Maybe I am just too inexperienced in theory or deluded from living in our little university bubble, but I was confused and taken aback by Deleuze’s claims about the future of family, schools, and hospitals. At the end of the Historical section, he states, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” after giving an example of the crisis of hospitals. Is he saying for the general population to look for new ways to arm themselves against the future corporations, or to look for the new weapons of the corporations?
I’m still unsure about what a ‘society of control’ means. If an example of moving towards such a society of corporations is the creation of a nationwide health information network, then in that one aspect it seems to be a more productive means of helping those who need it (the sick, injured, pregnant, etc...). In this way, lumping every ‘dividual’s’ personal medical history together in one ‘bank ‘ would lead to safer and faster treatment and more efficient hospitals. And that will be good, right?
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One thing in your post intrigued me, when you talked about the societies of control and the centralization of a medical record history that all hospitals would use to help sick patients get their treatment quicker, and safer. This scared me very much as the centralized control of any institution or aspect of our lives would scare me. If this record bank, being as you suggested a centralized network, were somehow attacked, I would fear that the records could all be destroyed very easily, as none of the other other offshoots would hook up to any other nodes, as Galloway called them.
Also, with societies of control apparently in our immediate future, the usefulness of having multiple hospital systems would seem to be a great loss. There is competition among a network of different, independently-run, hospitals to learn the best treatments and remedies for diseases. Granted that people get a little strung along on the way, would you be able to risk that for a centralized hospital that really had no need to fulfill the lack of certain jumps in treatment? If they have no one to compete with, there is no desperate need to get better, and with that, our medical knowledge could plateau. Competition, and divided hospitals, I feel are a necessary evil to fight the society of control, given where the human race seems to be right now.
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