From Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference by Erik Davis:
Just as William Blake condensed the coming horrors of industrialism into his image of “Satanic mills,” Dick’s Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the “disciplinary apparatus” of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a “technology of power” was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, “The Empire never ended.”
Related:
- Jerusalem by William Blake
- By networking information they are networking hierarchical observation on a global level. As philosopher Michel Foucault wrote before he’d even heard of the Internet:The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known;… This idea is similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison he designed.
- The New Panopticon: The Internet Viewed as a Structure of Social Control
- War as a tool for social control: Near the end of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union was about to self-destruct, Boris Yeltsin made a very revealing comment to the US government. He said, “We are going to do something very terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.” The forever ‘WAR against TERROR’ is the new paradigm of social control.
