Affect and Noise in the Society of Control

In his short paper “Postscript on Control Societies” (Deleuze 1995: 177-82), Gilles Deleuze offered one of the most searing diagnoses of contemporary society critical theory has produced. Three decades later, this essay remains remarkable for its prescience, especially when one considers that the World Wide Web was not in existence at the time that Deleuze wrote his essay, let alone smart phones and social media. Now that we’re beginning to understand the impact of global corporations such as Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), it could be argued that the essay speaks to today’s technological reality even more incisively than it did thirty years ago. Deleuze identified some of the key principles and logics at work