From Deleuze via Glen Fuller:

“Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.” — Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, pg 322

(Yes, I have finally and for the first time in my life reproduced a Deleuzian quotation longer than the word ‘assemblage’)

From a longer post by ideant that is well worth your time:

This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.

And a sneak peek from something much more prosaic that I said in a conversation with Georgina Born last month, which will be published soon in a new initiative of M/C called ‘M/C Dialogues’:

So there’s a sense that at the design end you’re creating an open, configurable system that the users will come along and do anything they like with, but on the other hand, that ‘anything’ seems to be taking quite a similar shape over and over again.

Kind of obvious, but worth unpacking in the light of ‘control after decentralization’, as Galloway puts it.