Byung-Chul Han is very quotable. From Psycho-Politics:
Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon isolated inmates from each other for disciplinary purposes and prevented them from interacting. In contrast, the occupants of today’s digital panopticon actively communicate with each other and willingly expose themselves. That is, they collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operations. Digital control society makes intensive use of freedom. This can only occur thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure (Selbstausleuchtung und Selbstentblößung). Digital Big Brother outsources operations to inmates, as it were. Accordingly, data is not surrendered under duress so much as offered out of an inner need. That is why the digital panopticon proves so efficient.
A couple of pages later:
Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.
The transparency demanded of politicians today is anything but a political demand. Transparency is not called for in political decision-making processes; no consumer is interested in that. Instead, and above all, the imperative of transparency serves to expose or unmask politicians, to make them an item of scandal. The call for transparency presupposes occupying the position of a shocked spectator. It is not voiced by engaged citizens so much as by passive onlookers. Participation now amounts to grievance and complaint. With that, the society of transparency, inhabited by onlookers and consumers, has given rise to a spectator democracy.
This “spectator democracy” is entirely different from the politics described by Teddy Macker in which political thought is (in the words of Wendell Berry) “a continuous asking how best to conduct oneself as a member of a community or a polity.”