ABSTRACT
Some popular thought posits that a creative destruction event has occurred, allowing for the possibility of a nonhierarchical market economy understood as a digital turn (Westera, 2013). This claim includes a perceived shift toward the provision of “free” information, services, and products arguing that it has limited or eliminated classic modes of exchange for economic and non-economic goods. This chapter instead challenges such assertions, particularly through the lens of social media. Rather than the creation of some nonhierarchical, non-economic free exchange system, this moment of “creative destruction” has instead opened a space for an unconscious or quasi-conscious system akin to barter to emerge. In this space, privacy and behavior become the items that define economic value for monopolies and other powerful institutions. It becomes both commercially viable and economically desirable to create virtual panopticons allowing for the constant surveillance of behavior (both consumer and non-consumer) to manage and marketize this new “currency” more effectively. The rules and rituals of these market panopticons (Bentham, 1995; Foucault, 1977), where people are under continual surveillance, in turn create a number of issues for the public sector that has not yet adapted to this moment of creative destruction.
