Soft Power: How Harmony Became Our New Form of Surveillance

Softpower - stencil - Quimper - (c) Fabrice Laudrin 2025

[French]

Everything that passes through a screen now has to be softened. Not to spare the other, but to protect oneself. Every message sent is a message that can be archived, pulled out again, misread, forwarded to a supervisor, a committee, or a WhatsApp group you didn’t know existed. Digital softness is not a moral quality; it is a survival strategy. We soften our words because we know the smallest rough edge can become evidence, a screenshot, a case file. Our relation to the Other now passes through a filter: what could be kept and used against us.

This gradual delegation of human interaction to platforms has turned speech into legal material, into a trace, into a future regret. What matters is no longer “what I want to say,” but “what could be retained.” So we erase, revise, apologize before speaking, wrap every intention in cotton. Speech becomes caution. Affect becomes protocol. We speak as if a lawyer were reading over our shoulder.

Meanwhile, outside the screen, language reacts to the suffocation. It becomes sharp again. Edgy. Voices snap in parking lots, insults fly at self-checkout machines, domestic conversations ignite over nothing. We tolerate nothing anymore: not waiting, not contradiction, not slowness. The contrast is so stark it no longer forms a paradox but a system: the more we delegate softness to the digital sphere, the more harshness settles into the real one. We polish our words where traces remain; we tear ourselves apart where nothing will be recorded.

Digital softness is not respect; it is the fear of memory. The fear of the archive. The fear of the Other as a potential machine for storing our missteps. It produces a world with no visible friction but saturated with invisible tension—a world where spontaneity becomes a risk. So we grow smooth. Prudent. Compatible.

In Logan’s Run (1976), that world was already fully formed: a domed city, too young, too clean, too happy not to raise suspicion. No leaders, no visible police, nothing to overthrow—just an atmosphere, a climate of compulsory harmony. And at the heart of this gentleness, a ritual everyone accepted: the Carousel, where people sacrificed themselves believing they would be renewed. No one died through violence. They died because gentleness required it. It was a power without a face, without anger, without threat—and total precisely because it was soft.

We resemble it more and more. Happiness has become a tool of stability, not an inner movement. We no longer ask, “How are you?” but “Don’t disturb the balance.” Desire must adjust to the collective mood. What once belonged to the subject—a private Threshold, a surge, an emergence—now falls under the group’s authority. “My reincarnation” becomes “our harmony.” The Threshold is no longer an intimate passage; it is a communal frontier.

This shift was captured, unknowingly, by someone in Quimper. A stencil on a busy street, clean, simple, blunt: À mort le Pouvoir — Death to Power. It wasn’t an insult, nor a classic protest slogan. It was a diagnosis. Power no longer has a figure. It holds by ambiance, attenuation, self-moderation. And here’s the telling detail: the city never painted over it. No roller, no cover coat. The pigment was too weak; the letters fade on their own, slowly, like a sentence that persists despite its fragility. They are still legible, but they pale. And as long as they last, they speak the truth.

We are not witnessing a return of authority. We are witnessing something subtler: harmony turned obligatory, calm turned implicit law, neutrality turned mutual policing. Power no longer imposes; it soothes. And that is precisely how it holds.

There is only one sentence left to name what is happening:when softness becomes necessary, it is no longer a feeling — it becomes a regime.

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Logan’s Run (1976) — Key Fiche

Director: Michael Anderson

Year: 1976

Genre: Dystopian science fiction, inspired by the novel by Nolan and Johnson

Original novel: Nolan, W. F., & Johnson, G. C. (1967). Logan’s Run. New York, NY: Dial Press.

Essential Summary

In a futuristic city sealed beneath a vast dome, the population enjoys a state of enforced happiness: endless leisure, perpetual youth, and total harmony. At the age of thirty, every citizen must submit to the ritual of the Carousel, a euphoric ceremony presented as “renewal,” but in truth a mass execution. Logan 5, a Sandman tasked with eliminating those who attempt to flee their fate, uncovers the truth and tries to escape.

Core Idea

Logan’s Run depicts a faceless form of power: no tyrant, no visible police force, only a climate of compulsory gentleness. Control operates through ambiance, ritual, and emotional compatibility. The city functions as a soft totalitarian utopia, where order is maintained by the promise of pleasure and the erasure of all friction.

Psychoanalytic Stakes

The domed city behaves like an artificial mother: nourishing, enveloping, reassuring — yet fundamentally castrating. The Carousel turns death into a harmonious spectacle, eliminating the possibility of conflict, desire, or threshold. It is a society where the subject exists only as long as they remain compatible with the collective atmosphere.

Why It Matters Today

This is one of the earliest narratives to show a system where pacification forms the core of power: a model of soft totalitarianism, exerted not through coercion but through emotional regulation. Its vision foreshadows contemporary concerns around digital moderation, automated smoothness, platform gentleness, and the growing social pressure toward permanent benevolence. 

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Glossary — The Regime of Softness

Digital Softness

A set of implicit norms that require smooth, polished, low-friction language — not to respect others, but to protect oneself from the archive. Softness as a defensive reflex.

Fear of the Archive

A contemporary anxiety tied to the fact that every word may be saved, resurfaced, misused. Speech becomes calculation and precaution. Spontaneity becomes a legal risk.

Delegated Relation

The gradual transfer of our relation to the Other onto digital platforms: conversation takes place under soft surveillance rather than between two free subjects.

Compatible Language

Sanitized speech designed to avoid conflict, misunderstanding, or social sanction. A desireless language — a calibrated utterance.

Compensatory Violence

The return of raw reality in non-recorded spaces: explosions in parking lots, shouting in traffic, domestic flare-ups. A compensation for digital polishing.

Soft Power

A system of control without authoritarian figures, grounded in the pacification of surfaces: discipline without visible violence, harmony as obligation.

Constrained Harmony

A climate in which any friction becomes suspect. Collective balance is valued above the emergence of the subject.

Collectivized Threshold

The transformation of the Threshold — the inner site where the subject appears — into a communal frontier. One no longer crosses what might displease the group.

Loganization

A term to describe societies adopting the mechanisms of Logan’s Run: symbolic youth, gentle coercion, erased conflict, a leaderless yet totalizing climate.

Carousel

In Logan’s Run, the euphoric ritual of death-as-renewal. A metaphor for social cycles that transform disappearance into celebration and obedience into joyful participation.

Spectral Stencil

Urban stencil art whose fading is not caused by authority but by weak pigment — a fragile trace that still reveals a desire even as it disappears.Canonical example: À mort le Pouvoir, on a busy street in Quimper.

Atmospheric Power

A form of domination with no face and no explicit decree. Not an institution: a climate. A condition of the air rather than a written law.

Punitive Neutrality

The imposed expectation of tone, attitude, and compatibility. Conflict is not forbidden — it is made unthinkable.

Behavioral Polishing

Self-moderation as default: smoothing, softening, calming oneself before speaking. An internalized emotional discipline.

Compatibility Regime

A system that does not require individuals to be good, but to be compatible. The subject must conform to the smoothness of the whole.

Regime of Necessary Softness

The tipping point at which softness is no longer a feeling but an obligation. When politeness ceases to be a virtue and becomes a political structure.