Paranoia Runs Deep

Scott has said a few times in class something to the effect that he set out to teach a course on new media and ended up teaching a course on neoliberalism. Like a broken record, I’ve repeatedly mentioned and blogged about David Harvey listing surveillance as a major symptom of neoliberalism in Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. As some of our other readings and class discussions have made clear, going online likely means that a user will be surveilled by search companies (Google, Yahoo!), the businesses that run websites, the N.S.A., and so on. With this knowledge comes justifiable paranoia that what is being typed, searched, or e-mailed privately is likely being seen by third parties.

Paranoia didn’t seem to come up as much I as thought it would have in some of our other readings related to networks and data-mining so I was pleased at how lucidly Tung-Hui Hu opened the cloud-and-paranoia can of worms in A History of the Cloud. Hu writes, “Network fever is the desire to connect all networks, indeed, the desire to connect every piece of information to another piece. And to construct a system of knowledge where everything is connected, as psychoanalysts tells us, the sign of paranoia” (11). Kelly, Diana, and I also got a taste of this when we had to read Emily Apter’s Against World Literature. Hu’s network fever is similar to Apter’s notion of the ‘one-world-system’ or ‘One Worldness’ in which everything globally odious, from terrorist networks to drug cartels (mentioned by both Hu and Apter), are connected in a complicated but existing network system. Apter’s ‘One Worldness’ or Hu’s ‘network fever’ can be grasped in the work of an artist like Mark Lombardi, who made artwork that simply connected global players to one another (i.e. George W. Bush to Saudi princes) on large interconnected doodles simply by “following the money” as Deep Throat said in All the President’s Men. Network fever can be easily seen in any number of current or recent U.S. television programs that engage with surveillance, paranoia, and/or conspiracy: The Wire (and Linda Williams has connected The Wire to control societies in her book on the show), The Shield, Homeland, Terriers, Mr. Robot, Rubicon, and the second season of True Detective. Go look for neoliberalism and its accompanying paranoia, conspiracy, surveillance, and network fevers on current TV, and you’ll find it all.