Fear, the Virus and the Digital Dictatorship

Abstract

Quarantine has not been used during any of the three pandemics of the twentieth century. What has changed since then? In this article, the two authors hypothesize that the victory of the society of control plays an important role in this modification of collective psychology. Society of control is based on the fear of a generalized threat, as hypothesized by the assumptions on which Thomas Hobbes found his Leviathan. With Covid, each of us has become a threat to everyone else. The ultimate goal of society of control’s latest version - surveillance capitalism - is the total manipulation of individuals who can be put under control in order to eliminate threatening aspects of their behaviour and become functional gears of society. The pandemic could be the perfect opportunity to implement the tools of control designed in the Silicon Valley to carry out both their business objectives, and their anthropological policy design of control society and surveillance capitalism.