Modern society has perfected a subtle, decentralized apparatus for enforcing sameness—what might be called the “conformity machine.”
This machine is not a single institution but a fusion of technologies, bureaucracies, and cultural pressures. Michel Foucault (1977) described the modern state as operating through “capillaries” of power, reaching deep into the details of life. In the 21st century, these capillaries are digital, global, and largely invisible.
Surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) has aligned profit incentives with behavioral prediction and modification. Every click, swipe, and location ping becomes data to be fed back into systems designed to shape what we see, buy, and believe. Unlike older propaganda, which sought to persuade, these systems seek to preempt—to make certain choices less likely to occur at all.
In parallel, administrative rationalism—the drive to quantify, standardize, and document—has expanded beyond government into every sector. Workplaces track productivity in real time, schools algorithmically flag “at-risk” students, and border agencies demand biometric proof of identity. The stated purpose is efficiency and security, but the cumulative effect is normalization: outliers are smoothed away.
Social media acts as the cultural wing of the conformity machine. The threat is no longer only state sanction but reputational ruin. “Cancel culture,” online shaming, and algorithmic visibility regimes ensure that deviation from consensus can carry swift, borderless consequences.
In such an environment, freedom is not eliminated outright—it is channeled. The range of permissible choices narrows quietly, and the individual internalizes the gaze of the system, self-editing long before an algorithm does it for them.