The Endless Mesh: Life in the Societies of Control

Abstract

This paper analyzes the structural and conceptual transition from Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary society” to Gilles Deleuze’s “society of control,” examining its profound implications for the social production of subjectivity in contemporary digital environments. Grounded in Foucault’s formulation of discipline as a mechanism that optimizes bodies through spatial compartmentalization and discrete institutional enclosures – such as the school, factory, hospital and prison – the study explores how Deleuze reinterprets this framework in light of evolving computational infrastructures and datafication. As foundational modern institutions face a crisis of legitimacy, power shifts from fixed physical molds to continuous, fluid modulations, transforming the governance unit from the unified “individual” into the datafied “dividual” – a subject decomposed into numerical codes and algorithmic data streams. The investigation details how this mutation erodes classic modern dichotomies (interior/exterior, public/private, self/Other) as physical public spaces are sublimated into politically inert virtual non-spaces governed by platform capitalism, predictive feedback loops and automated protocols. At the macro-level, the disappearance of a dialectical “Other” hollows out traditional state sovereignty, establishing the global market as the supreme diagram of contemporary power. Finally, the paper demonstrates how the carceral network transitions from physical confinement to a psychopolitical digital panopticon. Embedded within personal devices and notification loops, digital control operates through voluntary self-quantification and continuous engagement. The society of control does not dismantle disciplinary power, but rather digitizes and intensifies it, creating an omnipresent “endless mesh” that continuously generates subjectivity across every layer of daily existence.