Power, Knowledge, and the Human Condition: Revisiting Foucault in the Age of Technics
Power relations, sources of power, relations between knowledge and power have dominating role in Michel Foucalt’s philosophy. However, Foucault’s philosophy is not merely an analysis of power in historical perspectives or only institutions; it is an inquiry into the very logic of modern existence. He explored how power operates not only through laws and rulers but through the everyday structures that define truth, shape identity, and regulate life itself. In an age where data flows faster than ideas and human behavior is quantified into algorithms, Foucault’s insights illuminate how power adapts, becoming more invisible, pervasive, and intimate.
Today, when we scroll through social media, obey algorithmic recommendations, or submit to biometric surveillance, we are enacting the very dynamics Foucault described decades ago. His framework of discipline, surveillance, and biopower has not only survived the digital age, it has become its defining grammar.
For Foucault, power is not an object one can seize; it is a network of relations that shapes what is possible. In Discipline and Punish (1975), he used the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, as a metaphor for how modern power works. The genius of the panopticon was not its brutality, but its efficiency: it created a state of permanent visibility where individuals internalized control. “He who is subjected to a field of visibility,” Foucault wrote, “and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.”
Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and the panopticon has evolved. We now live in a digital panopticon, where observation is constant but dispersed. Social media platforms, governments, and corporations collect and analyze data to anticipate our behavior. We do not need to be watched directly; the awareness of being potentially monitored is enough to regulate conduct.
The effect, as Foucault would argue, is not repression but normalization. Power today does not merely forbid, it shapes desire, encouraging us to conform through incentives, rankings, and social validation.
In Foucault’s view, knowledge and power are inseparable. “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge,” he wrote in Discipline and Punish. Knowledge produces categories: sane and insane, criminal and lawful, normal and deviant that make power appear natural and necessary.
This logic persists in today’s data-driven society. Algorithms determine creditworthiness, employability, and even political trustworthiness. What we call “data” is not neutral information: it is a regime of truth, a mechanism for sorting people into hierarchies of value and visibility. Foucault’s question, “Who decides what counts as truth?”, becomes the central question of the algorithmic age.
Digital technologies have thus become epistemological systems. They define how knowledge is produced, who has access to it, and whose experiences are erased. The “objectivity” of data hides a structure of power as real as any political regime.
Foucault’s notion of biopower, the governance of life itself, is one of his most influential contributions. Modern states, he argued, no longer rule through the threat of death but through the administration of life: health systems, schools, prisons, sexuality, and demographics. Power became productive, and it shaped bodies, behaviors, and populations.
In the digital era, biopower becomes datapower. Our biological and behavioral information, from DNA to heart rates to browsing histories, is tracked, stored, and monetized. The human body, once a target of discipline, has become a source of data extraction. Health apps, biometric passports, and facial recognition technologies continue the Foucauldian project of “making live and letting die”: not through force, but through optimization.
What Foucault anticipated was not dystopia, but the subtle merging of control and freedom: the way we willingly participate in systems that manage us. We share data, not because we are coerced, but because it feels empowering, a paradox at the core of contemporary power.
Where Foucault analyzed power through institutions, Bernard Stiegler expanded this analysis into the realm of technics, the material supports of memory and thought. For Stiegler, technology is not external to humanity; it is the very condition of human existence. Every technological epoch reorganizes how we remember, communicate, and think.
If Foucault’s prisons and clinics were sites of discipline, Stiegler’s screens and algorithms are sites of attention capture. He warned that digital capitalism produces a new form of servitude, symbolic proletarianization, where individuals lose control over their psychic and collective memory. Knowledge, once a personal and social process, becomes automated.
Seen together, Foucault and Stiegler describe a historical trajectory: from the disciplining of bodies to the programming of minds. The question of freedom shifts from the political to the technological: how can one think freely in a system that anticipates every thought?
Foucault’s later works, especially The History of Sexuality and The Care of the Self, reveal another dimension of his thought: ethics as self-formation. While his earlier work dissected how power shapes us, his later work asked how we might shape ourselves. Freedom, for Foucault, is not a state to be achieved but a practice of resistance, a continual effort to reflect, to question, to refuse.
In our current condition, resistance might mean reclaiming time from the algorithm, questioning data-driven “truths,” or cultivating spaces of thought beyond digital optimization. As Foucault wrote, “There are no relations of power without resistances.” The act of critical thought, the courage to think differently, becomes the most radical form of resistance.
Foucault helps us see that power today is not simply political or economic; it is epistemic and technological. It defines the limits of our imagination and the terms of our selfhood. His thought challenges us to recognize how freedom and control coexist, how resistance begins not with rebellion but with awareness.
As our digital architectures grow ever more sophisticated, the Foucauldian question remains pressing:
Who controls the discourse that defines truth, normality, and reason?
To read Foucault in the twenty-first century is not to revisit a past philosopher but to confront our present condition: one in which the technologies of power have become the very medium of life itself.
