If the panopticon is a machine to dissociate the binomial to see/to be seenfifteen–in the peripheral ring, one is seen completely without being able to see anyone; in the central tower, one sees Finland Email List without being seen – it is clear that the big digital companies, like the Chinese Communist Party, operate according to this principle. In the West, there is no secret guarded with greater suspicion than the algorithms that govern the operation of companies that seek to impose total transparency on all others.
In China, the inexorable march of the "controlocracy" leaves intact the opaque heart of power inscribed in the Forbidden City16. This is nothing new: studies of the impact of the advent of the telegraph and later the telephone have already shown that both led to greater centralization of decision-making in late-nineteenth-century colonial empires . Indeed, if in the past the local managers enjoyed wide margins of autonomy (they had to act before receiving instructions from the center), current technologies simply erased them17. 8. Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party are converging toward a posthuman future.