The needle and the damage done: Of haystacks and anxious panopticons

Abstract

How should we understand the surveillance state post Snowden? This paper is concerned with the relationship between increased surveillance capacity and state power. The paper begins by analysing two metaphors used in public post Snowden discourse to describe state surveillance practices: the haystack and the panopticon. It argues that these metaphors share a flawed common entailment regarding surveillance, knowledge and power which cannot accurately capture important aspects of state anxiety generated by mass surveillance in an age of big data. The paper shows that the nature of big data itself complicates the power attributed to mass surveillance states by these metaphors and those who use them. Relying heavily on Ezrahi's distinction between information and knowledge, the paper situates this argument concerning the state and anxiety borne of information overload in the context of literature that concerns the state and information management. Drawing primarily on James Scott's work on legibility, it argues that the big data born of mass surveillance problematises the concept of information as empowering the state. Instead, understanding mass surveillance in an age of big data requires understanding the relationship between the surveillance state and information in terms of anxiety as well as power.

Stream your brain! Speculative economy of the IoT and its pan-kinetic dataveillance

“…As an earlier application of the IoT’s tracking and counting everything approach, the zero-tolerance policy thus suggests how its opportunity cost, namely the disclosure of personal data, is compensatable not so much by actual preemptions of terrorist attacks, which have not been that effective (Logan, 2017), but by the resignation of the people who believe the needle is real and only secret networks of smart surveillance could greatly reduce waste, loss, and cost of their paranoid concerns. While this “state of exception precipitated by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 produced surveillance exceptionalism,” for the software companies like “Google and other rising surveillance capitalists” to whom data collection and analyses were outsourced in a way to guarantee their own “paranoid style” of “self-management regimes that imposed few limits on corporate practices,” the war on terror meant, on the other hand, the opportunity for “further enabling the new market to root and flourish” (Zuboff, 2019).…”