“Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.”
To me, this brought to mind the image of a Ford assembly line, which was slightly ironic since Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control mentioned American corporation’s move from production to pure marketing. Regardless, I envisioned a line of people honed from birth/creation to fit into a mold. I imagined them pausing at stations along the way, such as the education system and the corporation where they are modified and better made to fit the mold of marketing–the most profitable and less energy consuming way of making money.
However, my analogy is off in the sense that the people are not being modified, but are modifying themselves. Because children are being introduced to “the ‘corporation’ at all levels of schooling,” a control society does not need to exert much direct energy into creating workers who will perpetuate the cycle, since in essence they are forming themselves.
So how does technology play into this? For one, it certainly perpetuates the environment that a control society currently thrives in. With constant affirmation from networking and peers that constant training leads to money and success in the future, it maintains a large pool of similarly motivated workers. For another, it allows those at the top of the hierarchy more power and ability to micromanage the training and watch have over the workers. But still, on a more micro level, what does the very nature of computers do for maintaining a control society? Also, I can see how it facilitated the shift from a disciplinary society to a control society, but really, what next? Will the concept of freedom become an even more intangible illusion?