It is worth reading this essay on Ctheory, which deals with power and control in the age of the internet of things:

For context, see the following entries on the evolution of power, in my own manuscript, and in our wiki.

In these comments, I make the point that after the evolution from disciplinary to control societies, we are entering an era of protocally power, as theorized by Alexander Galloway.

Dion Denis:

“More than three centuries later, the actual, possible and probable use for “an Internet of Things” has met the knowledge production requirements and governance agenda of 18th Century Polizeiwissenschaft theorists. In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze explained the key change that has reanimated the neo-Polizeiwissenschaft project:

In disciplinary societies, the individual passes from one closed environment to another: the family; the school; the barracks, the factory … Now, societies of control, operating with computers, are replacing disciplinary societies …

Enclosures are molds … but controls are a modulation … that continuously change… perpetual training replaces the school, and continuous control replaces the examination.

The numerical language of control is made of codes that [allow or disallow] access to information. We no longer deal with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” samples, data, markets, or “banks.”

The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control … short-term and rapid, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous …

One center for these new modulations of social control is the emerging “Internet of Things,” where data collection and analysis devices are ubiquitous, interactive, hyper-intensive, decentralized, cheap and mobile. Freed from the need for permanent enclosures (to observe, record, shape and discipline) by iterating generations of smaller, cheaper, faster and more powerful RFID and GPS chips, the capacity for continuous observation, judgment and control of “men and things” becomes broader, and deeper. As a constituent feature of this moment, these ubiquitous and mobile technologies de facto shred “taken-for-granted” categories of late modernity, such as the once-conventional distinctions between public and private.”