From surveillance to control: how the pandemic has changed our society

There is a fundamental contradiction in the way in which, a few years after the end of the pandemic and the emergency measures adopted, it still affects us. On the one hand, in fact, we have not stopped insisting on how the pandemic represented an 'epochal change' capable of profoundly transforming our lifestyle, our social relations, the way we think about medicine and science in general, but also politics, and so on. On the other hand, however, what this change consists of, few seem able to say, and indeed, on the contrary, the impression is that in order to put order in this 'post-pandemic' time of ours, we have found nothing better than to recover categories from the past: the return of fascism, authoritarianism, 'totalitarianism', and so on. We should be clear-headed and recognise that, if the pandemic has been an epoch-making experience, it is because the society that has emerged no longer has anything to do either, on a political level, with the mass society of which fascism first and then the 'party state' were the expressions, or, on an economic level, with the consumer society of the second half of the 19th century. In the new society, the subject is no longer the citizen or the consumer, but the patient, and we are all patients, even if asymptomatic. The new society is the therapeutic society, which is a form of control society.

Let us try to clarify this passage. Let us begin with the distinction between surveillance and control. These are two different devices that can coexist, but whose relationships vary over time, they transform, so that everything changes depending on which of the two mechanisms is ultimately decisive.

The surveillance device is used to monitor life within enclosed spaces: the family, the school, the university, the factory, the hospital, the asylum, the prison, the barracks. The social distancing, the lockdown, the wearing of a mask, are nothing but forms of a system that regulates human relations in closed spaces, taking this closure to the extreme. Empty squares and streets, shops, schools, universities, churches, places of work and entertainment closed. "Stay home!" was the message repeated by the government and its media tools. The experiment, however, could not last beyond a certain time, because human beings (at the moment) are not yet farm animals, they cannot be kept in cages for long.

The control device takes over at this point. This is the profound meaning of mass vaccination. One can again leave one's home and regain possession of one's own spaces: the office, the school or university classroom, the library, the museum, the theatre, the cinema, the restaurant, the bar, the gymnasium, and so on and so forth. But it is only with a pass that we can do 'safely' everything we did before. We can move around with a digital pass certifying our state of health and whether we have undergone the various prescribed doses. We are no longer monitored, in the sense that power has no interest in following us, spying on us, in all our movements, in everything we do. We are, however, controlled, subjected to continuous or periodic checks that regulate our possibilities of entering certain places, receiving certain services, etc. Thus, beyond the vaccination control, our lives have become marked and made possible by control devices: I access my smartphone just by typing in my pin, my salary slip as well as the results of my last blood test with spid, the library just by swiping my magnetic card, etc. Control is neither invasive nor all-encompassing, but one must respect the rules of the game.

In the society of therapeutic control, power has become something as creeping as a snake. Its task is no longer to 'supervise and punish' but to stimulate, to suggest, to advise, to persuade, all on the basis of the 'neutral' opinion of government experts, of their therapies that you can trust. The government merely checks their effectiveness. Yesterday the effectiveness of the vaccine against the virus, today the effectiveness of the propaganda of the war against the Russians.