Imagine walking through a city without any barriers, walls, or locked doors. You can go anywhere you like, do anything you want. No one is physically stopping you, yet somehow, your path is already being shaped for you. Your choices, behaviors, and actions are subtly guided, but not by the kind of authority you recognise, such as police officers or government rules and regulations. Instead, invisible forces—data and algorithms—are influencing where you go, what you buy, and what you desire.
This is what we might call a “control society,” and it’s the world we live in today. It’s a world where power and control don’t come from overt rules or restrictions, but from the hidden systems that track, analyze, and predict our movements. These systems rely on data, AI and predictive analytics to influence our choices in ways we’re often not even aware of.
Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self explores how Freud’s nephew supposedly used his theory to influence consumer behavior by tapping into unconscious desires.
What is a "Society of Control"?
In 1990, philosopher Gilles Deleuze published a brief, yet immensely influential essay titled Postscript on the Societies of Control, which offered a radical vision of how power and social organization were shifting from the older models of discipline to new systems of control.
Deleuze began his essay by contrasting disciplinary societies, which Michel Foucault famously outlined, with what he called “societies of control.” Discipline, characteristic of 18th and 19th-century industrial societies, operates through enclosures—institutions like schools, prisons, and factories—where individuals are subjected to specific routines, spatial organization, and time management. Control societies, however, function without these rigid enclosures. Instead of disciplining individuals through confinement, control operates in open spaces, using mechanisms that track, modulate, and influence behavior.
In a traditional sense, control is about rules and restrictions. Think about a school with strict discipline, a workplace with clear guidelines, or a prison with high walls and locked doors. This type of control is easy to spot—there are clear boundaries, and if you cross them, there are consequences.
In these spaces, you start fresh in each new setting: when you enter a classroom, the rules of the school govern you; at work, your behavior (and uniform) shifts to fit the office environment; at home, different norms apply. Every space resets the expectations for how you should behave, and your identity adapts accordingly. This is how disciplinary societies have functioned for many years—in institutions like schools, factories, and governments, where each setting imposes its own form of control, and we begin again with each transition.
Today, this traditional form of discipline has transformed. We no longer start from the beginning with each new space. Instead, our digital identity carries over seamlessly, following us from one environment to the next. Online, our past actions—what we’ve searched for, what we’ve liked or bought—accumulate and shape what happens next, no matter where we are. We don’t reset; we continue.
But this fluidity extends far beyond the digital reality, and is clearly evident in the business world, particularly in the idea of lifelong learning and development. In the past, education had a clear structure: you started in school or university, progressed through levels, and eventually finished. Today, education is no longer a finite process. Continuous training and professional development have become an integral part of many careers. The boundaries between learning, working, and self-improvement have blurred. There is no end to “education”; rather, it has become an ongoing, self-perpetuating process.
One might ask, what could be wrong with ongoing learning and development? This seems like a positive thing—an opportunity for growth, adaptation, and continuous self-improvement. But the absence of an endpoint means that many people feel trapped in an endless loop of self-improvement, where there’s always something new to learn, a new skill to acquire, or another credential to obtain. This can create a culture of anxiety and inadequacy, where individuals are never quite “enough” and are always striving for the next achievement. The idea that education, like many aspects of life, never ends has transformed from an opportunity into a form of subtle control, shaping how we think about success, fulfillment, and personal worth in ways that are increasingly difficult to escape.
This continuous flow of data tracking and prediction represents a new kind of control, one where our previous behaviors influences our future choices, and where each step builds on the last, quietly steering us in certain directions without us realizing it. For example, every time we perform a search on Google, make a purchase on Amazon, or engage with a post on Facebook, we’re feeding into a reservoir of personal data. This data is processed, analyzed, and synthesized by algorithms that are constantly refining their understanding of us. These systems don’t explicitly tell us what to do, but they subtly anticipate our next move. They predict our preferences. Rather than dictating our choices, they present us with curated suggestions, recommendations, and offers, tailored supposedly for us alone. The control they exert isn’t direct or coercive; it’s seductive, shaping our actions through nudges that feel intuitive and irresistible.
Julien Prévieux’s What Shall We Do Next?, examining how touchscreen gesture patents subtly control our bodies through seemingly free, intuitive tech interactions.
Control Without Prohibitions: The Joy of Predictive Control
When Deleuze wrote his essay in the early 1990s, the mechanisms of control were only beginning to take shape. Today, with the domination of big data, AI, and predictive analytics, control has materialized into specific technologies and economic structures that gather, analyze, and monetize personal information on a scale previously unimaginable.
In a control society powered by data, individuals are not explicitly prevented from taking certain actions, but they are subtly guided through incentives. Predictive analytics plays a crucial role here, as it enables corporations to anticipate consumer behavior and customize marketing strategies accordingly. It creates a positive, even joyful, space of possibilities, one that is continuously monitored, learned from, and enriched based on the individual’s movements and choices. Control is exercised not by telling people “no,” but by constantly offering them something they’re likely to say “yes” to.
In this environment, control is not exercised through overt power but through the quiet manipulation of data flows. It shapes what content we see, what products are recommended, and even how we move through physical spaces—whether it’s a store equipped with facial recognition or a city navigated via geolocation apps. The control is subtle, but pervasive, shaping our experiences and choices while preserving the appearance of autonomy.
One of Deleuze’s most striking observations was that control societies do not rely on prohibitions. Instead, they modulate behavior through suggestion. The question he raised was: How can there be control if nothing is forbidden? In today’s world, one answer may lie in predictive strategies and the constant feedback loops that shape our behavior. Instead of saying “no,” it’s always suggesting “why not?”.
The Implications for Privacy and Autonomy
This is where the tension between freedom and control becomes most apparent. In a disciplinary society, power is exercised through confinement and prohibition, and resistance often takes the form of breaking free from these constraints. In a control society, resistance is more difficult because the barriers to overcome are becoming less and less clear. Instead, power operates through the very choices we make, shaped by the data we produce. Our autonomy is compromised not by external forces that limit our freedom, but by internal forces, by patterns we've established ourselves, that now guide our decisions.
The loss of privacy in this context is not just about the exposure of personal information; it is about the loss of control over our own desires and actions. As predictive strategies become more sophisticated, our choices and appetites are increasingly shaped by algorithms that supposedly know us better than we know ourselves. The result is a kind of soft coercion, where individuals are led to act in ways that align with their data profiles, without realizing that they are being controlled.
Strategies for Living in a Control Society
Given these developments, how can individuals respond to the control society? Deleuze suggested that the task of living in a control society is to “discover what we’re being made to serve.” In the age of data, this means becoming aware of how our personal information is being used to shape our behavior and taking steps to resist or subvert these mechanisms of control.
One potential strategy is to limit the amount of data we generate by using privacy-enhancing technologies, such as encrypted messaging apps, ad blockers, and VPNs. These tools can help individuals protect their personal information and reduce their exposure to data-driven manipulation.
Another strategy is to engage in what some have called “data obfuscation,” where individuals deliberately introduce noise into the data they generate, making it more difficult for companies to build accurate profiles. For example, someone might use multiple email addresses or pseudonyms to confuse data collectors, or they might engage in random or unexpected behavior to disrupt predictive algorithms.
Ultimately, the most radical response to the control society may be to rethink our relationship with technology and data altogether. Instead of seeing data as something to be mined and exploited, we could imagine a future where personal information is treated as a form of collective wealth, to be managed democratically rather than privately owned and controlled by corporations.
Understanding how control society works is the first step toward reclaiming some autonomy. We may never escape the data-driven systems that shape our lives, but by becoming more aware of them—and by taking small steps to disrupt them—we can start to regain a sense of freedom in a world where control is everywhere, yet nowhere to be seen.
*This week’s recommended film is Playtime (1967) by Jacques Tati, a masterful comedy on the alienating effects of modern technology and urban planning. The film’s nearly dialogue-free style emphasizes the dominance of the environment over its characters, showcasing how architecture, design, and technology can influence human behavior in ways that are both subtle and profound.