“Transparency is the hell of the same.”— Byung-Chul Han

Like so many addictions, our short-term cravings are likely to be detrimental to our long-term well-being. By allowing ourselves to be surveilled and subtly regulated on a continuous, highly granular and pervasive basis, we may be slowly but surely eroding our capacity for authentic processes of self-creation and development— Karen Yeung, Hypernudge

If the individual’s understanding of himself as a subject emerges through the recognition of the other and the self, privacy, as the boundary between the two, is placed at the centre of identity, because privacy is what allows the self to become reflexive— Valerie Steeves, Reclaiming the Social Value of Privacy

Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside. Google and social networks, which present themselves as spaces of freedom, are assuming panoptic forms— Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society

Data flows generated within social media platforms extend beyond them, into a variety of secondary uses that are less consensual, including commercial profiling, background checking, criminal investigation and threat monitoring, trolling, and identity theft. There is persistent and mostly nontransparent slippage between the different kinds of uses, a state of affairs to which the vague, general privacy policies typically utilized by U.S. information businesses contribute— Julie Cohen, Studying Law Studying Surveillance

Ultimately, the proponents of personalization offer a vision of a custom-tailored world, every facet of which fits us perfectly. It’s a cozy place, populated by our favorite people and things and ideas. If we never want to hear about reality TV (or a more serious issue like gun violence) again, we don’t have to—and if we want to hear about every movement of Reese Witherspoon, we can. If we never click on the articles about cooking, or gadgets, or the world outside our country’s borders, they simply fade away. We’re never bored. We’re never annoyed. Our media is a perfect reflection of our interests and desires.— Eli Praiser, The Filter Bubble

We are all hostages of media intoxication,induced to believe in the war just as we were once led to believe in the revolution in Romania, and confined to the simulacrum of war as though confined to quarters We are all already strategic hostagea in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day, even while serving as exchange value.- Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

The minds of telechirists are grappling with the problems of employing remotely-controlled machines to do the peaceful work of man amid the hazards of heat, radiation, space and the ocean floor. Have they got their priorities right? Should not their first efforts towards human safety be aimed at mankind’s most hazardous employment—the industry of war?Why should twentieth-century men continue to be stormed at by shot and shell when a tele- chiric Tommy Atkins could take his place? All conven- tional wars might eventually be conducted telechirically, armies of military robots battling it out by remote control, victory being calculated and apportioned by neutral com- puters, while humans sit safely at home watching on TV the lubricating oil staining the sand in sensible simile of their own blood...Far-flung imperial conquests which were ours because we had the Maxim gun and they had the knob- kerry will be recalled by new bloodless triumphs coming our way because we have telechiric yeomanry and they, poor fuzzy-wuzzies, have only napalm and nerve-gas.- Anonymous, Last Word on Telechirics