on losing control

“…in communicative capitalism, the gaze to which one makes oneself visible is a point hidden in an opaque and heterogeneous network. it is not the gaze of the symbolic Other of our ego ideal but the more disturbing, traumatic gaze of a gap or excess, objet petit a. our disclosures are surveilled, archived, remembered, in ways that exceed our ability to manage or control. on the one hand, that is the source of their immense attraction, what lures us in, what incites us to practices of revelation and display. on the other, the media that incite us to create and express, to offer our thoughts, feelings, and opinions freely, to participate (but in what?), deliver us up to others to use for purposes of their own.” 

—jodi dean, blog theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of the drive