The consequences of these nineteenth-century models, especially the facilitation and maximization of content distribution, would impose themselves onto human life much more comprehensively throughout the twentieth century.

We buy products that have been recommended to us through the monitoring of our electronic lives, and then we voluntarily leave feedback for others about what we have purchased. We are the compliant subject who submits to all manner of biometric and surveillance intrusion, and who ingests toxic food and water and lives near nuclear reactors without

Also retrospectively, it can be noted that Deleuze did not address the intensifying overlap between control society and consumer society’s proliferating manufacture of individual needs, far beyond the products and commodities that were obligatory even in the 1970s.

By the late 1970s, perhaps earlier, the word “television” conveyed and encompassed far more than the objects and networks literally denoted. Television became a nebulous but loaded figure for evoking the texture of modernity and a transformed everyday life. The word concretized, in something localizable, broader experiences of de-realization.

Throughout the twentieth century, it was generally unthinkable that wishes could be for anything other than individual needs—wishes for a dream house, a dream car, or a vacation.

Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.

Part of the culture of modernity took shape around various affirmations that there could be individual gratification from emulating the impervious rhythms, efficiency, and dynamism of mechanization. However, what were often ambivalent or merely symbolic compensations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have become a more intensive set of both

The precise nature of the physiological attraction of television has yet to be specified, and may never be, but a huge amount of statistical and anecdotal evidence obviously has confirmed the truism that it has potent addictive properties.

Even in the ambulatory space of big department stores, eye-tracking scanners provide detailed information about individual behavior—for example, determining how long one looked at items that one did not buy. A generously funded research field of optical ergonomics has been in place for some time. Passively and often voluntarily, one now