What are the costs of our contemporary freedom? And who bears the different portions of those costs? In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault put forward a compelling vision of the logics of individualization and normalization that were the inescapable other side of liberty. Discipline, as instituted in all those ‘moralizing machines’ invented in the nineteenth century, was a mode of power that worked through the calculated distribution of bodies, spaces, time, gazes in attempts to fabricate subjects who were simultaneously useful and compliant. Through hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement, institutionalized in prisons, schools, lunatic asylums, reformatories, workhouses and similar assemblages, competences, capacities and controls upon conduct were to be inscribed into the soul of the citizen. The free citizen was one who was able and willing to conduct his or her own conduct according to the norms of civility; the delinquent, the criminal, the insane person, with their specialized institutions of reformation, were the obverse of this individualization and subjectivization of citizenship.

In his ‘Postscript on control societies’, Gilles Deleuze suggested that Foucault's characterization of ‘disciplinary society’ was written at the dusk of such societies, which reached their apogee at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the close of the twentieth century, in a process that began slowly but made rapid advances after the Second World War, we had begun to leave disciplinary societies behind: we now lived in ‘societies of control’.