Apparently, our previous economist is the root evil of the Puritanian origins of whatever

goes on against masturbation. So we now have a researcher working at Columbia University in political science to tell us how Facebook, the social networks and all that nice digital stuff that we build

around us might be enforcing a new Puritan law and time. So I'm not sure if that's going to be nice, but well, anyways, please give a warm round

of applause to Charlene Biondi.

It seems like there's a Puritan conspiracy in the Silicon Valley. No, really. I mean, it really seems like the iCloud was actually invented to punish the unfaithful lovers. Like Apple figured out all the best way possible to catch the misbehaving husband

and wives and hang them into a cross, or at least that's what my friend Matt thinks. Last Christmas, last year, Matt bought an iPad for his seven-year-old son, and so he enters

his password in iTunes so that the kid can download all the apps and all the games that he wanted. And the next morning, the kid walks into the living room where Matt and his wife are sitting, holding the iPad, and he goes, Daddy, who's Jessica?

And before Matt could grab the iPad, his wife did, and she read all the text messages that Matt had been sending to Jessica on his iPhone, but they were now popping up on the iPad, iCloud's magic.

And so needless to say, Matt is not a married man anymore. And so this story made me delete my iCloud account. But it also bothered me for a very long time, because it shed light on digital surveillance

from a perspective that I had never even considered before. A Puritan conspiracy? I mean, I knew that surveillance, especially digital surveillance, had normalizing effects on people, meaning it forced people into certain norms and conducts.

But could it be that it also had a moralizing effect on people? Could it be that the great actors of digital surveillance, Facebook, Google, the NSA, you name it, were exerting upon us a power similar to the power of Catholic priests,

a power of the guilt trip, a power that would force us into confessing our sins? So especially in this room, I guess it would be really banal if I reminded you that digital surveillance invades your privacy, and that it also violates your intimacy.

But what exactly is the most intimate activity that a human being can do? Human being means men, women and children included. When I asked this question yesterday to prepare for this talk, someone answered,

praying is the most intimate activity a human being can engage in. And that's very interesting, but it doesn't really work. Because if you're praying and I walk into the room where you're praying, I'm not really invading your intimacy. You can just keep praying. So I'd love to have you guess, but since my speech was introduced,

you already know the answer, so I'm just going to say it quickly. The most intimate activity that a human being can engage in is masturbation. And masturbation, my friends, has a history that actually tells us a lot about surveillance.

And the point of my talk today is going to be that digital surveillance has similar mechanisms and similar effects on us as the crusade against masturbation that was launched in the 18th century in Europe. And first and above all, the first thing they have in common is that both surveillance of the 18th century,

surveillance of the masturbators, and digital surveillance are arbitrary and ineffective. So why was surveillance in the 18th century arbitrary? Because actually, before the 18th century, nobody cared about masturbation, not even the Catholic priests.

I mean, they barely said to the Catholic priests that it was something that should be avoided. It was a very minor concern, and it only concerned adult men and monks. Until the beginning of the 1700s, and the publication of that tract, a medical tract by a British doctor,

that says, Onania, the heinous sin of self-pollution and its frightful consequences in both sexes considered. And this tract started a crusade against masturbation in all of Europe. For the first time, masturbation became an abnormal thing to do that was dangerous not only for the individual,

but for society. And that idea arrived and changed things almost from one day to the next. But what's important for us with that crusade is that it took one form and one form only, surveillance. What this said was that the masturbators should be watched.

They should be watched constantly until their bad habit was crushed, and until they would go back to normal behavior, meaning not masturbating. So structurally, if not technologically, 18th century surveillance is very similar to today's digital surveillance.

Another crucial resemblance that they have is that they're both multipolar. So you know why today's surveillance is multipolar. We have on one side state surveillance with state agencies. We have on the other side private surveillance with all the gaffas, with the telecom companies.

And we have a third pole today, which is us, us who participate, willingly or not, by giving out our data every day when we use technology. And in the 18th century, surveillance is also multipolar because masturbators are watched by their priests,

they're watched by their doctors, and they're watched by their family. So let's start to talk about the doctors. So as I said, they are the ones who started the Crusade Against Masturbation. Following the Onania Tracts that I just showed you, many other doctors across Europe, and especially in France and Germany, published medical treatises, other tracts,

that explained that masturbation was not only a disease, it was also the cause, the origin, or in medical terms, the etiology of all diseases that could exist. All possible diseases could eventually be provoked by masturbation.

So if you masturbated, doctors said, you would get sick, your body would degenerate, and you would eventually die in horrible suffering, like your skin would... So these images actually show very well the type of long-term effects of masturbation.

So you see that even a 16-year-old on the top left who masturbates is actually sort of a degenerate, he looks completely stupid. And so basically, for doctors at the time, preventing masturbation was actually a matter of life and death. The masturbators, therefore, had to be watched for their own good, for their own safety, for their own security.

And these doctors, they convinced the parents and the family that they had to put in place inside their homes a very pervasive type of surveillance in order to make sure that the children,

the adolescents of the house, and the young adults would not touch themselves. So there were guidebooks that were written and published for the good family men, such as this one published by a French doctor, Jean-Baptiste de Bourges, that says, I'm translating the title, the memento of a father and educator, or intimate advice on the dangers of masturbation.

And there's also a very nice telling subtitle on the bottom of the page that says, masturbation exhausts, it irritates, it bastardizes, whatever that means, it dulls the mind, disorganizes and kills. They also, the doctors were recommending using corsets as this one.

The part on the genital is in metal. And they also, you should wear that for a whole week and then just take it once to wash it. They were also recommending using cross, tying children on a cross in their bed to make sure that the hands could never touch the body

and the hips were also put together so the legs could not be spread. This is a modern version that I found on Google, but it actually existed. And there were also all type of very inventive techniques, like for example attaching a string that would connect the children's hands with little bells on it

to the father's hand or to his brother and sister's hand so when he would move his hand at night, it would wake the other people in the household, wake up. So basically, what was happening in those homes in Europe in the 18th century

was a surveillance culture where everybody was encouraged to watch everybody. The children would watch each other, the parents would watch the children. And then, what about the priests? So as I said, surprisingly, at least for me, it's not the priests who started that crusade against masturbation, but they still played a very crucial role in this crusade.

In fact, by the 18th century, the Catholic Church had completely reformulated its understanding of the sin of the flesh. Originally, the sin of the flesh, which is the sixth commandment,

was referring to very specific rules, to very specific infringement of sexual rules. For example, you should not commit adultery, you should not commit incest, you should not have sex with animals. But between the 16th and 18th centuries, so after the Catholic Reform,

the priests started to be more and more interested in the body itself. So it was no longer so much about the acts that you committed, so whether or not you fornicated or slept with animals, but it was more about the sensations that you might have had even if you didn't commit any fault.

So to give you an example, the priests would inquire about the way a young woman bit into a fresh pear. Was the bite too sensual? Was the bite too languorous? Did biting on that pear give her a sort of arousing pleasure

that she should not allow herself to have or to feel? So you see, it's not at all about sex anymore, but about autoeroticism. It's about the body as a potential infinite source of pleasure and desire.

And as Foucault puts it, what it's really about is masturbation. And so the priests were told during their seminars that what they should really inquire about, the questions they should ask, was not only to avow your faults, but it should be about the thoughts that were formed in your head,

about the images that came to your mind, and about the sensations that these images provoked. So really, it was a form of surveillance that was a confession of all of one's acts and thoughts. And now, if I just strike out the 18th century actors

on this beautiful diagram and replace it with today's actors of digital surveillance, you see that the mechanisms in place are exactly the same. Both are done in the name of security, by someone responsible for your safety.

But most of the actual information that is gathered is gathered by actually a third actor, a third party, in the form of regular, maybe even daily, complete confession of your acts and thoughts. And in both cases, the surveillance is constant because it is fed by us, by the people who willingly participate in it.

So I started by telling you that surveillance of the masturbators in the 18th century and digital surveillance today are both arbitrary and ineffective.

What I meant by ineffective is that pervasive surveillance in the 18th century never stopped masturbation, just as mass surveillance never stopped a terrorist.

You probably have more data than I do on mass surveillance and terrorists, but last time I checked, and my data is from 2015, the bulk collection programs of the NSA had never been efficient in preventing any terror attack. Now, there's still a question that remains, at least for me. Do the people who work at the NSA on this bulk collection program, do they really believe they work?

Because what's for sure is that in the 18th century, the doctors who worked on that anti-masturbation surveillance, they knew, they really knew it didn't work. They even admitted it. In some treatises, they wrote down that, actually, none of those measures that I told you about were efficient.

The only radical solution would be to excise women and to torture men by injecting baking soda into the urinary tract. But they agreed that it was not really a plausible or nice solution. Yet, even if they knew everything they were doing and saying

was completely inefficient, ineffective, they still kept playing the game. They still kept leading the crusade against masturbation. And the question is, why? So, there's a very simplistic answer.

It's because they were making money with new patients, coming in with a new disease, masturbation. But it's not only that, obviously. They were also applying the new and pervasive economic logic of the time.

They were simply acting, sorry, forgot a slide. They were simply acting, as Russell, Marcuse, or Heisch argue, as the first sons of capitalism. In fact, the 18th century was also the time when economic liberalism was born.

And with it, the human body was supposed to become a tool of performance and an instrument of productivity. And Thomas Lacquer, which is an American contemporary philosopher, goes even further, and he says, the reason why masturbation became such a huge problem

in the 18th century is because it contradicted the very principle of economic liberalism, which is that private vice is always translated into public virtue if it goes through commerce, if it goes through trade with the other.

And obviously, masturbation is by definition the human activity that excludes the other, or any type of commerce with other. And this liberal principle, so the virtue of trade, of course still applies today. Maybe it applies today more than ever.

It's, in fact, at the core of digital surveillance. Because we are so inured to the liberal economy, we don't even realize anymore, but we have applied market rationalities to every single facet of our life. In fact, the only reason why digital surveillance is possible

is because we consider everything, including our privacy, as a good, as a commodity that could eventually be traded or bought. However, despite the great similarities

between 18th century surveillance of the masturbators and today's digital surveillance, there's one crucial difference. In the 18th century, both doctors and priests agreed that in order to be cured or to be forgiven,

the masturbator had to confess. It had to confess to the priest, to the doctor, and preferably to both. But confession was really meant as a relief of the soul. It forced the subject to reflect on himself,

to have an extremely active relationship to himself, to develop what Foucault calls an internal gaze, meaning to watch his own thoughts, to watch his own feelings. And of course, the mandatory confession that was imposed to everyone in the 18th century often had a counterproductive effect

because it produced guilt and produced self-censorship, not necessarily a flourishing internal gaze. But at least the confession of the 18th century had one merit, is that they let the subject speak for himself and create his own narrative of himself.

And today, when Siva Vaidyanathan, who wrote a great book called The Googleization of Everything, writes that to search for something on the web using Google is not unlike confessing your desire to a mysterious power. Well, he makes a very compelling point by saying that, but he also misses an essential difference.

In today's surveillance, there's no such thing as a confession in the Christian sense of the term. We may well be laying out all of our desires, intimate hopes and fears on the Google search box. But first, very often we don't do it willingly,

meaning we don't mean to confess them when we type on Google. We're just really searching for something. And second, we don't reflect on them or on ourselves when we do so. And third, some of us, maybe even most of us, are not even aware that when we do so,

when we type on Google, there's a mysterious power, as Sida calls it, that might be listening or reading our confession. So Google certainly has a similar power and probably a much better knowledge of who we are

than the priests of the 18th century. But we, as subjects, have mostly abandoned the internal gaze that I was telling you about, this foundational relationship with oneself that comes with conscious confession.

So as a conclusion, I want to suggest why, to me, this comparison with 18th century crusade on masturbators is meaningful and not merely titillating or just funny.

I've always felt that what is really at stake with surveillance, and not only targeted surveillance, but bulk data collection, mass data collection, what's really at stake with that surveillance is the self. This very little black box that we all have inside and that humanists believed should remain untouched,

should remain free and should be sanctified. I really felt that this very inner self that makes us worthy human beings, that's what is ultimately at stake with mass surveillance and that's why we should care.

But the problem is, and the difficulty I have, is that this argument is extremely difficult to make. I mean, even when I'm talking to a crowd of philosophers and I say, you know, using all type of references, surveillance changes our relationship to the self.

I mean, of course some might agree, but it's actually, nobody really knows what the self is and so nobody is moved if I say that. There's no gut reaction. And on the other hand, when we talk about masturbation,

the gut reaction is immediate. Even if we don't know what the self is. Even if we still don't know what the self is. The idea of being watched while masturbating, and for some of us, just the idea of masturbation itself, mortifies us immediately. I mean, we always immediately feel invaded.

So it's very easy to understand that surveilling masturbation is the ultimate violation. Not because it's bad and not because it's shameful, not because we're doing anything wrong if we do it, but simply and only because it is one little part

of that little black box of the self. Thank you. Thank you, Charlene.

We have six microphones on ground level and we have a few minutes for a quick Q&A. So if you have questions, please line up at the six microphones at ground level and shoot. Are there any questions? Yes, we have one at microphone number one.

Thank you very much for your talk. I want to make a short introduction. I'm Greek and in Greek we have a very common insult. Please keep your question short. We have limited time. Malakas, that means masturbator, and it's a very common insult. Maybe it stems from your time, the time you described.

So I wanted to ask you about the geographical place of this crusade and its relation in time, its position in time with the Renaissance period and the confession. Was the confession already a structure that was in place or it was adopted with this crusade?

Yes. So the crusade actually started not in Catholic countries but in Protestant countries. It started in England and then in Germany and then it moved to France, which was mostly Catholic at the time.

And so that was really beginning of the 18th century and it lasted until the end of the 19th century. And when it comes to the Catholics, what's really interesting is that both the medical,

rational crusade and the Catholic Church that became to be interested in surveillance, they happened at the same time but for different reasons. So the doctors, as I say, the only plausible explanation is that they interiorized the new economic approach to life in general. To science, to rationality.

The Christian priests, on the other hand, what really changed things is the 16th century, the counter-reform that happened with the Council of Trent. I think there was a 16, I forgot, yes, anyway,

1532, I think, Council of Trent. And so the Christian church, the Catholic church had to reinvent itself after the reform of the Protestants. And so the priests reunited and they decided on new ways to just exercise their own religion.

And one of the first things that they thought of was confession. To make sure that people were not Protestants, that they were not heretical, they made sure that confession would become mandatory. And to be efficient in knowing if people were really good Catholics or not,

they could not just ask people, as they had been doing until the 16th century, did you commit a fault, did you commit a sin? Because that was not enough. They had to know what was going on in their head, in their mind. So that's why they transformed confession into not simply avowing your fault and your sins,

but into speaking your whole self. You had to be able, during a confession, to represent your own self, to think, reflect on your whole life, even the things that were not false, that were not sins. You had to analyze yourself completely. This is almost the beginning of psychoanalysis.

We have another question from our signal angel who's monitoring IRC and social media. Thank you. One question from the internet. Do you think that the self-surveillance and self-regulation will become normal as government realizes that we are no longer governable by their conventional means?

I almost want to answer by another question. If self-surveillance really becomes the norm, and if we self-surveil ourselves with the norms that are imposed upon us,

then of course we don't need to be governed by any other type of government. I think that's one of the key arguments of totalitarian regimes. The point of any totalitarian regime is to not even need to exert any power upon the people because they'll just do it themselves.

Next question from microphone number three. Hi, thanks for the talk. I have a question. You talked about when I go to the priest and I confess my sins, then I tell a story about myself. And when Google is telling my story, so I don't have my own told narrative me.

It's my Google told narrative me. How does this affect my black box? Well, I'm trying to think of the best example.

If I just gather the metadata that I get about you for the last three days, I gather the metadata about you, your Google search, where you went, your GPS, et cetera. Anyone can probably picture you as a crazy person,

as a criminal, or as just a person you're not. Because we can make this data talk in any way possible. And this actually is happening in certain courts. The metadata becomes used as a proof, as an evidence of who you are and what you did.

And against the data that is so easily readable, you can't really defend yourself. Your own word has less power and is considered less truth than the data that is officially gathered black and white on paper.

And it's, I think, extremely violent to not be able to tell who you are yourself. It's extremely violent to be confronted to that double, that data double of us that speaks louder than we could ever speak ourselves. So I think that's the violation of the little black box,

that you can be convinced of what is into your little black box. You can maybe not be even sure, because I think no one is really sure. But until now, you always had the possibility to let it talk and let it speak

as well as you could narrate your own story yourself. And the existence of those data doubles forbids that. Or it doesn't forbid it, but it makes it very complicated to be taken seriously when we have that existing double.

Thank you very much, Charlene Biondi. We're sadly out of time. Please give her a warm round of applause.