high and low culture understood by Fredric Jameson as a condition of what he defines as postmodernity, as variety and difference serve not only to reflect a democratic equality of taste and judgement, but also to energise the market with an ever-increasing pool of consumer satisfactions.

         Of course, one cannot invoke quantisation without its material analogue, as it were, the computer. As depicted in many science fiction and espionage films of the 60s and 70s – here I am thinking of Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld, and THX 1138, among others – the computer entered into the public consciousness in the 1960s as a monolithic and autocratic entity which troubled distinctions between inanimate objects and wilful organic sentience, ultimately threatening human independence. The malevolence threatened by the computer is perhaps best realised by the murderous rebelliousness of HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose monstrousness stems from the logical sacrifice of human life in pursuit of what has been reasoned to be a more significant collective purpose and whose all-seeing eye signals the omnipresent surveillance with which this presentation will conclude. An even more prominent aspect of the counter-cultural movement, and one which overtly connects the 60s with the Occupy movement of today, involved democratic political agency as realised by mass protest – civil rights, feminism, the anti-war movement, and gay rights, wherein the agency of the individual is realised and enabled by the strength of the group.

         In his 1984 essay Periodizing the 60s, Frederic Jameson describes rebellion and popular activism as fundamentally tied to the colonial history of the countries in which such forms of protest materialised. He argues that the emergence as subjects of women, homosexuals, minorities, and the disabled – along with other minorities – granted the full extent of political and social standing is fundamentally a process of de-colonisation(498). As I will further discuss momentarily, it is the proposition of this paper that such neo-colonialism does not simply implicate those subjects who have been historically marginalised. Rather, I wish to extend Jameson’s interpretation of neo-colonialism as precisely the project of late capitalism. Instead of ships full of Europeans who encounter a “New World” full of economic potential manifesting as resources and slave labour, colonialism under late capitalism requires a new geography and conception of the socio-economic world, one in which the desires and needs of the body of the individual subject are elevated to the superposition of the desires and needs of the incorporated state, a virtual realm of borderless finance and the self-realised sovereignty of the multinational companies. It is for this reason that we are confronted with the logic of massive corporate subsidies and austerity budgets, in which the middle- and working classes are sacrificed for the abstract and, in world-history terms, unsustainable benefit of economic growth, itself inordinately tailored to continue economic growth for the investment class (see, for example Thomas Piketty’s recent book). In this capacity, the modern subject is granted individuality within the circumscriptions of citizenship, which grounds the subject within the praxis of the legal and economic systems in which political agency most concretely manifests, namely the aristocratic privilege of property.

         Viewed in concert, the major and minor socio-cultural transgressions which occurred in the 1960s in fact really were threatening to the authority and dominion of the established hegemonies in Western civilisation. However, the cultural and political legacy of the 60s does not live up to the popular conception of resistance and rebellion. While the drive to satisfy the will and desires of the individual by extending to rights of the citizen to all individuals regardless of gender, class, or ethnicity is indeed an important and ongoing procedure – most importantly in the sense of the Hegelian recognition of the Other – we should not allow such progressivism to blind us to the consequences of a continued and enthusiastic individualism. The counter-culture idealism of the 60s, made iconic by the young hippie protester, enabled the popularisation and broad (or mainstream) acceptance of free love (sexuality outside of marriage and/or child production, ultimately elevating the commodification of sexuality into daily and habitual practices of consumption – images, bodies, people), “new age” lifestyles of self-exploration and a spirituality governed by the self (constituted not only by the crystals, vibrations, auras, “Eastern” polytheism, and psychic readings popularly referred to as “new age”, but also in the mainstream acceptance of psychiatry and pharmacology as therapeutic practices, the latter deriving from recreational drug use intending to “expand consciousness”), and the foregrounding of personal feelings as foundational to the establishment of new and alternative lifestyles.

         As should be evident by the list I just provided, such gestures to counter-cultural resistance have been entirely co-opted by forms of consumerism. Over the decades that followed, the image of the hippie and of 60s protest has been sanitised as itself a commodity, to the point where the rebellious and revolutionary potential inherent to 60s counterculture now signals the precise manner in which market forces interpellate individual subjects as individual consumers.

The popular conception of the 60s radical ignores the realities of life for many of those who truly did “drop out” – perhaps best exemplified by the model and junkie Joe Dallesandro, the star of Paul Morrissey’s trilogy of films Flesh, Trash, and Heat, whose bohemian and transient life critiques both bourgeois complacency and working class (masculine) hedonism. Of course, under Warhol’s tutelage, Dallesandro was himself commodified, although not at all to the degree of his heirs.

The contemporary rebel, commodified in the wake of James Dean, is safe enough for mall fashion and daytime television.

         In this sense, we can understand the revolutionary discourse of cultural history as a means by which the past is rationalised, enclosed, and invoked as a series of walled gardens of commercial potentiality. The hippie commune is now the corporate retreat, while the expansion of consciousness in realisation of a “true” self has become personal fitness training and the self-help industry. The deviant, do-it-yourself fashions of hippie youth became not only the heavily-accessorised fashion trends of latter decades, as well as the continued proliferation of youthful rebellion as “sexiness” for the beauty industry presently, but also served to ensconce the perpetual novelty of youth culture as the principle driver of consumer capitalism.

          In this sense, we should perhaps be a little weary of the symbolism behind the appropriation of the Guy Fawkes mask from the film version of V For Vendetta, as the history of political rebellion invoked by the mask is inaccurately glossed by the film in that the Gunpowder Plot was not a rebellion against aristocratic or authoritarian control of the body politic, but rather it was a conservative and Catholic reaction to Protestantism.

This historic-political gloss is mirrored in the use of the mask by the middle-class left, for such consumer-enabled activist symbolism was acquired at dollar stores and manufactured in China. As Zizek has recently warned, protesters must beware of taking pleasure in themselves and the good time they are having.

         And so with the middle-class privilege of citizenship, finally we come to the mobile phone itself. The common narrative describes the manner in which, like a techno-centric inversion of the Horatio Alger myth, what was a luxury item in the 1980s and early 90s has by 2012 become available to nearly everyone in the “developed” world and a substantial portion of people in countries collectively known as the “developing” world. In ways that are both obvious and subtle, the mobile phone brings together the worlds of the private and the public, which includes the intimacies not only of social and interpersonal relationships, perhaps best (and incidentally most humorously) realised in the “sexting” phenomenon which troubles teenager and politician alike, but also the intimacies of the virtual and quantified self, and such intimacies are both financial and geographical in nature. That mobile phones are viewed by financial analysts as having the potential to replace both physical currency and bank access cards further enshrines the mobile phone as the principal new mark of citizenship.

The authoritarian potential of an individual’s subject-identity to be quantified in such an individuating and technocratic manner for commercial purposes is evidenced by the famously apocalyptic rants of the character Johnny in the 1993 British film Naked, wherein the barcode prefigures the cell phone in dividing the self into material agent and virtual consumer.

         On the other hand, the democratic potential of mobile telephony extends from phone acquisition to its actual use, or so we are told.  The freedom to communicate at our will and at our leisure is perhaps a necessary by-product of a democratic capitalism which allows and often demands freedom of travel.

And so we read in the popular press (Guardian, Globe and Mail) that the glut of inexpensive cell phones enabled the flourishing of popular protests in the Middle Eastern countries, an event collectively narrated under the sign of the Arab Spring. Spontaneous crowd organisation and mobilisation (flash mobs), as well as a high degree of tactical co-ordination are enabled by mobile telephony, and the resultant activities are themselves rendered into a self-reflexive catalyst for protest as the still and moving image making capabilities of mobile phones are exploited and photographs and video circulate through social media.

The 2008 film The Dark Knight depicts one possible implementation of the surveillance possibilities of the mobile network which, while rendered in the thoroughly sensationalist and fantastic manner typical of Hollywood “realism”, is grounded in contemporary research into information analytics. Batman himself can be seen to represent the conservative fantasy of individual agency enabled by the corporate nation state. Batman is himself an individual whose privilege is under threat from a morally corrupt and politically rebellious underclass of criminal elements. In one sequence, he uses the powerful computer systems in his Batcave to access an elaborate spy network which uses the cell phones of every citizen in the city. Not only does Batman have access to the location information of every citizen in real time, thus allowing him to locate and monitor their behaviour and communicate with them. More fantastically, the Batcave computer can access the microphone and camera of each individual cell phone, and that data, when interpreted and analysed, allows the Batputer to render a real-time audio-visual map, thus reifying what Paul Virilio describes in The Information Bomb as the “audiovisual continuity of nations”, in which “political frontiers ... shift from the real space of geopolitics to the ‘real time’ of the chronopolitics of the transmission of images and sounds” (13).

         Virilio further describes the results of such, as he calls it, “amplification of the optical density of the appearances of the real world” (39). As an aside, it should be noted that the computational power necessary to interpret the data sets produced millions of simultaneous mobile phone users is already available in the supercomputer-class of machines already in use by large corporations and national governments. As is often noted, US Intelligence agencies currently use a system called Echelon, which in the wake of the attack on the World Trade center in 2001 has expanded its Cold War era role of media and electro-magnetic signal transmission analysis to include the acquisition and analysis of every email message and most if not all cell phone traffic (voice, sms) and internet searches, as well as possibly Amazon purchase histories as well. The National Security Agency is currently building a very large data centre in Utah, which will be used, according to former NSA official William Binney, as a permanent archive for this ever-growing intelligence database, which Binney describes as currently containing roughly 20 trillion sources of data. Furthermore, computer science predicts that by 2030 the same computational power will have “trickled down” to the individual consumer by means of the same mechanism of capital and industrial investment by which the computational capabilities of a computer which cost $10,000 in 1995 has been matched or exceeded by an inexpensive mobile phone in 2012.

          More practically in the short term, however, and more specifically relative to the protest activity occurring with the Occupy and Arab Spring movements, among others, is the ability for cell phone users to be located geographically in real time. Governmental and military authorities are presently using this capability to locate and monitor individuals of interest, and indeed by analysing the mobile traffic which occurs at locations of protest or conflict, criminal guilt may be assigned with the assumption that proximity equates with participation.

The internet-enabled cell phone permits a further capacity for control, and here we can turn to the commercial model championed by Apple and its iPod and iPhone technologies. First of all, we need to remind ourselves that there is relatively little that is unique about Apple’s products other than a unified design aesthetic. The iPod, which like every other digital media player and flash drive in existence is in fact a software media player laid on top of generic flash memory, exists solely within the postmodern virtual geography inhabited by marketing and branding. Similarly, the iPhone is neither the first portable digital device with a touch screen nor the first internet-enabled phone. The revolutionary and individuating potential of their devices is quite simply a fabrication of Apple’s marketing strategy. Much more important than the individual devices, however, is the infrastructure on which such devices operate. Apple’s mobile infrastructure involves a closed-hardware/software platform in which all user interaction with the device is controlled, regulated, and profited upon by a home electronics company now worth as much as an oil company. In a market strategy which involves rendering traditional optical media obsolete and all content delivered to the end user will be downloaded to the iTunes store, the capacity for the Apple customer for cultural awareness will be limited to what has been approved by Apple. Indeed, that the socio-technological configuration known as (iDevice) + iTunes is presently the most optimal means by which corporate capitalism and the individual subject can be seen to cohabitate within the virtual geography of the self (which, as this paper has elaborated, is the corporate body of the citizen) is reflected in the fact that the financial markets have christened Apple as the most valuable corporate entity on the planet. The desire for communication is the fuel for this dependency. In this capacity, mobile telephony will be seen as the dominant means to control and conform the individual subject, much like oil was the means by which individuality came to flourish over the course of the 20^th century.