Alienation in the Age of Procedure: Liberty and Surveillance in the Contemporary World

Modern humanity has not shaken off alienation; rather it has remade it in subtler forms. In earlier epochs, alienation was the loss of self through industrial labour, as Karl Marx described: “The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.” In our own time the condition is reconfigured. We live not merely alienated from the product of our work but also from the purpose of our lives, as procedure, protocol and bureaucratic form engulf intent and meaning.

Michel Foucault discerned this paradox with unsparing clarity. The societies that call themselves free may in truth be the most suffocating of all, precisely because they conceal compulsion within the fabric of normality. As he observed in Discipline and Punish, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The paradox of liberal democracy, Foucault implies, is that liberty contracts as surveillance expands, for liberty is not simply the absence of overt coercion but the capacity to act without unseen constraint.

Technology, hailed as the emancipation of the individual, has become the new overseer. With each keystroke, biometric scan and geolocation ping, individuals are observed, classified and directed. Hannah Arendt foresaw that modern bureaucracies would produce a condition in which “the rule of nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have tyranny without a tyrant.” What she described as the “banality” of administration has become the logic of digital systems that determine whether one may travel, secure credit, or speak without sanction. Procedure becomes more powerful than politics.

The alienation this breeds is subtle. It is not the overt estrangement of the factory hand at his machine, but the quiet loss of meaning when the form of action overshadows its purpose. Max Weber called this the “iron cage” of rationalisation: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.” In the contemporary cage, the individual seeks to comply with checklists, forms and protocols, often without any genuine sense of end or fulfilment. We pursue procedures not because they serve results but because the system recognises no other currency of value.

Liberty, once conceived as self-direction, is now measured in permissions granted by opaque systems. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing almost two centuries ago, foresaw “an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. … It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them.” His prophecy resonates uncannily with the present digital order, in which individuals exchange the substance of freedom for the convenience of algorithmic direction.

The ceaseless surveillance inherent in technology deepens alienation because it transforms the individual into data. One ceases to be a person of intention, becoming instead a node in a network of metrics. Søren Kierkegaard anticipated the dehumanisation of such abstraction when he wrote that “once you label me you negate me.” Labelling is now automated, statistical, and inescapable.

Here the insights of literature lend prophetic force. George Orwell’s 1984 portrayed a society in which “Big Brother is watching you” not merely through spies but through the omnipresence of screens, slogans and the manipulation of truth itself. Surveillance was not an exception but the norm. In the twenty-first century, Orwell’s nightmare seems realised not through the jackboot but through the convenience of smartphones and digital assistants. As Orwell warned, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” The stamping is quieter now, but it presses upon us with no less weight.

Franz Kafka captured another dimension of alienation in The Trial, where the protagonist finds himself ensnared in a labyrinth of faceless procedures, condemned without knowing his crime. Kafka’s lesson is that alienation lies not only in surveillance but in the absurd machinery of systems that overwhelm the individual with rules and rituals devoid of meaning. “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” It is an arrest not of the body but of autonomy, for procedure itself is enough to dissolve liberty.

Aldous Huxley offered still another perspective. In Brave New World, liberty is lost not through terror but through pleasure and distraction. “A really efficient totalitarian state”, he wrote, “would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude”. One might say that in the consumer-driven surveillance state, the cage is gilded, the alienation disguised by the very comforts technology provides.

To live under these conditions is to feel estranged from liberty itself. We are told we are free, yet our choices are ever more directed, predicted and channelled. We are told we are secure, yet our security depends upon compliance with unseen rules. We are told we are connected, yet our connections are mediated by systems that commodify them. Alienation is not only economic but existential.

The lesson drawn from these thinkers is sobering. True liberty lies not in the multiplication of choices but in the possibility of meaningfully directing one’s life without procedural shackles. The surveillance state, whether run by governments or corporations, threatens this by substituting the external validation of systems for the inner purpose of procedure. Foucault warned that the panopticon was not a building but a principle of power: a society in which “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action”.

The contemporary human condition is marked by precisely this: we are subjects of permanent effects, alienated not by the weight of visible chains but by the subtle absence of genuine autonomy. To recover liberty requires more than limiting technology or reforming bureaucracies. It demands a reassertion of purpose over procedure, results over form, and humanity over the metrics by which it is ceaselessly observed.