The smartphone operates as devotional object of digital servitude
Evidence
Every dispositive – every technology or technique of domination – brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion. Devotion and related words mean ‘submission’, or ‘obedience’. Smartphones represent digital devotion – indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary – which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 41
Every dispositive – every technology or technique of domination – brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion. Devotion and related words mean ‘submission’, or ‘obedience’. Smartphones represent digital devotion – indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary – which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 41
Categorization
- STORYSTEM: Could seed speculative fiction: a world where people physically carry and orally recite their feed like rosaries — Han’s analogy made literal — and the Like as a compulsory amen.
- CANDY: ‘Like is the digital Amen’ and ‘Facebook is the church’ — genuinely tweetable oneliners, though the rosary comparison is the load-bearing analogy.
- SHARE: Someone deeply into media-theology (or devices-as-instruments-of-power in the manner of McLuhan) would enjoy the smartphone-rosary-communion chain.
- DEFINE: Defines ‘dispositive’ and reframes smartphone, Like button, Facebook through devotional/confessional vocabulary.
- XREF: Connects to Foucault’s dispositif and surveillance literature already in the base about delegated surveillance and power. — connects to: Being watched by God intensifies awareness of social surveillance on Sundays — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 147; Smartphones under communicative capitalism function as workplace tools, not luxury goods — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1592; Smartphone touch operates without sensuality, as digital relays rather than felt contact — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1768 (+2 more)
- SEED: Possible essay angle: a history of ‘devotional objects’ of power from rosary to smartphone, and what ‘Like as digital Amen’ implies about attention economies.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 41
Broader Connections
- Smartphone touch operates without sensuality, as digital relays rather than felt contact
#complicates(0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1768 - Being watched by God intensifies awareness of social surveillance on Sundays
#contradicts(0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 147 - Smartphones under communicative capitalism function as workplace tools, not luxury goods
#qualifies(0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1592 - Smartphones evolved from McLuhan’s media extensions into prosthetic parts of the body
#expands(0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1131 - The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity
#expands(0.70) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18