The what and why of surveillance microcosms
Surveillance
Like many others, my first thoughts about surveillance came from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; the dark vision of Big Brother watching was my introduction to dystopias and their need to control every aspect of our lives, which depends heavily on surveillance. Interestingly, Orwell left 85% of the population of Oceania outside the surveillance regime. The proles were controlled in a more Huxleyan way through cheap alcohol, pop music and sex. As most authoritarian states have shown us, this is not going to happen, even the uneducated, disinterested proles will be kept under careful watch.
The first uses of the concept of surveillance began during the French Revolution, where the Convention formed the provisional revolutionary government. To deal with external threats as well as internally with popular discontent, inadequate food distribution, inflation, legislative factionalism, and revolts, the administration formed two national committees: The Comité de Surveillance (Committee of Surveillance) and the Comité de Sûreté Générale (Committee of Public Safety). The Convention decreed that committees of surveillance should be formed in each commune of France and larger cities. These were charged with uncovering anyone suspected of being enemies or traitors to the nation.
From the beginning, the goal of surveillance is to find those who are not following the orthodoxy of the time.
Microcosms
Whatever the miasma touched on contact with the microcosm it tainted, and then spread itself steadily through the healthy living material ‘like the dyeing or staining of a cloth’. Virginia Smith (2007) Clean: a history of personal hygiene and purity p 98.
Most of our interest in surveillance is connected with the ability to practice it. Surveillance isn’t about monitoring or looking; it is a high form of bureaucracy requiring technologies and practices to be used to categorize, classify, and evaluate individuals and groups, often leading to discriminatory outcomes and reinforcing existing social hierarchies.
This also means that, for the most part, surveillance is carried out by powerful organizations over relatively powerless individuals. Early surveillance was the arm of the state. Later technology enabled similar work to be carried out by corporations. Now, when technology has ‘trickled down’ to individuals, surveillance is no longer about the powerful looking at the powerless.
A byproduct of surveillance capitalism has been the democratization of the powers of surveillance. Sophisticated surveillance systems are easily added to our existing communications infrastructures, and sometimes they are preinstalled in the devices we already own.
The plural makes this whole thing more interesting, doesn’t it? This work is not about a single microcosm, where we can see reflections of the larger world. The plural is intended to remind us all that we are constantly seeing and being seen in several overlapping microcosms.
What’s this all about?
This collection of texts is a study of the ways in which our easy access to the sophisticated tools of authoritarian bureaucracy will change the ways in which we see each other and the ways in which we choose to be seen.
I am writing this now as I have been working on (and hope to finish soon) a book of the same title. One of the difficulties I face with the book is choosing what to include and what to leave out. These texts will cover part of the book, but more importantly, will allow me to go down those fascinating rabbit holes that cannot be included in the final product. From the book draft:
The technology in focus here is the tools and knowledge available to the individual and how these tools create surveillance microcosms where we are the subject and object of our surveillance, where we are as invested in being seen as we are in looking. Therefore, this is a book about the subtle interplay between intimacy and surveillance. It is about seeing another, to know them, via techne, but also about being seen, and seeing oneself through techne. It is, as the Canadian poet Jhave Johnston suggested after hearing an early presentation, about the permeability, osmosis and connectivity of networks of interdependent beings.
Goals
The goal of this space is to share ideas and ideally get feedback. If that goal does not materialize, then the secondary goal is that I get to work on presenting ideas, and if nothing else, this is just me yelling my ideas to the void, and hopefully improving my grammar.
I hope to publish a text or two per week. But as with all experiments, this is the intention, and we shall see where we end up.