Time,space,and power in digital modernity: From liquid to solid control

Introduction

Modernity is now thought of as having entered another phase contiguous with the growth of digitized communications, linkages, and relationships in everyday life. This phase addressed as digital modernity (Lyon, 2017; O’Hara, 2020; Fussey and Roth, 2020) is assumed to have evolved from the late period of industrialization, without fully abandoning analog systems, and then progressing to a stage of rapid, flexible interactions in computer-mediated networks arising within comprehensive digital frameworks. It is plausible to think of this movement as leaving behind the conventional understanding of modernity as increasing rationalization and embracing the idea of intermediation as the basic unit of a new modernity. The rationalized control of time and space is being reimagined as the nonlinear and placeless means of decision-making, relating and exploiting in the multiple dimensions of an emerging digitized world. Where space and time were treated as differentiated in early modernity, they are dedifferentiated in a digitized modernity—as is also the case in a liquefied modernity (Bauman, 2000a). Spatiotemporal separation under a rationalizing impetus came to represent the early phases of modernization as a form of institutional solidification with fixed locations situated in paradigms of progressive movement. However, digitization enables the interpenetration of space and time through intermediation that is both a process of dislocation and compression. It allows observers to construe modern structures as susceptible to liquefaction or transformation into mobile, desultory entities without fixed points in space and time. These entities exist and operate in digital atmospherics that lack equivalency in the older analog systems and may even imply an increasing hegemony over the democratic process (Hassan, 2018: 15). It is, therefore, vital to arrive at an understanding of whether liquid modernity as conceptualized by Zygmunt Bauman is continuous with contexts that are now becoming digitized. Bauman’s theory of modernity does not deal with digitization per se, but his observations on liquefaction are pertinent to an inquiry on present conditions that are simultaneously producing new freedoms and controls.

The idea of spatiotemporal compression received much attention from Harvey (1990: 240) as a postmodern condition in which “space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies … [and] time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is.” Compression in this sense was made as an observation to indicate the reduced command over space. For Bauman (2000a), however, this observation applied to his rendition of modernity as having become liquefied rather than being prefixed by the term “post.” Taking his cue from Marx and Engel’s dictum (1996: 9) that all that is solid melts into air, Bauman reconceived modernity not as a fixed feature of a hardening industrialism but rather as a state of dissolution that made it less cumbersome and more fugitive-like. By reshaping this idea into an aqueous metaphor, Bauman came to pose modernity as nonlinear where space and time could be depicted as reunited to produce “the new irrelevance of space, masquerading as the annihilation of time” (117). ¹ It simply meant that the “conquest of space” as inherent to solid modernity was over and “the effectiveness of time as a means of value-attainment tends to approach infinity” (118). Yet, this nonlinearity as applied to social actions within a liquid context was premised on an assumption of linear movement within the phases of modernity that made plausible the change from the solid to the liquid. Does this movement also apply to the idea of digital modernity? By posing this question, we raise the possibility that liquid modernity is now being replaced by a digital form. Such a replacement may in fact suggest a reversal of liquidity to solidity under a new structure that “concretizes globalization in the form of real time … and remote-control systems” (Stiegler, 2009: 32, italics added), a solidity Bauman might not have anticipated. Spatiotemporal interpenetration may make the digital seem somewhat continuous with the liquid, but it is actually concealing the formation of a new structure that is turning the liquid back into the solid. ² Such a reversal implies that digitalism may be reproducing structuration on a level that renews the differentiation of time and space.

My purpose in adumbrating this reversibility is to argue that Bauman’s theory of modernity not only describes liquidity as a rethinking of the postmodern condition but also prepares the ground for discerning the return of solidity in digitized society. For Bauman, the view that postmodernity was not the end of modernity meant that it was still a form of modernity but lacking in certitude. Increasing uncertainty made it possible to introduce the liquid metaphor as an alternative to describing modernity’s ambiguities and, at the same time, address the future of this trend. Without explicitly stating a reversed future, some of his thoughts on surveillance (Bauman and Lyon, 2013) may be taken to suggest a renewed differentiation of time and space that implicitly points to a solid return. Examining this differentiation within the context of digitalism and its relation to surveillance would be a first step to reutilizing Bauman’s theory for a new analysis of time, space, and power in the digital era. But first, we begin with the purpose of Bauman’s liquid metaphor. Why did Bauman relinquish his earlier views on postmodernity for a more aqueous conception of modernity?

Modernity: From post to liquid

Bauman’s choice to go liquid could have been premised on postmodernity’s own event horizon. Where could postmodernity reaching its apogee in the 1990s possibly go after its time? The uncertainty inherent to the postmodern condition implied the need for an alternative level of analysis. Bauman’s struggle with this condition of incertitude was initially an attempt to descry the parameters of postmodernity as a form of social breakdown. ³ First, he argued that the postmodern environment lacked a totality with organization. It meant that the magnitude of uncertainty in this environment could not be fixed and, therefore, social actions became “staunchly under-determined, that is autonomous” to appear as “a space of chaos and chronic indeterminacy” (Bauman, 1992: 192–193). This scenario of disorganization was seen to render the idea of self-constitution as incommensurable with the notion of progress. As far as self-identities were concerned, postmodernity implied a disfigurement of the cumulative process since selves could only remain in a state of permanent change without any stabilizing coordinates and timeframe.

Second, Bauman (1993: 33) discerned postmodernity as a “re-enchantment of the world after the protracted and earnest … modern struggle to dis-enchant it.” Re-enchantment implied that “mystery is no more a barely tolerated alien awaiting a deportation order … [when we] learn again to respect ambiguity, to feel regard for human emotions, to appreciate actions without purpose and calculable rewards.” In a sense, his statement on re-enchantment could be considered an indirect reference to the notion of reversibility. The postmodern world was seen to be a site for the rediscovery of older values based on nonrational appeals and actions. If the view on disenchantment were thought to be an outcome of a temporal movement away from the ancient toward a quest for modern secularity, then re-enchantment as expressed in postmodernity would not be anything else but another route back to the hoary state of the elemental and preternatural. In that regard, re-enchantment constituted a challenge to a disenchanted modernity by breaking down its worldview and logic of organization.

The circularity of time, inferred from Bauman’s addressing of postmodernity as an era of indeterminacy and recursiveness, might make it seem that modernity was actually an illusion of linear movement. In postmodernity, change could only be conceived as a type of irony. Yet, Bauman wanted to argue that there was real change despite the postmodern tendency to bend the arrow of time. Therefore, the only way to express this change was not to frame it within a postmodern discourse but to recontextualize it as a transformation from solid to liquid modernity. Indeed, liquid modernity could be treated as a phase contingent on the passing of solid modernity or if one liked, a post-solid modernity.

Bauman’s view on the transition of modernity from solid to liquid first appeared in his primary work on liquid modernity (2000a). His subsequent writings on liquidity (Bauman, 2003, 2005, 2007a, 2011) simply took this transition as fait accompli. He began with the idea that the history of time originated with modernity:

Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps even more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history. (2000a: 110)

It was in the making of this history that time came to be conceived as something different from space because “it could be changed and manipulated … a factor of disruption” (111). What he meant by this was that modern inventions like the car could shorten travel through space by making it feel as if time was lessened by machines made and controlled by humans. Modern scientists and philosophers were also presented with the occasion “to cast space and time as two transcendentally separate and mutually independent categories of human cognition” (111). In this separation, time ultimately became “the weapon in the conquest of space … [as] the invading, conquering and colonizing force … the principal tool of power and domination” (9).

If spatial conquest constituted the ethos of the era Bauman referred to as solid modernity, it gave space value but rendered time as an object to be tamed or regulated or, in his own words, “a tough, uniform and inflexible time was needed” (115). This gave time in solid modernity the characteristics of routinization where repetition of familiar actions filled the hours of daily life. In Bauman’s description, routinized time “joined forces with high brick walls crowned with barbed wire or broken glass and closely guarded gates … [it] tied labour to the ground … immobilized capital as effectively as it bound the labour it employed” (116). As time assumed dominion over space, it also became decisively measurable like the dripping sand in an hour-glass, the circulating hands of a clock, or the changing digits of a digital watch to provide a sense of mechanical control over the schedules of capitalist production. Spatiotemporal separation was indispensable to the modern arena of capitalist production, giving a solid sense to its sources, participation, and future.

In the latter part of the 20th century, the solidity of modern institutions and cultural lifestyles began to morph into fluid and flexibly dynamic forms that Bauman came to depict as liquid, that is, they could not be characterized as being rooted in specific locations and operating in definitive timeframes. If solid modernity represented “an era of mutual engagement,” liquid modernity took on the features of “disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase” (120). These were features of spatiotemporal dedifferentiation: the instantiation of movement as time swallowed up space. In his view, the short-term “made of instantaneity its ultimate ideal … to focus on the manipulation of transience rather than durability” (125–126). Therefore, any transaction in a liquid world would have “an element of disorganization deliberately built into it: the less solid and the more fluid it is, the better” (154). This type of disorganization could only be practiced under circumstances where time became portable and elastic, a temporal form Agger (2011) designated as iTime. And in a culture dominated by the use of smartphones, iTime dissolved the boundaries between day and night, work and leisure, and space and time.

While solidity promoted a view of the future as enabling structuration, liquidity merely pointed to a program of unending metamorphoses. But Bauman (2000a: 126) also offered a reminder that the work of culture in human history consisted of “conjuring up duration out of transience, continuity out of discontinuity” and “the consequences of [its] falling demand remain to be seen.” Perhaps, in saying this, he was suggesting that liquidity was likely a passing phase, undermined by its own flux to possibly revive the structural work of culture. In analyzing Bauman’s theory of culture, Brzezinski (2020: 470) seemed to regard the growing concerns in his final years over the problem of securitization and resurgence of nationalist movements as marking “a return to the concept of culture which characterized solid modernity.” But one could also ask if these concerns were being rethought within the purview of a more extensive change spearheaded by digitization. His final publication on Retrotopia (2017) reiterated the bleak view of an increasingly fragmented world. In this view, people desperately perused the past as a generator of hope: “Hope is placed in the past … a dreamed up history without the educating capacity of experience and suffering” (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2018: 338). Was this nostalgia being driven by further estrangement in a new world turning to digitization as means for accelerating control and domination? If this were the emerging motif of heteronomy, Bauman could have been implying that the liquid era was coming to an end and signaling another phase of modernity that supports the forces of resolidification.

Digitizing modernity: A new solidity?

The advent of digitalism is introducing new meanings for the notion of modernity. By utilizing the coded bases of ones and zeros, digitalism is apparently making human relations more liquid as people are experiencing faster and lighter forms of connectivity. Instantaneous and remote interactions have become commonplace. Yet in this context, we “become unmoored in our consciousness from the analogue Earth to be buffeted by virtual currents whose origins we do not recognize, nor fully understand or control” (Hassan, 2018: 19). Modernity in this sense not only depicts a condition of increased transience but also one of growing discombobulated thoughts and behavior in a world glossed by digital sophistication and high-speed porousness.

However, digitized events may only be superficially liquid because many of their enactments are produced and maintained within an algorithmic sphere of regularity, predictability, and determinacy. In digitized practices, the algorithmic refers to the formulaic or mathematical steps in computational processes that are induced for the purposes of social and hierarchical sorting. It now constitutes the nucleus of most data-driven activities related to many aspects of everyday life (Striphas, 2009: 81–110). Seemingly, digital modernity is centered on the algorithmic and cannot do without it in terms of the solidity it provides to current forms of interacting, producing, and consuming. It is a solidity of new cultural forms based on specific information-processing tasks establishing correlations between large sets of data. Algorithms empower these tasks to the point of being considered as decisive in shaping social behavior, for which the leading corporations such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook that utilize them are identified as “the new apostles of culture” (Striphas, 2015: 407).

Yet, this solidity that appears as hyper-structured interconnectivity is also subjected to the variability of algorithms that “sometimes manifest as math, sometimes as lines of code and sometimes the parsed data or visualizations they produce … They shapeshift in the hands of those who design and engineer them and especially those who use them” (Thompson et al., 2018: 4). To describe algorithms as shape-shifting suggests that the structured outcomes of their operations may be less solid than what is generally expected of computational processes. In other words, the algorithmic is chameleon-like in lending to interactive networking a certain level of solidity and, at the same time, may reduce the manipulation of digital operations to a liquid process. But despite the liquidity of algorithmic usages, the organization and transmission of data under their operations generally result in greater powers of predictability such that a cumulative sense of solidity can be attributed to the ways social transactions are enacted in the digitized world. From the viewpoint of some AI specialists, the power of data (and concomitant algorithms) is regulatory, rather than innovative, in “creating a set of dependencies that is hard to disrupt,” especially in the case of media platforms (O’Hara, 2020: 202). It implies that reliance on the algorithmic in digitized social actions has come to shape the world today in a new solidity that highlights the massive generation and collation of data.

This global impetus toward “datafication” (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013) may be seen as replacing the emphasis on commodity production by the drive for data extraction. It represents a form of capitalist accumulation derived from the growing dependency on mediatizing, networking, and profiling in all walks of life. Compared with other forms of capital such as those created in the financial and cultural sectors, data capital is now considered possessing value which surpasses that once attributed to money. In this age, data capital “is institutionalized in the information infrastructure of collecting, storing, and processing data; that is, the smart devices, online platforms, data analytics, network cables, and server farms” (Sadowski, 2019: 4). As info-tech/media organizations, the bases of data capital are also seen to be compatible with those supporting financial services and innovations. Little or no animus exists between the institutional citadels of data and financial capital—“Far from being in competition with each other, Wall Street and Silicon Valley are converging around data capital as the new frontier of accumulation and circulation” (Sadowski, 2019: 5). The implications of this growing literature on data capitalism and its links to other forms of digitized capitalism such as communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005), informational capitalism (Fuchs, 2010), iCapitalism (Duff, 2016), platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) are indubitably an acknowledgment of the resolidification of capital.

Focusing on the resolidification of capital suggests training our analyses on the gargantuan assets owned by leading high-tech and media corporations that signify the breadth of economic wealth and control they wield to maintain or alter the scope of business, communication, and politics, as well as the transactions of everyday life. As noted by Sadowski (2019: 8), “Some of the wealthiest companies in the world, like Facebook and Google, are built on data capital … The three biggest data brokers alone – Experian, Equifax and Transunion – each bring in billions of dollars annually … For many of these companies the data they use is primarily about people and created by those people doing things.” Data capital, therefore, welds digital modernity to a solid base of immense wealth that supports a new computational social order. To discuss the solidity of this new order also means taking another look at spatiotemporal compression as a basic feature of the digitized world. If this feature were taken as a derivative of liquid social processes, how would its expression be seen as compatible with the solidity of the new order? That is to say, if digital modernity signals a reemerging solidity, it would be expected to contradict the preceding liquidity. Yet, this liquidity seemingly continues to play a vital role in digitized interactions and transactions. Can we, then, conceptualize the new era of the digital as simultaneously liquid and solid?

The argument offered here begins with the re-imagination of spatiotemporal differentiation as underlying a new means to power in digital modernity. However, this differentiation is not considered an attribute continuous with that of a solid modernity where time was seen as the dominant factor. Instead, it is in the control of spaces that marks digital modernity as ushering in an era of big data: the cyberspaces where huge amounts of varied data are created, accumulated, and stored. Where such spaces are concerned, data storage and management would represent new localities of power and control rather than the speed with which data are collated and utilized. On the other hand, speed can be conceptualized as a coded technique, as in the use of barcodes and QR codes, to hasten connections and correlations. The shrinking of time would not be prioritized as a new power-drive for controlling big data but an adjunct to the vast infrastructures that occupy the new spaces of control.

Relocating power

Databases form the new localities of power in digital modernity. They are not merely technical assemblages of informational materials and codes but represent intricate digital systems that are “embedded within a larger institutional landscape of researchers, institutions and corporations constituting essential tools in the production of knowledge, governance and capital” (Kitchin, 2014: 21). These systems are so extraordinarily complex and yet so ingeniously convergent with surveillance and other functions of everyday life that they have come to be seen as revolutionary in shaping and predicting social behavior. In an earlier description of this revolution, O’Harrow (2006: 37) detailed the capability of a US database company to store a petabyte or a thousand trillion bytes of information in its computers. Likening it to a 50,000-mile high stack of King James Bibles, he referred to it as the company’s Infobase that stored the largest collection of US consumer and telephone data available in one source. This revolution was not just concerned with data accumulation but also the sites of supercomputer capabilities where fine-grained portraits of about 200 million people could be matched and analyzed.

Even though the vast stores of data fine-tuned through algorithms can be accessed from anywhere on PCs, laptops, or smartphones, they still need to be centered in strategic locations where connections and transactions can be made logically and speedily. The actual situating of data highlights specific places where storage is concentrated and data are processed resulting in power centers which are not only revenue-generating but also behavior-modeling. Places such as Silicon Valley in northern California or Crypto Valley in Switzerland are distinguished by the density of digital professionals and companies specializing in datafication for media and financial purposes. Intelligence work based on global data collection suggests storage location as a power center such as the Utah Data Center run by the NSA (Lyon, 2014b: 8). Even video-streaming services provided by companies such as Netflix depend on well-located storage spaces known as “the cloud” which are “very real, well-guarded facilities with stunning levels of operation” (Helles and Flyverbom, 2019: 37). Data centers are also growing in different parts of the world as in the case of Ireland which is now one of the European hubs for data storage and processing. They host major tech and media corporations that collect data but store them in specific locations elsewhere and sell them in any part of the world. Alternatively, tech companies could move into new territories to exploit untapped data sources as an emerging form of “data colonialism” (Sadowski, 2019: 3, 5). Paralleling these companies, server farms are also springing up everywhere from across the United States to countries in the Far East like India and Malaysia (Cubitt et al., 2011: 152). In short, digital modernity is reproducing space as a variable of control. And this is not just about physical space but its virtual dimension “that is unlimited and therefore the potential repository and generator of unlimited accumulation” as well as “the power to colonize the outward and inward physical realms of the world in ways that were impossible under analogue capitalism” (Hassan, 2020: 29, 111).

For Bauman (2000a: 118), liquid modernity promoted the meaning of time as a form of “near-instantaneity” which augured “the devaluation of space.” Time became “timeless” because “all parts of space can be reached in the same time-span (that is in ‘no time’), no part of space is privileged, none has ‘special value’”. He was in all likelihood referring to computerized communication and transactions that made unproblematic the daunting gaps in human ties and relations generally created by distance. For instance, skyping and teleconferencing enable the online meetings of colleagues, friends, and relatives even though they may be hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart. These meetings tend to induce an illusion of shrunken real time with no benefit given to space. Here or there matters little since the computer can conjure up our real-time images without having to deliver live bodies through space. Yet computers have to occupy space in order to perform these imaging functions. In other words, the locations of computers and servers do make a difference to how these functions are carried out. Without an understanding of where relay stations are positioned, one would be at a loss in explaining the differential rates of speed in data flow. Lewis (2015) in his report on financial “flash boys” provides an eye-opening example on the importance of location in revving up or slowing down data flow for stock forecasts and trading. His description of how computerized price movements could be delayed by distance manipulation, a method known as coiling the fiber, demonstrated the dependency of temporal liquidity on spatial specificity. Delays as infinitesimal as 350 microseconds could only be pulled off with 38 miles of fiber connection (or at least, an impression of this length) to provide some traders with split-second advantage over their rivals (177–178).

The ascendancy of space restores the meaning of solidity to a new modernity replete with digital connectivity, gadgetry, and interchanges. But this is not a solidity that is tied down by heavy machinery or frozen in time. Mainframes, cell masts and towers, and fiber optic cables are not considered heavy machinery and are amenable to relocation. Data movements in networks created through the use of such equipment imply that we are witnessing the construction of a protean solidity, not the bulk or size-obsessed kind confined to fixed localities (Bauman, 2000a: 113) but one that is relocating and reshaping as exemplified by the killer cyborg that can resolidify in different ways in the Terminator movie franchise. Databases and centers, computer exchanges, and relay stations all privilege space as a re-locative source of power that not only provides an interactive solidity to data collation and management but also a basis for resolidifying capital in the form of data accumulation and exchange value. If digital modernity is fostering a new kind of spatiotemporal separation with space as a power-determinant, how then would time configure in this bifurcation?

Time as technique

In writings on modern temporality, the idea of accelerated impermanence has become conventional wisdom (Hassan, 2009; Glezos, 2012; Noyes, 2014; Rosa, 2013; Tomlinson, 2007). Real time still ticks on but invariably experienced as shortened and rushed in a manner as necessary to the completion of various tasks in the workaday world. A belief in modernity as institutionalizing “short-termism” makes it difficult for people to place their hopes in a more certain future, as voiced by Lipovetsky (2005: 43): “Our inability to imagine the future increases, but it goes in tandem with a super-powerful science and technology more than able radically to transform the coming age.” This is a depiction of a new dystopia where technology reigns supreme but increasingly blurs all futures-scape through its means to speed up changes indefinitely. Yet, acceleration is considered preferable to slowness because it facilitates the immediacy of intermediation processes—despite the disruption it can cause in the pursuit of innovation (O’Hara, 2020: 199). Thus, the desire spawned by digitalism for speedier, multiple interconnectivities is also considered utilitarian in a world of complex searches and research: “fast social media such as Twitter have turned out to be very productive and practical instruments in academic life – useful for promoting one’s work, networking with colleagues globally and enhancing scholarly impact” (Vostal, 2019: 1052).

Even as the modern world veered toward acceleration as a form of progress, reactions have emerged to challenge it as desirable or unstoppable with homiletic propositions that slowness and its accompanying sanguinity could be preferable to the toxic aspects of the hurried life. This theme of deceleration as a ballast to acceleration forms a new didacticism on the manipulability of time as experienced in quotidian contexts (Honoré, 2004; Parkins and Craig, 2006; Osbaldiston, 2013; Koepnick, 2015). On the other hand, Vostal (2019: 1056) highlights the pitfalls of slow living as well as the risks of accelerationism to argue that “neither slow nor fast can be preferred as universal solutions.” What these arguments hinge on is the view that time does not encapsulate modernity but rather it is a shapeable variable in the service of modernists with different values regarding progression. Time is not presumed to be a given objectivity but perhaps something more attuned to an incurred subjectivity. Bauman (2000a: 125) cited Thompson (1979) in reiterating that durability was assigned special value because of its association with immortality. This reference was intended to emphasize that time as value could not be excised from power-orientation, especially the venue of control where the “ability to make objects durable … is what puts people ‘near the top.’” Neither acceleration nor deceleration was considered temporal actions of a natural order but intended by the controllers, people who called the shots in speeding up or slowing down the world.

If spatial control is central to digital modernity, it would also entail a consideration of its temporal partner as susceptible to the redefining agendas of the digitized elite. Again, it was Bauman (2000a: 125–126) who identified the Bill Gates-style of manipulating transience in order to forget about the long term as a means “to clear the site for other things similarly transient.” Indirectly, he was also pointing out the accelerationism of the digital: the shelf-life of digital products is always contingent on the imminence of newer versions. Innovative digitalism can only thrive in terms of policies that reject fixity for continuous upgrades. Smartphones, laptops, video games, video-streaming, online learning, and a host of other digitized activities do not enjoy the luxury of inertial existence. They are utilized only on a basis of the perpetual upgrade where obsolescence is engendered as necessary to the rapid turnover of all forms of digital products. For instance, for a while I had been applying online for campus parking and paying cash personally for the parking decal. The dreaded moment came when the practice was upgraded to online payment. Applicants without online debit accounts had to seek out kin or acquaintances with such accounts to make representative payment. I had fallen behind time as unknown bureaucrats accelerated the meaning of upgrade. But to where could a complaint be filed?

Time in digital modernity has acquired the status of technique. It appears to be continuous with the spatiotemporal compression of liquid modernity, but in the empowerment of space, it becomes a tool for purposive alacrity or a means for economic, political, and social gain without a full disclosure of its power centers. Digital modernists and aficionados of compressed time may still imagine that spatiotemporal dedifferentiation has not fully run its course yet, but they are not fully aware of the powers that be (wherever they might be) which dictate the conditions of speed for maintaining or advancing the new order of mass digitalism. And it is in this new order that the renewal of spatiotemporal differentiation ⁴ becomes critical to the reemergence of solid control as exemplified by the spread and enculturation of mass surveillance.

Enculturating surveillance

Early digitization of the modern world produced religious analogies of its practices such as the cult of information (Roszak, 1986) and the cult of the Internet (Breton, 2011). These analogies have now dropped cult for culture such as in the culture of surveillance (Staples, 1998; McGrath 2004; Lyon, 2014a, 2017, 2018). Culture tends to imply timeless beliefs and practices which instill generations with attachment to ways of life perceived as attractive, beneficial, desirable, and useful. However, digitizing these ways of life has not only increased the level of conveniences and affordances in daily actions but also exposed them to unprecedented frequencies and varieties of observation that are making lives more transparent anywhere and everywhere. ⁵ It is in this landscape of interminable monitoring that the cults of information and the Internet merge with a wider cultural matrix dominated by the practices of liquid surveillance (Bauman and Lyon, 2013). This cultural matrix is considered post-panoptical because, in Bauman’s view (2000a: 11), the controlling towers of Bentham’s “Panopticon” have become decentered, as those who are in charge “can at any moment escape beyond reach–into sheer inaccessibility.” The implication is that power-wielders become less noticeable but exercise greater outreach with the high-tech tools of observation spilling out into the consumer realm. Bauman satirizes employees of this culture as having to grow and carry their own personal panopticons on their bodies in order to be watched even as they believe that these devices are a necessity for being interconnected. This form of digital internalization comprises the voluntary participation of consumers in “using their cellphones, shopping in malls, travelling on vacation, being entertained or surfing the internet” (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 10, 47).

For Bauman, liquid surveillance represents an aspect of a dystopian culture where identities are not only frenetically monitored but also easily reshaped in a context of fragmentation that allows the unrestrained movement of signs and imageries masquerading as the freedom of consumption. Pursuit of this freedom is considered a form of self-deception providing a momentary sense of well-being for the digital consumer who is not only a responder to market forces but also fodder for the data economy. Just as people are spending more and more time at digital amphitheaters and online agoras, they are simultaneously exposed to agencies that closely study their identities and file them for posterity. The liquidity of choice is also the liquidity of surveillance: the moment of choosing can also turn into a moment of choosers being identified and documented for future actions. Under the cover of multiplying choices, liquid surveillance invades all aspects of social life to render the circulation and collation of personal data consistently unproblematic. The ubiquity of online platforms and portals suggests the reality of a “new transparency in which not just citizens but all of us … are constantly checked, monitored, tested, assessed, valued and judged” (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 10). It reflects the solidity of a new power where “the tables have been reversed, and it is now the many who watch the few” (Bauman, 2000a: 85–86). Everyone can now record and document the actions and utterances of anyone with their camera phones and spy cameras, thus displaying a reversal of the panoptical power once held by the few against the many. It may well lead to a situation where the ubiquitous power to view can also be reduced to a power to distort and entertain.

But this power can also be disproportionately channeled into building up stores of feedback data for purposes of self-improvement. It allows the compulsion for self-tracking to be seen as a type of new freedom for boosting self-identities through the constant monitoring of digitized personal data. Morozov (2014: 226) referred to compulsive self-trackers as “datasexuals,” people who aspired to rational action “only by attending to every single noise, by recording and visualizing all [their] wants, fears, and desires” (233). As part of the quantified self-movement (Crawford et al., 2015), “datasexuals” are contributing to a new narcissism where “being in the open” with oneself becomes “the most avidly sought proof of social recognition, and therefore of valued – ‘meaningful’ – existence” (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 26). Yet, in pursuing this proof they only see a small fragment of the data, much of which end up “in the databases of the wearable device corporations” (Lyon, 2017: 827). These databases like those controlled by other surveillant assemblages (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) are the warehouses of “data-doubles,” digitized replicas culled from the personal information provided by multitudes of net surfers and media neophytes. As the new spaces of control, these warehouses contribute to an emerging solidity composed entirely of coded information organized algorithmically by data-workers who only perform according to corporate policies. No doubt these are policies that fetch humongous profits, but they are also providing the blueprints for cultural acceptance of surveillance as an embedded practice of digital modernity—for instance, the growth of surveillance practices in various digital platforms catering to cultural consumption across all societies (Helles and Flyverbom, 2019). It is a practice that has reinvented the bread and circuses of the pre-digital era as the intermediated joie de vivre in a warren of watchfulness directed by digital corporations.

Within an expanding data economy, digitization readies bodies to vanish into databases as a new form of solidity “where all brilliant residues of technotopia are mixed together in newly recombinant forms” (Kroker and Weinstein, 1994: 17). This depiction of digitization in which data reductionism refixes bodies as vessels/vassals of an intermediated system suggests a mass culture marked by electronic prostheticization and surveillance. Masses are not treated as the progenitors of independent thoughts and actions but as the willing givers and conductors of data categorized by controllers for predicting and intervening “before behaviors, events, and processes are set in train” (Lyon, 2014b: 4). Concomitant with the Internet-of-Things (Bunz and Meikle, 2018), such data would likely become “virtuocratic” as power devolves from subjectivity to systems designed to automate connections and searches through digitized configurations to produce both a seductive effect, as in online shopping, and a policing regimen which sets in motion varieties of identification technology. Power becomes more distanced from individual action and stays concealed in the corridors of the media—intelligence—surveillance complex. This is what is meant by a new digitized solidity when flesh and blood becomes transformed into databases to be utilized as tools of governance by state and corporate power. In this transformation, there is no difference whether these tools are inside or outside a body because—in the views of Mamoru Oshii, a Japanese artist and filmmaker quoted by Bunz and Meikle (2018: 96)—the individual has already become part of the machine, the facsimile of a device. It implies a new mass culture of interchangeable persons and devices within an Internet-of-Things replete with sensors, processors, and network connections—an entwined solid order of flesh and artifice interacting under the auspices of time–space compression. However, it is not speed that counts most in this order but the distinction between the datafiers and datafied: those who procure, store, and sell data and those who knowingly and unknowingly provide data for their own manipulation.

Ultimately, the question of the reason for this order has become one that even Bauman could not decisively ignore. When asked why such an order was considered necessary, his response was the “all-too-human and inherent urge for transcendence … to a habitat that is neither worrisome nor wearisome … a world with no contingency or accidents, ‘unanticipated consequences’ or reverses of fate” (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 99–100). In other words, a re-embedding of sociality with minimal fluidity as space once again takes over to empower technology’s autonomy. The enculturation of this autonomy in surveillance can be seen then as the unacknowledged reversal of liquidity to a digitalism automating the solid control of a world already normalized by instantaneity and dis-locality. Ironically, it is not a control that serves the urge for transcendence but one that “has taken other directions in search of the self-same goal of profit” (Hassan, 2020: 59).

Conclusion

Bauman’s conceptualization of liquid modernity was an attempt to rethink postmodernity not as the twilight of modernity but another phase of social transformation in which we witness the accelerated flexibility of almost everything and the dislocation of almost all forms of interactive agency. The world appeared to be incredibly fleeting and permeable; making it seem more sinisterly malleable than it was in the days of heavy industry and political administration. Within the context of time–space interpenetration, this malleability has ramified into multiple forms of monitoring, making it almost impossible to consider everyday lives as not being surreptitiously undermined by the very tools that make those lives workable. It gives to those in authority the means to collect data and exert control promptly and without being up close and personal. Those on the receiving end may not even comprehend its impact until the consequences have become fait accompli. Power gains more distance to make us less cognizant of the new heteronomy masked by mass consumption and technological advances in a paradigm of solid control that may be far more devastating than the one encountered in the pre-digital era. This was the solidity that Bauman might have reconsidered seriously in view of his final thoughts on “the road back, to the past, won’t miss the chance of turning into a trail of cleansing from the damages committed by futures” (Bauman, 2017: 6). It was his way of reimagining the liquid world as unfolding into a digitized dystopia, perhaps even more solidly heteronomous than the pre-digital past. And it is to this new solidity that researchers of digital modernity should place their focus—the form in which digitized spaces of power dictate mass culture in an intermediated world, where to be constantly connected would be equivalent to not being excluded from the affordances and conveniences of an app-guided existence that masks solidity as liquidity.