Ten Theses on Surveillance

As often happens among technology enthusiasts, there has been a flare-up of discussion about the politics of surveillance on one of the talk-fora I participate on regularly.

The terms of this discussion seem to me to drift into pretty well-worn grooves these days, defined roughly by the positions of "cypherpunks" like Tim May on one end, and advocates for "transparency" like David Brin on the other.

Maybe this says more about the salons I hang out in than about the actual issues at hand, but it seems to me that most of the positions taken up within the discursive universe defined by these poles make assumptions (a certain level of technological determinism, for example, as well as a reductive understanding of politics inspired by market libertartianism) that undermine the capacity of the participants to really get at many of the stakes and problems in play in the emerging politics of surveillance.

Anyway, somebody made the comment: "In the future, suveillance will be voluntary. People will pay to watch and pay to be watched." And, true to form, I took this innocuous comment as the prompt for a sprawling and probably misdirected response of my own. My only defense is that this is the topic of my dissertation, and I am a bit preoccupied with these issues at the moment, and so I hope I can be forgiven for going off occasionally somewhat half-cocked.

But, come what may, it seemed to me the ten theses inspired by that comment might have a more general interest and so I figured they might as well find their way to the blog:

First of all, be careful about treating the sentence "People will pay for x" as a synonym for "x is voluntary." Freedom is more than selecting options provided by the powerful for the delight and edification of the rest of us. (This is probably not what you meant, but it is a problem these formulations are prey to.) It is more likely that the techniques of surveillance that become customary in the next few years, for good or ill, will in fact define much of what comes to be taken and experienced and defended as "voluntary" in the first place.

Second, "surveillance" is too sweeping and complex in its impacts and development to ever deserve the straightforward whole-cloth application of a label like "voluntary" or "coercive." Some applications of surveillance techniques will facilitate domination, some will express consent.

Third, it is key to shift the discussion of surveillance away from technological determinist frameworks where we pretend that there is something inherent in the technologies themselves from which either inevitably dangerous or inevitably promising outcomes will unfold. It is not technology but prosthetic practices that are liberating or coercive, here as always.

Fourth, what we call "privacy" has always been unstable in its characteristics, and deeply responsive to technological development. (Warren and Brandeis's canonical "Right to Privacy" was a response to networked journalism and high-speed photography, and the category of privacy has been primary in the legal and cultural discourse through which democracies have grappled with the ongoing development of reproductive technologies, and now digital/biometric surveillance, for example.) Technology is not threatening privacy, so much as changing it. This is not new. This has always been the story of privacy. Still, it is also always right to worry whether particular changes afoot are welcome or not.

Fifth, the problem is not that we are exposed to greater and more exhaustive scrutiny, but that we are vulnerable to the uses to which such information can be put. It is not the availability of personal information that is threatening, but the capacity of power to impose definitive interpretations of information on us to facilitate our exploitation and domination.

Sixth, at the heart of David Brin's notion of "transparency" would seem to be the idea that there is a single stable truth of the matter to be exposed by ubiquitous surveillance which will protect the innocent from the depredations of the powerful. I believe that the world is susceptible to multiple pragmatically powerful descriptions, and that when surveillance power is asymmetrical (as it is now, conspicuously, and shows no signs at all of shifting away from) those descriptions will prevail primarily which maintain and consolidate established concentrations of power, whatever suffering this causes or justifies otherwise.

Seventh, these worries should not inspire us to repudiate new technologies but to insist on uses of technology that will be emancipatory. This means we must shift the focus of surveillance techniques onto authority itself, rather than acquiescing to the ongoing intensification of surveillance by authorities over the relatively less powerful.

Eighth, my libertarian friends -- whether of the market, socialist, green, or civil varieties -- who are still hypnotized by eighteenth century characterizations of power best embodied by absolutist sovereigns, would do well to study Michel Foucault as soon as possible. Foucault proposed, among other things, that the "coercive" application of power has become more diffuse, institutionally multi-lateral, and involves multiple micro-intense interventions into conduct to produce desired outcomes in a way that is at once more efficient as well as experienced by its objects (subjects) as less onerous. Dazzled by fantasies of Big Brother, too many lovers of freedom are distracted away from the actual workings of power, and the actual institutional locations from which domination is exercised, to the real cost of freedom. Foucault's word for these diffuse coercive mechanisms? "Surveillance."

Ninth, the focus of privacy activism, then, must be (1) to strengthen civil liberties which would protect us from the pernicious misuse of information gathered and deployed by the powerful to dominate others (for example, if gay people were not earmarked for special discrimination in most societies it would matter considerably less that information about homosexual conduct can be ever more easily exposed and published to the world), and (2) to challenge (within reason!) the veils of official secrecy through which powerful institutions maintain their asymmetrical power to impose interpretations over information (primarily through the logic of "security" and the "reason of state" -- or the corporate logic of intellectual property and proprietary information).

Tenth, we must at all costs resist the usual disavowal of politics through a focus on technical questions. This means we must reject out of hand the technophobic response of those whose fears about the dangerous misuse of technology will prompt them to repudiate the technologies themselves. Such a response will squander the energies of dedicated defenders of freedom on a hopeless cause. Technologies cannot be disinvented, and so activism must ensure instead that through reasonable regulation their uses and distribution are progressive. But we must reject with equal fervor the technophilic response of those who expect or desire that technological development will hurdle us past intractable political quandaries, rather than simply express them in new forms. Radical and progressive technology advocates cannot afford to make the mistakes of irrational exuberance that characterized the technophilia of "cyberspace," "cypherpunk," or "virtuality" enthusiasms of recent memory. Technology expresses political interests, it does not bypass them. Technological development is a space of social struggle, not the steady accumulation of objects in a toy-pile. When Aristotle defined human beings as "political animals" this was the first recognition that humanity is definitively cyborg. Technology will never deliver us from the contestatory, collaborative, conversational field of politics. Politics is who we are.

Now, get to it.