About the Author
Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of
Law at Columbia University and Directeur d'etudes at the Ecole des
hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris.
Reviews
We live in what Harcourt calls an expository society: where
privacy is no longer a core value and 'all the formerly coercive
surveillance technology is now woven into the very fabric of our
pleasure and fantasies'... The force of his new book lies in his
synthesis of a huge amount of history and theory, ranging from the
Ancient Greeks to the twentieth century, into a persuasive picture
of how and why we have stopped valuing privacy... So why don't
people care more about their privacy? Harcourt's book is forceful
and passionate, theoretically advanced, and persuasive about the
dangers of an alliance between the government and the for-profit
sector. The rigorous reader will be very satisfied by his precise
use of terminology, and by the fact that he does not set up an
absolute dichotomy between freedom and technology. But he also
acknowledges that knowledge of these practices doesn't seem to be
enough to move people to action... When Harcourt points out that
wearing the Apple Watch essentially turns consumers into parolees,
he gives us a very powerful way to think about our present state,
one that we need more of. Because we won't care about privacy until
we feel its absence as a loss, a physical limitation, an
affront.
-- (11/18/2015)
Real and imaginary panopticons of incarceration from centuries past
pale in comparison with those that surround us today. Rather than
acquiescing to structures of command and surveillance by force,
against our will, and in confinement, we have surrendered to them
voluntarily, without duress, and at scale. The condition of willful
exposure Harcourt describes in his book challenges well-worn tropes
of critical theory...The expository society, as Harcourt calls this
emerging assemblage of technology, practice, norms, and
institutions, frustrates long-held intuitions about spectacle and
surveillance, inside and outside, public and private. We live in an
expository society, Harcourt writes, in a society of willful
exposure and exhibition. In this perverse light, the inability to
expose oneself seems like punishment. And the reward for being
watched--liked, favorited, followed--is personal affirmation. Under
the emerging regime there is no need for metal bars, cells, or
watchtowers. We enter into the hall of mirrors willingly. We demand
entrance. And we expose ourselves in return...We have only begun to
understand the personal and political implications of the
expository society in which surveillance is both more total and
more voluntary than was ever imagined. The nightmare of George
Orwell's
1984 is in some ways less intrusive than the
reality of 2016. Harcourt's book ultimately points to the desire at
the root of our need for exposure...
Exposed sounds a timely
alarm about the proliferation of such seemingly banal but powerful
surveillance mechanisms...We do not live under a tyrannical regime
today. But Harcourt's book does identify infrastructures that have
the potential to invite tyranny.-- (02/05/2016)
The most socially alarming effect of the digital revolution is the
state of continuous surveillance endured, with varying levels of
complaisance, by everyone who uses a smartphone. Bernard Harcourt's
intellectually energetic book
Exposed surveys the damage
inflicted on privacy by spy agencies and private corporations,
encouraged by citizens who post constant online updates about
themselves...Harcourt describes a new kind of psyche that seeks,
through its exposed virtual self, satisfactions of approval and
notoriety that it can never truly find. It exists in order to be
observed.-- (06/23/2016)
