Autonomy within Digital Surveillance and Control

The Enlightenment ideal of maturity is one of the central norms of democratic societies. However, Kant’s moral understanding of autonomy has never been uncontested, as notion of autonomy in modernity (Simmel 2007 [1918]) and later as appropriate normative ideal per se (Allen 2008; Foucault 1982; Mackenzie und Stoljar 2000), nor has it ever overcome its initial state of an unfulfilled regulative ideal (Blühdorn 2021; Haderer 2021). In light of its fragile state, calls to revitalize autonomy have been posed time and again. Against the backdrop of new surveillance and online manipulation of contemporary digitalization, concerns about moral self-determination and the socio-political consequences for democracy of its undermining are at the center of academic debates (Susser et al. 2019; Zuboff 2019; Rössler und Mokrosinska 2013). These debates call upon civil society to reclaim maturity from digitalization’s danger for the 'healing of the autonomous self anew' (Zuboff 2017). Given the ever more fading boundary between the online and the offline worlds (Susser et al. 2019), the issue of new surveillance’s threat to moral autonomy reaches beyond the digital sphere, but concerns every emancipatory project in a digitally mediated society that relies on the values of equality, freedom and justice. Besides individual and collective struggles against surveillance infrastructure, and despite ever-growing knowledge about the issue of new surveillance and accompanying privacy concerns, the devotion to the use of social networking sites has increased considerably. This low visibility of privacy concerns in behaviour on social media has been framed as 'the privacy paradox in the social web' (Taddicken 2014). There is a variety of plausible explanations for this empirical paradox such as addiction to social media, the relation to self-esteem, convenience, structural constraints for perceived social relevance, cynism or ignorance. These explanations might, however, be only half the story. Instead, this contribution aims to propose a further perspective that conceives of the privacy paradox in the social web as hint for the need to look towards a critical problematization of our historical moment’s social norms of autonomy in the digital sphere. Put differently, to understand the obstacles of digital maturity in the social web, this contribution puts forth the questions: if the Kantian understanding of autonomy in social networking sites is not considered worth defending, then what notion of autonomy is productively produced in social media profiles? And, how does this notion of autonomy affect public space in a digitally mediated society? These questions require firstly, an extended perspective of autonomy as variable ideal to act (Allen 2008), and secondly, a take on digitalization, not as external hazard to autonomy but as socialization factor in a productive power relationship (Thiel 2018). This contribution proposes the conceptual part of an ongoing empirical research project that aims at a critical understanding of autonomy in contemporary digital times. Conceiving of the Kantian ideal as something “never given, it is always a task” (Derrida 2006 [1993]:54), it includes critical perspectives on the autonomous subject but ultimately holds on to the fulfillment of modernity’s moral values (Allen 2016).