The Digital Cage: Digital Surveillance and Bureaucratic Governance

Abstract

[The calculability of decision-making] and with it its appropriateness for capitalism… [is] the more fully realized the more bureaucracy ‘depersonalizes’ itself, i.e., the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of official tasks. In the place of old-type ruler who is moved by sympathy, favour, grace, and gratitude, modern culture requires for its sustaining external apparatus the emotionally detached, and hence rigorously ‘professional’ expert.¹