The article aims to offer a new theoretical framework for thinking about surveillance and control in social media. In the first section, the authors show how Panopticism found breeding ground in social media studies. Yet they claim that despite an expanding critical literature, not much seems to be changing in prosumers’ practices online. Their hypothesis is that this is happening not only because individuals are forced or cheated by the technical systems, as it has been usually argued, but also because they voluntarily submit to them. For this reason, in the second section, the authors introduce the notion of voluntary servitude, coined by Étienne de la Boétie in the XVIth century. Voluntary servitude is a paradoxical notion because it represents the attempt of tidying up two opposite facts: human beings’ will of freedom and their reiterated submission. In the third section, they make the notion operative in the context of social media by focusing on privacy as the counter-discourse of surveillance. In conclusion, the authors deal with the emancipatory character of voluntary servitude, as well as with the concept of subjectivity it entails.

Trascrizione dell'intervento del Collettivo La Boétie all'interno del ciclo di seminari La disobbedienza civile 2020-2021.

Tocqueville’s writings on prison discipline have often been underestimated by specialists. Nevertheless, they have a significant theoretical value and are tightly linked to their author’s more renowned works. While comparing the two U.S. “penitentiary systems” of Auburn and Philadelphia—a comparison critics have long eluded due to a subtle interpretative oversight—Tocqueville poses a theoretical question: how can inmates’ attitudes be durably modified by prison organization? In struggling to answer it—as this paper argues—Tocqueville investigates the relationship between habit, mutual communication, abdicative tendencies and individuals’ “taste” for freedom, thus developing a set of anthropological insights that would later play a crucial role in his social and political thought.