Byung Chul Han, PSICOPOLITCA, 2016

Does an infinite possibility of connection and information really make us free subjects? Starting from this question, Han outlines the new society of psychopolitical control, which does not impose itself with prohibitions and does not oblige us to silence: instead, he constantly invites us to communicate, to share, to participate, to express opinions and desires, to tell our lives. With a friendly face seduces and flatters us, maps our psyche and quantifies it through big data, stimulates us to the use of self-monitoring devices, optimizing our performance. In the digital panoptic of the new millennium – with internet, smartphones and Google Glass – you are not tortured, but tweeted or posted, the subject and his psyche become active producers of intangible assets, personal data and emotions are constantly monetized and marketed. In this essay, Han pays attention to the paradigm shift that we are living, showing how freedom today meets a fatal dialectic that leads it to turn into constraint: to redefine it it is necessary to become heretics, to turn to free choice, non-compliance.