Infocracy: How the Digitalization of Information is Dramatically Changing Our Perception of Surveillance and Freedom.

I recently read Infocracy, by the Korean-born Philosopher Byung-Chul Han and translated by Daniel Steuer. Han writes in German and is famous for being the philosopher of the contemporary digital information revolution. He's famous for his exceptionally short books, which are commonly less than 100 pages, and for writing on technology. Some of his most popular books include The Burnout Society,  Psycho-Politics, and The Disappearance of Rituals.  

Surprisingly, Infocracy was easy to understand for a philosophy book. Yes, I said it: this is an easy to understand philosophy book. The small paperback was only 59 pages and light as a feather. I was able to throw it into my laptop case and read it over the weekend. In this short but edifying short read, Han writes how information has become so easy to access with a click of a button. With so much information at our fingertips, Han writes how this age of AI halts the search for truth and modern discourse. People are able to get any information instantly without having to do any work for it. We can just type into Gemini or Chat GPT and receive a neatly packaged answer for just about anything. 

He compares past times, when research was a lovingly arduous, often communal activity where researchers and students alike engaged in discourse to learn from others. Do any of you remember the library? You know, the place you would go to find information on a subject you were interested in? Nowadays, we use our mobile phones for information and for digital discourse. We are liberated from being shackled to a designated location where all the information is available. 

Han argues our mobile phones are not giving us freedom at all, but are rather making us unfree.

He points out that our phones are surveillance devices; the more we use them, the more we subject ourselves to data collection. Han calls these powers of data collection by algorithms and artificial intelligence the “Information Regime,” and we are all subjects that are under constant surveillance. 

Interestingly enough, under the information regime, people do not feel like they are under  surveillance at all. Rather, we feel free while we simultaneously clutch our phones everywhere we go. Just look outside at any university, and you can see the “freedom” of students as they walk around with their heads buried in their phones. I mean, that’s freedom, right? Paradoxically, this feeling of freedom keeps people under the rule of the information regime. The more we click on a certain topic, the more we give our data over to the powers that be. 

Characteristic to our socio-technical society, we already know our data is used against us. There are myriad algorithms on our devices that know what we like. We’ve all searched for something on our phones and had that item advertised to us later on in the day. Convenient, right? No; once the novelty wears off, this type of access to our daily lives is absolutely creepy. It’s digital stalking, and our information is always at risk. Our data is a new currency in the age of AI, and we gladly hand it over for the sake of convenience. The information collected is then used against us to influence our own  consumerism, politics, and ideas.

The worst part is there is no conceivable way to escape the data collection time we live in. Well, if we really wanted to escape the information regime, we could go totally off the grid and live full on Walden status. However, most people don’t have the luxury of living in the woods. We have families, jobs, internships, vacations, term papers, and Starbucks coffee to get! 

We can’t reasonably uproot or alter our lives to escape constant surveillance and data collection; that won’t happen anytime soon. Rather, what Han points out is that we should be aware of the information regime and how it gives us the perception of freedom without actually granting it. Han encourages his readers to take the time to do some research of their own and use critical thinking. While AI is helpful, we should also be able to think for ourselves. Now that’s true freedom.