Awards

• Nominated for Rachel Carson Prize 2016

Overview

Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care. Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society-a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. We are not scandalized by this. To the contrary: we crave exposure and knowingly surrender our privacy and anonymity in order to tap into social networks and consumer convenience-or we give in ambivalently, despite our reservations. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist. Disobedience to a regime that relies on massive data mining can take many forms, from aggressively encrypting personal information to leaking government secrets, but all will require conviction and courage.

Full Product Details

9780674504578

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Reviews

This compelling study reveals a radically new form of power to which we freely expose ourselves in a world in which state, economy, and society are no longer separate spheres. Harcourt s vision of this new digital age stands out for its sweep, its vividness, and its analytical precision.--Steven Lukes, New York University

An impassioned plea to liberal democrats to wake up to the perils posed by the new digital technologies to their freedoms and selves. We have become a society of expositors, willingly and naively exposing our most intimate lives to the scrutiny of impersonal agencies, endangering not only our civil liberties but our identities as well.--Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

Author Information

Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University and Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.

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