Survey: 1. Introduction: Guenther Anders' Philosophy 2. The Dispersion of the Subject 2.1. Anders & Postmodernism 2.2. The Babbitization-Syndrom 2.3. Dissolution of the Present-Horizon 3. New Aspects of Power 3.1. Panopticon, Television & Control -A New Device 3.2. Between Marx and Monitors: Viewpoints on Information Society 3.3. The Control Society 3.4. Computerization and Anti-Control-Movement Abstract: Guenther Anders' (1902-1993) philosophy of humans in the technological age is briefly introduced, especially his work on the mass-media (The World as a Phantom and a Matrix, 1956). The thesis of the dispersion or dissolution of the subject is discussed with regard to Anders and some postmodern authors, mainly Foucault. A parallel between dissolution of world and individual caused by the mass-media (Anders) and the thesis of the dissolved subject by the postmodern authors is supposed. The ideas introduced here are extended on the information technology and society. Issues of Neomarxists and the Frankfurter Schule on explaining information society are discussed. The Foucaultdian metaphor of Panopticon/Panoptism, the "network of incarceration", of control, surveillance and disciplines is questioned as to its actuality in the modern societies. Deleuze's thesis of the change from a disciplinary society into a control society is supported by an analysis of the Panopticon/television-device. This is supposed as a mechanism of two different networks of technology working together in controlling behavior, illusions and desire, which makes the traditional incarceration obsolete. Computerization is considered as an important part of this change into control society. According to Lyotard the creative and critical use of the computer technology by a counter- culture of hackers is recommended as an anti-control movement. 1. Introduction: Guenther Anders' Philosophy of the Technological Revolution The concept of the panopticon needs an analysis in the broader context of technology (especially of mass- media). Technology is the issue of a philosopher, well known in German public but expulsed and mostly concealed in the world of scientific and academic philosophy. The recently deceased philosopher Guenther Anders had centered his work outside of the academic area. His father, William Stern ("Anders" was the philosopher's artist-name) had been expelled to exile by the Nazis and their academic accomplices. He was the founder of the Hamburg University's Psychology section. Anders made ends meet by doing "odd jobs" in the U.S.A., where he also worked as a factory worker, a fact that furnished material for his critical analysis of the relationship between man and technology. His analysis of the destructive dimension of techno-scientific progress is regarded today as "one of the great documents of self-criticism of the left" and is compared to Horkheimer and Adorno's "Dialectics of Enlightenment": "Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen" (The Antiquity of Man) , the first volume of which appeared in 1956. The basically media-pessimistic tendency of his essay "The World as a Phantom and a Matrix", which is contained in this book, has only been partly revised by Anders in his preface to the fifth issue in 1979, as a consequence of his perception of the media's Vietnam reports. The positive effect of the latter he commented by: "Pictures perceived are certainly worse than perceived reality, but they are still better than nothing at all." (p. VIII). It is the goal of this essay to compare Anders' theses with a few more modern points of view, especially with Foucault's "Surveiller et punir". The conclusions of Anders makes him to an anti- McLuhan, to anti-prophet of the global village. His critic will give some interesting hints how to deal with cyber- and other spaces. 2. The dispersion of the subject 2.1. Anders & postmodernism An important thesis in structuralist and postmodern reflexion on culture is the dissolution of the subject. The thesis proclaiming the "Death of Man", uttered more often and more vigorously by his critics than by Foucault himself, makes a point of this blasphemy against the social sciences . Even when considered as an "epistemological metaphor" , there still has arisen some quarrel. Being an abstract result, this moderating view of the subject seems to be astonishingly congruent with Guenther Anders' observations on modern man: i.e. that mass media transform us into scattered existences amidst some "ontological ambiguities". Are the theoretical insights of the post-modernists only inspired by the personal relationship between their author and the world, a relationship which in turn is widely determined by the mass-media? Are perhaps the postmodern theories a mere mirror of today's circumstances of individual "reality production"? Anders sees a cause of this new relationship in the irruption of technical achievements, mainly mass-media, into our everyday world. The "dispersion" (or "dissipation") of the subject also occurs in his phenomenological media theory, where he uses the same image as Foucault. "Structuralism does not at all deny the existence of the subject, but it makes the subject crumble and systematically scatters it, it denies the subject's identity, dissolves it and makes it go from one place to another, changes it into a subject that will always be a nomad". (Deleuze op.cit.) 2.2. The Babbitization-Syndrom Mass-media tend to bring closer to us people who are far away, whom we will never actually meet and who maybe are only fictitious, so that in the end they seem to be closer than the real ones that we personally know. This applies not only to people but also to things, to sports, culture, war, catastrophes - all these are abundant in our homes. The neologism "Verbiederung" -babbitization, describes this process as a distortion of the world which supports a simple form of world view, the view of the bourgeois. The good and the bad are easy to discern, a well-ordered scenery of frames guards the babbit, who is frightened of everything alien, and in general, of the chaos of the world. But shrunken to little two-dimensional puppets, the criminal and other deviant monsters give us a nice thrill: we know Batman will take them into prison. Even real nuclear disasters are easy to consume, guarded by the experts and by trustful official faces. Anders speaks of us being systematically changed into "companions of the globe" by our electronic tranquilizers. He also says that we should not mistake this as something that enables us to love the far-away, as a state of real brotherhood or even mystical "Einsfuehlung", as it was found by cultural optimists like Marshal McLuhan or Teilhard de Chardin in "Global Village" or "Noosphere", respectively. On the contrary, a media consumer rather grotesquely loses his ideas of distance or difference. The everyday life of a normal consumer is marked by an increasing disappearances of spacial categories. Railways, cars and airoplanes make continents shrink to villages. The globe becomes a supermarket where foreign countries and cultures can be consumed just like at home in front of the television-set. The air passenger does not feel the distance, his or her journey is transformed into mere movement. At the core of these tendencies , i.e. of the globalization of the living-room and the planetarization of the front garden, are the electronic mass-media , especially the computer. Whoever really wants to be up-to-date will not content himself with today's cosmopolitan world-citizenship, but will at least found a "galactic union" (as say the articles of the Chaos Computer Club of Hamburg). The product of the mass-media is a "babbitized" world, a cosy little thing that enters our living-room, not necessarily logical but self-consistent. It is effected mainly by distortion and levelling of events. By this way of consuming the world, the spectator increasingly becomes somebody who is directly involved, or at least this is what the medium tries to suggest. The forced disappearance of differences within the presented context goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the frontier between the actual and the media-presented "realities". 2.3. Dissolution of the Present-Horizon Is it really only pictures that the mass-media deliver? Doesn't the technical connection that exists between us and the rooms where a live transmission is being taken give us a part of actual presence there? If we listen to a radio-transmitted concert, then we rightly say that we are listening to a symphony, and not to an "audio- picture" of that symphony. But in this case our relationship to the world is only a half of something, and it is the passive half that is left to us. The disciplining effect that this consumable surrogate-world can have has been clearly expressed by Timothy Leary, a psychologist transformed from a drug-apostle into a computer- and cyberspace-fan: "George Orwell got it wrong. He was too optimistic. He wrote in 1984 that Big Brother would watch us from screens on the walls of our living rooms or bedrooms. But that is nothing. You could always duck out of sight. The currant horror is that Americans voluntarily stick their amoeboid faces toward the screen six or seven hours a day and suck up information that Big Brother is putting there." In spite of this condemnation to passivity, the illusion of reality of the media acts upon us in a way of magical fascination. In opposite to conventional pictures (photographs), those pictures transmitted by television lack the time difference between original and model - which is actually the case during live-transmissions, or otherwise apparent because the actors move. According to Anders, we could speak of a "dissolution of the present- horizon". The word "present" has a double function here which underlines the beginning confusion: it means spacial presence (i. e. being present) as well as temporal simultanity. The present is being shifted towards the simultaneous, while its temporal aspect is even less distinct to the media-user than the spacial aspect. G nther Anders goes as far as speaking of these particularities of the media-world as an "ontological ambiguity", because the transmitted events are present and absent at the same time, real as well as fictitious, briefly:"... because they are phantoms." (Vol.1, p. 131) Not without a certain degree of justification, Anders remarks that sometimes it happens that we are unable to say where we have spent the afternoon: have we been in the garden, weeding, or have we rather been on the football field, following the "audio-picture" of the match? If afterwards somebody came to ask us the names of the children playing in the garden, we might rather be able to tell the names of the football players whose acoustic phantoms had captured our attention. In principle, we have been at both of the places, but at none of them really; we were dispersed between them. It was this distraction that we were looking for. This example clearly shows that not only do we not know where we are, but we don't know what we are doing. We are dispersed/distracted between two activities. The computer gives its user a new quality of media-activity: to manipulate the world beyond the screen. Computer freaks told us of feelings like breaking through a magical wall, like conquering a new mystical space (the Cyberspace). "Alice in wonderland" is an often quoted tale in the computer science - perhaps not only because of the logical games. Has the world of the media become less phantom-like by computerization? The latter at least enables the user to take part actively what happens. Or does he rather become a phantom while manipulating the world behind the monitor, while electronically slipping into networks as a being of data? However, the data-traveller and the computer freak are substantially more lively phantoms than the figures that t.v. sends into our homes. Their knowledge of the technological networks certainly does extend their possibilities, but first of all the "virtual vagabonds" have to make an effort in adaptation: they have to learn a computer language which demands a stringent use of structures, otherwise the electronic excursion will very soon end with a laconic "syntax error". The modern subject who tries to face and contend with the passive consumption of phantoms and the infantilization of the media system is a very disciplined subject. The discipline of the computer freak is similar to that of the book culture, a culture which Anders perceived as a victim of the media world. It is this exploratory discipline that will now be critically analyzed with the help of Foucault. 3. New Aspects of Power: 3.1.Panopticon, Television & Control -A New Device In the analysis of the relations of power, technology and individual, G nther Anders seems to complete Foucaults' efforts. Anders' work enlightens the capillar mechanisms of power in the field of mass media, which Foucaults' Panoptism is neglecting. This blind spot of Foucaults' theory missed a development, as a parallel to the panoptical process, of a unique and enormously extensive system. It is enabling the many to see the few. The panoptical tendency for the few to see and supervise the many is contextualized by a remarcable counterpart: the development of the total system of the modern mass media. Both of these systems are based on unidirectional communication, both of them support the power of groups which are already in power. The mass media are an ideological frame of the beliefs necessary for the surveillance systems to be functional. This "belief context" may be seen as propagation of "social censures", telling us what we have to see as crimninal or deviant. Social censures are a legitimation of surveillance and a part of the pressure to normalize the subjects. The human actor in the context of media-using is only a chooser and not a creator. Anders gives a deeper parable of the situation of the user of mass media: "As it was not to the king's pleasure that his son, walking cross-country, would leave the marked and controlled roads in order to find his own views, he gave him a horse and a cart. " Now you don't have to walk any longer", the king said. But what he meant to say was: " Now you may not walk any more". Effectively the meaning of his words was: "Now you could not walk cross-country any more". (G. Anders, Vol.1, p. 97) According to Anders, the "dispersion of the subject", the dissolution of its connections to the world by technology and media leads to a loss of freedom of thinking; i. e. a loss of that kind of freedom that according to Foucault was won during the Enlightment when disciplines were formed. Man, whose incapacitation Anders complains of, is according to Foucault "that man, about whom we are spoken to, and who to liberate we are invited, is already intrinsically the result of a subjection very much deeper than himself. There is a "soul" in him that creates an existence which itself is a part of that dominion which exercises its power on the body". (Foucault 1977, p.42) Not only the wily king, dominating his son, is that power, but also the kind king who had taught the son how to walk, thus opening up his freedom to rove about. Foucault seems to mention a point here that is totally strange to Anders: the school of walking, or rather of marching, already demands a certain constitution of the individual, i.e. the disciplinary subject. The discipline necessary for any "enlightened freedom" of thinking is attributed by Foucault to the subjection of the body under the picture of the machine. "The great book of man as a machine was written on two registers simultaneously:on the anatomical and metaphysical register, the first pages of which were written by Descartes and which later was continued by doctors and philosophers, and on the techno-political register, that was built from a huge lot of military-, school- and hospital regulations as well as on empirical and rational procedures to control or to correct the physical activities of man." (Foucault 1977, p.174) All the efforts to understand the functioning of the human body firstly and then to exploit it were aimed at the acquisition of " infinitesimal power over the active body". As a model for those regulations, Jeremy Benthams "Panopticon" was chosen. In its original form as a prison, it penetrates society in its entirety, an "archipelago of incarceration", and so ensures a disciplining normalization. "The prison as a rigid (cell-like) segmentation refers to an extendable and mobile function, a controlled traffic, a network that also extends itself into the free milieus, that might teach how to get along without any prison at all. It is a bit like Kafka's "undelimited delay", which makes any arrest or judgement obsolete." This allusion on Kafka's "Prozess", made by Foucault's companion Gilles Deleuze, shows up a new tendency which is no longer completely covered by the image of an "archipelago of incarceration". The mass-media, only marginally present in Kafka's work, could play an increasingly decisive role by establishing a second network in society, a network whose communication scheme is the inverse of that of the panoptism. But how could we connect Guenther Anders skilfully performed accusation against the mass-media caused destruction of the (enlightened) subject with Foucault's criticism, which starts at a very much more profound level of reflexion? Or, to put it in other words, shouldn't we be glad that the media contributed to liberate the subject? To liberate a subject, which according to Foucault stuck in a rigid corset of "bodily mechanics", from this false freedom of disciplinary-enlightenment? (This point of view may have inspired the media-optimistic works of Marshall McLuhan.) In Anders allegory, on the other hand, the mechanisms of incapacitation (and de-disciplination?) correspond to one of those positive effects of precisely that power which Foucault refers to: "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it >excludes<, it >represses<, it >censors<, it >abstracts<, it >masks<, it >conceals<. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth: the individual and its perceptions are results of this production." Both of the authors at least seem to agree in their opinions on today's human being as a beneficiary of only illusory freedoms: while here, the mechanisms of the disciplines control the individual, there, the mechanics of a mega-machine have put man out of power. As Foucault concludes that "...there was no favor done to man when he was proclamed to be a subject of history, or a master of speech..."" , Anders complains that "...if there exists, as you would express it in Heideggerian terms, a >who< of history, this >who< does not mean us, but technology."" 3.2.From Marx to Monitors: Viewpoints on Information Society Innovative forms of manipulation are need to be invented, a new type of power may emerge. The reason for this change of power technology is easily defined in marxist terms as a change on the economical base: "Especially in the advanced sectors of the economy, the manipulation of information tends to characterize human activity. (...) If advanced capitalism is becoming an information society, in aditition to the older configuration of a labor society, the labor premise can no longer be the first principle of a critical theory. Domination cannot be theorized from the point of view of the labor activity, of the subject acting on matter to produce things." Perhaps this interpretation of the category of work is too restrictive. We will now have a look on one neomarxistic issue discussing Frankfurter Schule , which had new ideas to explain the changing situation. Not everyone favours a complete renewal of marxistic thinking. Rick Roderick thinks that J rgen Habermas (the most famous" son "of Adorno's and Horkheimer's theories) judges Karl Marx too negatively. In his monograph on the work of Habermas from the sixties to the eighties he concluded that Habermas' critical review of marxistic society-theory goes too far -not to the same extent as the Frankfurter Schule, but also too far. Nevertheless, the critical (neo-) marxist Roderick tries to give a benevolent and cooperative criticism of Habermas. The idea of social rationality is discussed in front of the background of Marx, Max Weber and the Frankfurter Schule. Habermas' reception of these paradigms is interpreted as the attempt of taking the fragments of the tragedy of enlightenment -left behind from Adornos total critic of occidental rationality. A criticism of Kritische Theorie leads to the foundation of a communication-theoretical trial to reconstruct critical theory -centered on Habermas' ideas of universal pragmatics and evolution of society. Roderick put the problem of rationality in normative foundation of critical theory and in the theory-practice- problem into concrete terms: In the formal semantic analysis of rationality and its relation to the social context. In this perspective Roderick reflects Habermas' tension between a transcendental and a historical dimension, result of the trial of normatively founding critical theory by the idea of communicative rationality: The paradigm-shift from a paradigm of production to a paradigm of communication -with its theoretical core in the "Theorie kommunikativen Handelns", the opus magnum of Habermas. At last this point inflames Roderick's criticism of Habermas' "misinterpretation of marxist theory". "Marx did not reduce the development of species on the dimension of increasing technical-instrumental rule over nature. It is only the interpretation of the most narrow >scientific< marxists."(Roderick, p.181). In spite of that in the marxist paradigm of production a subtle analysis of social interaction is possible. -There may be an affinity to the ideas of Mark Posters "mode of production versus mode of information", but Roderick seems not to know Poster. The next point is the discussion of the basic ideas of Habermas' paradigm of communication: The 'ideale Sprechsituation', the 'kommunikatives Handeln' and the 'kommunikative Rationalitèt'. First he mentioned a confusion of understanding and agreeing in Habermas term 'Verstèndigung' -a little sly-hint on the harmonistic tendencies. Then he calls in question the occurence of 'ideale Sprechsituationen' in relevant parts of normal life, and the optimistic hypothesis that 'Verstèndigung' must be the characteristic feature of language, communication the most important competence of human species: Couldn't misunderstanding, lies and disagreement be more characteristic, and instrumentalization the most universal competence of the species? In his critic of the 'quasi-transcendental dilemma' Roderick finds fault with the insoluble ambivalence between aprioric and empiric elements in Habermas' logic of development (taken from Piaget) -this seems not to do Piaget's constructivism justice. Roderick's ideas of a reformed paradigm of production (which Habermas' theory of communication may complete) remain rather vague. A Wittgenstein-like sounding quotation of Marx is not fully convincing, even not if completed by the hint that today the marxist term 'Fabrik' could be used for the whole society and that everyone could be regarded as a proletarian. This part of the renewal of Habermas need not have been so opaque: In the marxistic 'culture-historical' psychology ('activity theory') are emerging more concrete attempts for redesigning the paradigm of production with the goal of covering the social sector of communication. The contribution of Arne Raeithel tries explicitely to be an alternative research strategy to Habermas' "Theorie kommunikativen Handelns". Based on Vigotsky's classical work in marxistic psycholinguistics, Raeithel suggested an extension of the marxist term 'work' from production to reproduction and intersubjective relationships -i.e. social communication. Roderick's survey of postmodern theoreticians also seems to lack depth. It is limited to the dicussion of only Baudrillard, who tries to explain the production in terms of an explicite 'paradigm of communication'. Capitalism is in this view interpreted as a kind of discourse -which uses an aggressive "terrorism of code"- while Marx is critizised for remaining caught in the discourse of production of bourgeois economists, planning his revolution as finishing of production. In the discussion Roderick argues with his critic of Frankfurter Schule, underlining parallels to the postmodern thinking. But in his preface he blamed Habermas for undervaluing postmodern positions, wondering wether the great rationalist is not able to argue against the ironical style of the attacks of Derrida. Even the most subtle exegesis of marxistic paradigm of production -searching ideas for an communication- oriented critical theory- leaves some of the doubts of Baudrillard -especially if one takes into consideration the theses of J. F. Lyotard: This postmodern thinker explained the latest technological developments, the process of informatization of the western societies, at first as an exploitation of a newly discovered power of production: The language (e.g. algorithms as abstract machines). The new generation of 'linguistic-turn-marxists' ê la Roderick in this point of view seems to be a pure reaction on the latest chapter of the bourgeois discourse of production of economic values; perhaps similar to the above-mentioned interpretation of the postmodernist movement as reaction on the changing mechanisms of production of the subject. 3.3.The Control Society Back to Anders and Foucault: Their attempts are needed to understand the functioning of new power mechanisms working with new technologies of media. Foucault's negative aspects of power, the masking and concealing, make up part of the negative mechanisms of the media-world in Anders' analysis; their effect, however, is according to Anders definitly positive: the formation of new, standardized ways of thinking, the possibility of being guided not by walls and fences, but by the invitingly comfortable motorways of prefabricated world views. Apparently, the restriction of the "enlightened" liberty of thought would simultaneously bring about changes in the disciplinary mechanisms that accompany this liberty. Deleuze mentions a change from a disciplinary society into a control society . Although this difference is still slightly indistinct in Deleuze's work, so that some have been tempted to consider it as a part of the "fog of the frogs", it seems useful to me to take up on the investigation at this point. It appears that the new capitalism of the New Technologies was constructed in a more refined manner, that it were no longer a struggle for the mere distribution of matter. In an affluent society, it is the logisticians of the immaterial who dominate. "Services have become the centre or >soul< of an enterprise. Marketing is the instrument of social control that is typical for the new generation of our masters." As Foucault says, "...power can no longer be considered as a guarantee to maintain a form of production, but in fact power is one of the constitutive elements of this way of production, power functions within the heart of this way of production...", in order to "...define the life time of the individuals as a working-time". I feel tempted to add here. not only working-time, but also consuming-time, especially media-consuming-time. According to Anders, who ever consumes media employs the most ephemeral and therefore best form of services. Simultaneously he exposes himself to the strategies of marketing business, i.e. to advertisements and commercials. But how do the newly constructed mechanisms of control work? "...enclosures are moulds...controls are modulation..." The disciplining enclosure of a prison, which under the mechanism of panoptism received its educational function, now recedes to give way to a pure panoptism in the literal sense of the word. Everything is exposed to the controlling instances while imprisonment itself only applies to special cases of deviance. But today's control-surveillance must neccessarily be completed by the watch of the controlled into the second network of the mass-media; they must watch t.v. while being observed from a distance. Their internalized directing process always needs a fine adjustment with the help of the transmitted picture worlds. There can be no doubt that the structures which had been formed under the disciplines take their part here. In advertising, as Anders remarks, it is most important to "...manufacture the raw material of >sexual stimulus< into a desire for goods and products..." and "...the sexualization of today's advertising world has reached its climax just in those countries where prevails a tradition of puritanic taboos." This marketing strategy falls on the fertile soil of a long-cultivated "discursivation" of sex (Foucault), in which "...the power instruments working on sex do not follow a principle of strict selection, but rather have followed a principle of dissemination and implantation of polymorpheous sexualities." The puritanic traditions of taboo should not be misunderstood by a "repressive hypothesis" of sex, but on the contrary are an example for the blossoming productivity of power: "In these instances there was not an activity which was 'repressed', but an extensive development of knowledge/power which shaped, constituted and controlled practices according to complex rules. Hand in hand, technologies of power and discourses are, according to Foucault, positive, creative forces, not negative, preventive measures." Even it seems as if Foucault did not clearly recognized the "gendered character of all censures" , his concept of the positive mechanisms of power does give us here a hint on the structures, the directive mechanisms of the mass-media are based on. What is more evident than plucking the fruits of the dissemination of seeds mentioned above? Marketing could divert the polymorpheous sexual desires onto the glistening surfaces of varnished limousines. Today it is more profitable to compose virtuos programs of behavior on the detailed keyboard of sexual stimuli than to rely on the propaganda of disciplinating moral rules. What is the meaning of this transition to a more finely tuned form of control over the individuals? To which other rules must the constitution and socialisation of the subject obey? What symbols define its situation? " Disciplinary societies have two symbols: the signature,which denotes the individual, and the number, which denotes its position in the large mass. In a control society, it is the number -the number is a code word- that is most important. The language of control is made of numbers, which either allow or refuse the access to information. We are no longer dealing with a reciprocity between mass and individuals. The individuals have become dividuals and the mass has become data. The disciplinated man was a discontinual producer of energy; man controlled is a man of wave motion." Masses moving stompingly and simultanously like the pistons of an internal combustion engine are no longer up-to-date. Control society allows wider liberties, more individuality; it is sufficient if the guided desires of the "lonely crowd" move within the statistical mean of the consumption cycles. But this individuality is different from what individuality has meant before. The incarceration into a fixed room, between the rigid walls of a discipline, is increasingly being abolished. A procedure that Anders denotes as the invasion of media into the private sphere, and whose effect on the subject he described similarly to Deleuze's dividual: "The individual becomes a >divisum<. / Das Individuum wird zum Divisum" The meaning intended was a scattering of the subject over several, partly phantomical, places. Deleuze suggests the no longer clear positioning in a social space or in a hierarchy by the help of a number. The numbers which are now attached to the >dividual< resp. which are specific for it open up access to spaces of information. These space can differ among the individuals but the spaces must not longer follow the simple structure of top and down. The access code may constitute complex interacting levels of freedom of information. What has been stressed here, once passively, then actively, always reflects a shift concerning the meaning of the division of space. This shift is also increasingly present in the core of the disciplinary society, i.e. the prison. Virilio has his own ideas about Goffman's favourite theme, the total institutions. These thoughts lead towards mass-media: "The installation of television sets in prison cells, instead of only in common rooms as before, should have alarmed us. This decision, which has hardly been analyzed, represents a characteristic evolution of the customs of incarceration. Since the times of Bentham one used to identify the prison with the panopticon, in other words, with central surveilance, where the inmates are constantly observed by the wardens in whose permanent scope they live. Whereas today, prisoners can survey the events of the world (...) >To survey and to punish< belong together, as M.Foucault has found out. What kind of punishment could this apparent enlargement of freedom of the prisoners be, if not the typical punishment of advertisement: desire. Such was also the statement of a prisoner who had been asked his opinion concerning this change: >Television only makes prison harder. You see everything that you miss, everything that you have no right to get.<" Here, the prisoner quoted by Virilio seems to be subject to a widespread illusion: to think that everybody has a right to participate at the glamourous world of wealth and happiness that television presents as reality. But should he live in freedom, i.e. probably in a block in an underdog ghetto, nothing would be different from his life in prison. The only possibility to take part at the glamour of high-society-style consumption which is constantly celebrated on television would be robbery. But just this might have been what brought him into prison before. His lack of adaption is therefore not based on his illusionof having a right to participate, but rather in his lacking illusion to participate already. He does not accept pictures as reality, but perceives them as an offer of something that really exists (for him), neither of which is true. So far as that, he does not suffer from a fundamental deviation, but he rather lacks of fine adjustment in his illusions and desires. Thus, it would probably be acceptable to survey him outside prison by means of an 'electronic necklace'. This and other new means of control will transforme the character of society. The core technology of the information society is the computer. But new technologies will not only bring new possibilities of control, but also new way to "duck away from the eye of big brother", and even new kinds of resistance. 3.4. Computerization and Anti-Control-Movement The background of computerzitation is the crisis of trust in technology. In 1970 to 1980 there was a significant change of the belief in the beneficial effects of technology in Western Germany. The reasons were the increasing number of averages from Seveso to Harrisburg and a strong social movement as a lobby for ecology and environment. The uncontrolled development of economy and technology seemed to be more and more like the "mega-machine": A cancer-like growing complex. Computerzitation could be considered as a new core of the traditional industrial conquest of reality. "Modern" is in the interpretation of Jean-Francois Lyotard the consciousness of a lack of meaning accompanied by many activities. Modernity is the history of the "grand narratives" of emancipation (Age of Enlightenment) and opulence (colonialism, capitalism, industrialism). In Marxism these narratives were integrated so it is not very surprising when the failure of modernity emerges first in the marxist contries. ("Like most postmodernists, Lyotard suspects Marxists of self aggrandizing motives.") His hypotheses: These grand narratives are today no longer plausible for the most socities and haven't still the power of social, political and cultural integration. The language is bursting asunder in heteronomous Sprachspiele (games of language, communication cultures) with own rules of communication, truths and world views. In the Age of Enlightment scientific rationalism was the only way of rationalism, the only way to truth. In Lyotard's opinion this was a structurally wrong idea. The dream of "...a meta-language for all meanings is mixing up completly incompatible kinds of discourse and bears the monster of confused reason." The increasing disintegration of the basic legitimations of modernity leads to some effort of integration. The most efficient power is the mega-machine itself: In the process of informatization/ computerization. It is the rule of the "blind calculating reason of the capital" over all heteronomous Sprachspiele by one type of language: Capitalism is exploiting a new power of production -the language. Informatization is the infiltration of the whole society, the usurpation of all important symbolic exchanges. Lyotard recommends a new style of using technology which is very similar to the practise of computerfreaks., e.g. on the Chaos Communication Congress 1990. Unifying effect of communication technology should be destroyed by using it in an avant-garde way. Lyotard (in unison with Chaos Computer Club) calls for free entry to all data bases, all information. The ideas of the postmodern philosopher become reality in some aspects of the computer-freak subculture: the free and responsible use of technology, the creative misuse of the mobilization infrastructure (e.g. hacking the electronic networks, phonefreaking etc.) But the situation is more difficult: First, the computer-freaks "hacks" (inventions) may have an unintentional value, - so his work could be grist to the mega-machine's mill. Second, his "hacks" may become criminalized by society e.g. by new laws against so-called "computer sabotage". Third, the computerfreak is more deeply involved in the information techniques than e.g. the Greens are in nuclear power. He or she uses it more intensively than most of the engineers payed by IBM. At last, there is the danger of a psychological submission of the subculture to the technological way of communicating and thinking. A possible way is mentioned in recent publications on (and of) the counterculture of the hackers: as an anti-control-movement they may have a similar function for the computer technology as the ecological movement for the nuclear power technology. The political utopia of this communication-ecology may be formulated, according to Foucault, as "Inverse Panopticon". In the next chapter this idea will be explained in the context of cyberspace. The most important question is: "...how to deal with the media without becoming part of it?"