Our contemporary age is confronted by a profound contradiction: on the one hand, our lives as workers, consumers and citizens have become ever more monitored by new technologies. On the other, big business and finance become increasingly less regulated and controllable.
What does this technocratic ideology and surveillance-heavy culture reveal about the deeper reality of modern society? Monitored investigates the history and implications of this modern accountability paradox. Peter Bloom reveals pervasive monitoring practices which mask how at its heart, the elite remains socially and ethically out of control.
Challenging their exploitive ‘accounting power’, Bloom demands that the systems that administer our lives are oriented to social liberation and new ways of being in the world.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Preface: Completely Monitored
1. Monitored Subjects, Unaccountable Capitalism
2. The Growing Threat of Digital Control
3. Surveilling Ourselves
4. Smart Realities
5. Digital Salvation
6. Planning Your Life at the End of History
7. Totalitarianism 4.0
8. The Revolution Will Not Be Monitored
Notes
Index
About the author
Peter Bloom heads the People and Organisations Department at the Open University, UK. His recent books include The CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life (Zed, 2018) and The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral (Routledge, 2017). His writing has featured in the Washington Post, Guardian, and New Statesman.