Hustle Culture and the Invisble Big Brother

Reading Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power’ and ‘Burnout Society’ felt like witnessing a surgical analysis of society itself. His diagnosis is that neoliberalism has created a crisis of freedom: in his words, we have simultaneously become victim and perpetrator, master and slave. To me/ According to Han,This is the greatest societal issue we face today. Han shows that the crisis of mental health and individualism are also symptoms of this issue.

In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Han recycles and revises Foucault’s ideas of the disciplinary society and biopolitics to fit our contemporary situation. Firstly, where Foucault's biopolitics was concerned with the corporal and managed populations through statistics and demographic control, psychopolitics today penetrates deeper layers - our desires and our very sense of self. Furthermore, the “docile body” no longer complies with immaterial forms of production. Second to his argument is that Foucault’s disciplinary society operated on negativity, repression and prohibition whereas the modern neoliberal order is one of “positivity” and excess. It is, in his words, a “friendly big Brother” where needs are stimulated, consumption encouraged and desires fulfilled through an illusion of freedom. Though we never feel we are being watched or under threat, this is simply a more efficient method of control and surveillance. The digital sphere plays a primary role in this operation as “Big Data” can now observe, record and influence not just our actions but our very psyche. Here, his analogy of a digital panopticon excited me: he says it is an ‘aperspectival’ system, with no blind spots unlike Bentham’s and thus it can “peer into the human soul itself”. Even more importantly, we, the inmates, collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operation through voluntary self-exposure: “smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers”. Every like or retweet reveals to them our desires, some of which we may not even be conscious of ourselves, so that emotions can be exploited at a pre-reflexive level to “steer” behaviour or even voting decisions through micro-targeting.

Unfortunately, our auto-exploitation and auto-surveillance also takes another form which he describes in The Burnout Society. He argues that neoliberalism has transformed the discipline society into an achievement society where we are no longer obedience-subjects, but “projects” and entrepreneurs of ourselves. What could be a more efficient kind of subjugation? We become our own panopticon. We chase self-optimization so that the coercive ‘should’ is replaced by an unlimited, positive ‘can’: this is the notorious violence of positivity. At the same time, every failure leads to self-reproach as aggression is turned inwards. Han recognises two important symptoms that result from this. Firstly, the atomization of society:  the neoliberal subject has no capacity for friendship with others that might be free of purpose. Secondly, today’s mental health crisis of neurological illnesses like depression, anxiety and exhaustion. As the issue of economic inequality also increases, I suspect that the symptoms Han describes will only worsen.

Upon reflection, I would also add to Han’s analysis that the rise of populism and authoritarianism is yet another symptom of the neoliberal crisis of freedom. In an individualistic, burnt out and polarised society, people are even more vulnerable to the appeal of a populist narrative that promises belonging and the authoritarian promise of security and control.

Han’s work has fundamentally changed my understanding of freedom by showing me how deeply and broadly power operates in society today. I see that it extends its reach beyond sovereigns, institutions or coercion to penetrate even psychology and identity.