CONCEPT
The Transparency Society
Han's name for the post-Foucauldian regime in which surveillance has been replaced by voluntary self-disclosure — a panopticon built and inhabited by its own prisoners, who experience their exposure as expression.
Han's 2012 The Transparency Society extends Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power into the digital age with a crucial inversion. Foucault's panopticon operated through the possibility of surveillance: the inmate might be watched and therefore behaves as though always watched. The transparency society operates through the demand for self-disclosure: the subject is not watched against her will but produces herself as an object of observation, voluntarily and enthusiastically. The prison has been democratized. The guard tower has been replaced by the smartphone, carried in every pocket, funded by every user's data, furnished with every user's self-exhibition. The arrangement is experienced not as imprisonment but as expression — and this is precisely what makes it more effective than any disciplinary regime could be.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The transparency society operates through the compulsion to participate. The subject who does not disclose does not merely choose privacy; she falls behind. She becomes invisible in a system where visibility is the