After the 2016 Brexit referendum, British fiction has increasingly engaged with themes of populism, digital surveillance, and social fragmentation. Sam Byers’ dystopian satire Perfidious Albion (2018) offers a particularly prescient critique of how technology mediates power and alienation in contemporary society. This study examines how Byers represents technologies of alienation and social degradation in the novel, arguing that power no longer operates through overt force but through invisible, internalised mechanisms of selfcontrol. Drawing on ByungChul Han’s theory of psychopolitics – specifically his concepts of autoexploitation, smart power, the digital panopticon, the expulsion of the other, and the burnout society – the research employs a qualitative, interpretive methodology based on close reading of key scenes involving the Griefers, Jess Ellis, Robert Townsend, Hugo Bennington, Alfred Darkin, and the Green corporation. The analysis demonstrates that Byers depicts a neoliberal regime in which citizens voluntarily expose themselves to surveillance, internalise demands for perpetual selfoptimisation, and experience deep isolation as a systemic outcome rather than an accidental byproduct. The novel’s formal features – binary chapter numbering and the concluding “Error 404” page – reinforce the closed, inescapable nature of this digital panopticon. By integrating Han’s psychopolitics into the analysis of Perfidious Albion, this study fills a significant gap in existing Brexit fiction scholarship, which has largely overlooked the novel’s technological dimensions of control. The findings suggest that Byers’ work is not only a sharp satire of populist politics but also a timely warning about the psychopolitical conditions of twentyfirstcentury digital life. Keywords: Brexit, psychopolitics, digital panopticon, alienation, social degradation.
