In 1933, as imperial Japan electrified itself at a forced pace and Western architects exported alongside their blueprints a particular idea of the good life, a writer from Osaka published a short essay on light and its consequences. Junichiro Tanizaki was neither a politician nor an economist. He was a novelist attuned to textures, to lacquer, to rice paper, to the way in which penumbra transforms a bowl into an object of meditation. What he wrote then did not pretend to be a theory of power. But it is one. In’ei Raisan, translated into English as In Praise of Shadows, describes with clinical precision the mechanism by which a civilisation imposes its aesthetics as a universal norm and liquidates, in passing, everything that does not fit within it. Ninety years later, the mechanism continues to function. Only the cables have changed.
Clarity as a Project of Domination
Tanizaki observes something his Western contemporaries could not see because they were inside it. Electric light is not a neutral improvement. It is a cultural choice presented as a technical necessity. When Japanese engineers installed in traditional interiors the same lighting that worked in Parisian salons or Manchester factories, they did not solve a problem of visibility. They imposed a way of inhabiting space, and with it a hierarchy of what deserves to be seen. The opaque tatami, the aged wood, the unpolished tableware, everything that existed in dialogue with the penumbra lost its reason for being under white light. It did not disappear immediately. It became invisible in another way, falling outside the regime of what is appreciable.
This mechanism operates today within the digital infrastructures that organise the public and private lives of more than five billion people. Technology platforms, mass communication systems controlled by a handful of corporations headquartered in the United States, do not propose a way of connecting. They impose it as a condition of participation. Those without a profile do not exist in certain labour markets. Those who do not publish are not considered active. Those who do not exhibit are not taken into account. Total transparency, permanent visibility, continuous exposure are not options among others. They are the contemporary equivalent of electric light in Japanese interiors of 1933, a norm presented as progress that functions as the exclusion of everything that does not submit to it.
What Is Destroyed When Everything Is Seen
Tanizaki devotes memorable pages to traditional Japanese lavatories. The gesture might seem eccentric. It is not. He chooses that space precisely because it is the most intimate, the most protected, the most removed from the public gaze, a place built for darkness, silence, transitory solitude. What he describes is not nostalgia for an inferior sanitary technology. It is the defence of a principle. There exist zones of existence that need to remain beyond the reach of the gaze in order to function. Intimacy is not a defect of transparency. It is a condition of interior life.
Digital platforms have turned surveillance into an architecture. The term refers to the systematic collection and automated processing of data produced by users during their online activities, for commercial, political or security purposes. This is not an occasional observation but a continuous and exhaustive record. What is read, for how long, what is purchased, with whom one speaks, what is searched before sleep. This record is the raw material of a market valued at trillions of dollars annually. Shoshana Zuboff, a researcher at Harvard University, named this system “surveillance capitalism”, a model in which the prediction and modification of human behaviour is the product being sold. The mechanism is simple, as all well-designed extraction mechanisms are. The user produces data by using the service, the data is processed to infer preferences and vulnerabilities, the inferences are sold to whoever wishes to act upon them.
According to data published by the European Data Protection Board in 2024, data protection authorities across the European Union imposed cumulative fines exceeding 4.2 billion euros on technology platforms between 2018 and 2023, without any of them substantially modifying their data collection model.
What Tanizaki understood before the problem existed is that the destruction of shadow is not merely aesthetic. It affects the way in which human beings constitute themselves as subjects. A person who knows they are being observed permanently modifies their behaviour before acting. They do not decide to do so. They do it reflexively. The power that does not need to be exercised directly because the watched person watches themselves is the most efficient that exists. Platforms are its version scaled to planetary dimensions, with the difference that users pay to enter, in time and in data, and are grateful for the service.
Opacity as a Condition of Freedom
Tanizaki does not propose a return to oil lamps. His gesture is more precise and more demanding. He asks that the capacity to choose be recovered. Western modernity arrived in Japan, as it arrives everywhere, with the conviction that its values are universal and its techniques neutral. Tanizaki shows otherwise. That a society can choose to preserve zones of shadow without thereby rejecting electricity. That technical progress and fidelity to one’s own ways of inhabiting are not incompatible. That choice is possible if one is aware that there is a choice. This possibility is precisely what platforms work to eliminate.
Their attention-capture mechanisms, designed by teams specialised in behavioural psychology, function so that the user does not perceive that they are choosing. The interface is built so that scrolling through the content wall seems as natural as breathing. The algorithm that decides what is seen and what is hidden is not transparent. Neither is the company that owns it. What Tanizaki called the imposition of light as a norm now has a more sophisticated mechanism. The illusion of choice within a space designed so that all choices lead to the same result, which is exposure, recording and the production of commercially exploitable data.
The General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union, in force since 2018, explicitly recognises the right not to be subject to automated decisions with significant effects on the life of the user, and establishes transparency obligations that the major platforms have met in a systematically partial manner.
Europe has attempted, through legal instruments, to reconstruct something close to what Tanizaki demanded. The right to exist outside the spotlight. The General Data Protection Regulation, known by its acronym GDPR, sets limits on the processing of personal data and recognises citizens’ right to control the information they produce. It is not a solution. It is a belated acknowledgement that the destruction of shadow carries costs that can no longer be ignored. The fines are paid. The business models continue.
Penumbra as Resistance
There is a temptation when reading Tanizaki that is worth resisting. That of turning his text into a romantic celebration of the past. It is not that. Tanizaki was writing from inside a culture being transformed at a speed it had not been able to process. His position was not that of the conservative who rejects change. It was that of the observer who asks what is lost in the process and whether that loss is necessary or merely convenient for whoever imposes the rules.
Networked communication systems do not technically require the mass collection of personal data. They require infrastructure, bandwidth and protocols. The rest is a business model that has been normalised so completely that questioning it seems an extravagance of the same order as demanding dark and silent lavatories in a world of white porcelain and neon light. Nobody says it in those terms. Nobody needs to.
What Tanizaki offers is a way of seeing. A capacity to perceive that what presents itself as neutral has a colour, that what presents itself as progress has a direction, that what presents itself as inevitable has been decided by someone with precise interests. The penumbra, in his text, is not an absence of light. It is the space where the gaze learns to distinguish what clarity flattens. It is the condition of depth. And in a system designed for the surface, preserving depth is always a political act…
G.S.
Sources
- Tanizaki, Junichiro. In Praise of Shadows. Vintage Classics, 2001
- Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019
- European Data Protection Board. Annual Report 2023
- General Data Protection Regulation, EU 2016/679
- GDPR Enforcement Tracker, 2024
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Penguin, 1977
