ABSTRACT
Post-industrial societies largely experience freedom as competitive individual participation in work and consumption. In many ways, security inevitably becomes the most indispensable part of freedom when freedom is exerted via capitalist competition. Surveillance presents itself then as a precondition rather than an antagonist of democracy, a necessary precaution for governing a society where individuals combine available ready-made options in their effort to distinguish themselves from others. Paradoxically, the question to ask in this context is if we can have a democratic society without some form of control that homogenises collectivebehaviour and, to the same extent,makes formal surveillance redundant. The link between democracy and freedom is a product of history. Since mod-
ernity, we understand this link as the association between majority voting and individual liberties. This is how the private sphere was established as the fulcrum of sovereign bourgeois identity, a sphere that no one is entitled to enter except when the justice system authorises it on grounds of serious criminal suspicion. From this angle, privacy, and the consequent lack of surveillance, is the historical assertion of an ascending class and its priorities and interests, as Elias has shown (Perrot, 1990: 89, 473; Ronnes, 2004; Delzescaux, 2002). Conversely, freedom for the lower classes is rarely associated with the lack of social control and an impenetrable individual sphere. It is primarily a matter of having the means to be free in practice, that is, a matter of equality. Post-industrial democracies are caught in this transitional trap between the rise of the mass society and the decline of the bourgeois subject as a hegemonic citizen. As a result, the opposition between control and democracy is increasingly defused as we move towards Automated Socio-Technical Environments (Lianos and Douglas, 2000; Lianos, 2003). In fact, the very meaning of democracy changes as such environments deliver to the post-industrial citizens the efficient outcomes of a dense web of institutions and organisations which shape both the market and the state.
