ABSTRACT
Unlike liberty,money can be digitized. For this reason, wemay anticipate thatwhile there are limits to howmanypeoplemay languish in prisons, the domain governed through monetary sanctions – and especially through regulatoryfines – is likely to continue to expand almost exponentially. It is not difficult to imagine a world in which each behavioural transgression committed, or each degree of licence taken, is registered electronically and billed to us electronically together with the usual warnings, disclaimers and conditions that accompanymostmarket transactions. Along with our other bills, fees and taxes, these fines will be paid electronically aswell. It is a scenario already substantially in placewith respect to traffic regulation.While it can be pushed into a paranoid imagery of technocratic despotism, as Deleuze (1995:175) sometimes envisages it – from another viewpoint, it is quite consistent with a vision of freedom associated with consumer societies. Money is sufficiently ubiquitous that these impositions almost may be taken for granted. While a constraint on our power to spend, fines of this sort do little or nothing to constrain or threaten our liberty, nor is it intended that they do so. Such sanctions govern through ‘freedom of choice’ – indeed we may think of them as a technology of such a freedom. As responsible consumers we pay for our choices and for the routine mistakes and failures of foresight that characterize everyday life. Regulatory fines are thus quite consistent with governing the consumer society that has come into being since the end of the Second World War and has burgeoned in the past 30 or 40 years.
