Digital image society erases privacy by mandating self-visibility

Evidence

Uber-creative spirit, hyperproximity, and insatiable imaging industries immure the psyche in imaginary coordinates. What sociologist Eva Illouz marks as “scopic capitalism”—relentless “consumption of the image” in an “economy of reputation created by internet platforms and social media”—inflates the ego and compels its ostentation. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, we look, and we look at ourselves being looked at; we expose and are exposed in turn. Faster fluid circulation burns in the economy of goods and services, and churns psychically through images, perpetuating not just commodity fetishism but what cultural theorist Christopher Breu terms “avatar fetishism.” Avatar fetishists behold the images at their fingertips, especially the ones they themselves generate in personal “presence” management, as spontaneous shimmer, with nary a thought for the scandium mines, chip microprocessors, server farms, and embodied people who physically toil to produce and operate them. Plate the dinner, frame the photo, upload it to the hash-tag, bank your brand—and thus fetishistically elide the economic relationships of data analytics. The willing ignorance in such fetishism is advanced by the internalization of “visibility mandates,” which lead individuals to misperceive digital architectures as their own self-expression. Again and again, quick visual processing occludes the technological and social conditions, and an illusory transparency obliterates any internal opacity. The philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle laments this absence of absence: “In today’s age, it has become intolerable to ‘withdraw ourselves,’ or else this withdrawal must be announced, scheduled, and registered, the secret garden is identified by a sign, which means that it is no longer secret.” If Roland Barthes could still conceive, in his reflections on photography back in 1980, of “private life” as “that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object,” then it seems clear that the 2020 vision of digital-image society preserves virtually no privacy, legal or metaphysical. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 92

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces two core terms: ‘scopic capitalism’ (Illouz) and ‘avatar fetishism’ (Breu), extending Marx’s commodity fetishism into the self-image economy.
• XREF: Connects directly to Marx’s commodity fetishism and to the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the culture industry and false immediacy.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Illouz’s and Breu’s coinages as sources for Kornbluh’s mapping of immediacy’s economic mechanism.