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  • Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
  • Martha Patricia Niño M.
Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2006. 360 pp., illus. Hardcover. ISBN: 0-262-03332-1.

This enjoyable book examines the paradoxes of freedom in the age of fiber optics. The notion of light as knowledge, clarification, surveillance and discipline is interwoven by networks of light tubes, giving way to a literal materialization of enlightenment and at the same time serving as a metaphor of reality. There is a somewhat extreme but interesting discussion about concepts that we take for granted, such as freedom and liberty. The author's position is akin to Žižek's. There is no better way of enslavement, no better way to live a non-reflective existence than living in a free society, a free world, a free market with a free circulation of information and democracy. For him, enlightenment means "Think as much as you like, and as freely as you like, just obey!" Freedom is different from liberty. The act of liberation from an oppressive circumstance is linked to liberty, while freedom is related to mobility. If in the past people longed for "liberty, equality and fraternity," we now speak of "freedom, democracy and free enterprise." Freedom in our society is more a characteristic of capital than of individuals, regardless of how bourgeois they are or even exactly because of that very same condition, as Marx stated. This social shift toward a control and power society is not necessarily better or worse than a disciplinary society. These models will always have at some point internal contradictions, such as the tension between liberty and equality. Chun also implies the impossibility of full democracy in a technocratic society in which the so-called digital divide has not disappeared, and will not disappear since it is what companies use to sell themselves as "the solution." It introduces new liberating and enslaving forces, such as the emerging digital sweatshops.


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Within the text one can encounter information about widely discussed topics that are still very relevant, such as, When do we sacrifice important rights such as privacy in order to have security and to reinforce control, as with militaristic approaches and the post-September 11th terrorist paranoia. The author also notices that paranoia is not pathological anymore but something that we perceive as logical. Justifying fear has become quotidian and acceptable.

Although there is a list of technologies and descriptions of software and hardware, the core of her analysis is not based on technology or military strategies, and she clearly states that control and paranoia form parts of bigger political problems that cannot, under any circumstance, be reduced to technological ones. For that reason the research is focused instead on the roles of race and sexuality in the rich and complex interactions between freedom and control. These discourses are symptomatic of larger changes in bio-power.

The Internet is sometimes advertised as a utopian place in which there is no gender, age, infirmity or other ways to be excluded. This is problematical, in particular when it is portrayed as a race-free utopia, because it ends up solidifying the stereotypes that it claims to erase. New media constructs notions of race that, as Mongrel states, are more than simple indexes of biological and cultural sameness; sometimes ethnic conflicts are also carefully constructed. Race is a complex mental image that sometimes depicts the fear of otherness, since sometimes it is built upon harmful stereotypes. Some of the constructions about others also have colonial and conquest strategies. The chapter "Orienting the Future" is particularly insightful, in that it has interesting criticism of nerd-cool cyberpunk literature, such as Neuromancer, a narrative with high-tech Orientalism that projects exotic and erotic fantasies highlighting the anxieties about the "impotence" of Western culture. It is not surprising that the main character, Case, is a primitive, emasculated and suicidal cyber-cowboy. In a similar way, cyberspace is a sensuous consensual hallucination, an addiction so powerful that one turns to drugs...

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