Deleuze (via Foucault) argues that before Napoleon we were in societies of sovereignty and that after until WW2 we were in a society of discipline. The former sought to tax rather than organize production and rule over death rather than administer life.

Societies of discipline were marked by institutions like the barracks, factory, hospital, school and prison that aimed to enclose people in physical spaces to control, order, and distribute productive forces into a single body that was more productivity than its parts.

After WW2 these institutions have decline and a society of discipline has made way to a society of control. Control societies aren't marked by physical spaces, or what he calls "molds" that impose discipline, but are "modulations" which form overlapping viscous layers.

Discipline societies have two poles: the individual and his position in the mass.

Control societies discard the mass/individual in favor of what he calls "dividuals". The individual is demarcated by what information he has access to in "banks" eg markets, data, and information.

Under control systems things like the family, the factory and the school which used to converge on a single public or state owner have become deformable and transferable entities of a single corporation owned by anonymous shareholders.

Factories get replaced by corporations, newspapers by social media, things that used to have to impose physical discipline on you are given way to things that can control control speech and behavior without you ever realizing you're being controlled or disciplined.

What can we do? Deleuze doesn't equivocate:
"There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another...[t]here is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons"

h/t to @bronzejaguar and @Outsideness for getting me woke to this

https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents

Bonus: Deleuze predicts current day Shanghai thirty years ago.