The New Media of Surveillance

Shoshana Magnet,Kelly Gates

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317990383
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Civil Rights in Politics

The spread of new surveillance technologies is an issue of major concern for democratic societies. More ubiquitous and sophisticated monitoring techniques raise profound questions for the very possibility of individual autonomy and democratic government. Innovations in surveillance systems require equally innovative approaches for analyzing their social and political implications, and the field of critical communication studies is uniquely equipped to provide fresh insights. This book brings together the work of a number of critical communication scholars who take innovative approaches to examining the surveillance dimensions of new media technologies. The essays included in this volume focus on interactive networks, computer generated imagery, biometrics, and intelligent transport systems as sites where communication and surveillance have become virtually inseparable social processes.

This book was originally published as a special issue of The Communication Review.

Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure

MARK ANDREJEVIC

Recentralization

Pronouncing the untimely death of the desktop computer in an interactive era, Wired magazine claimed that, “computing is moving off your machine and into the cloud” (Tanz, 2007). Thanks to Wi-Fi and other forms of always-on connectivity, the article reported, users will no longer need to store their data or even their software applications on personal computers—rather these will be relegated to the ether and conveniently accessed via an increasing range of networked devices: laptops, mobile phones, PDA’s, and so on. Our portable storage devices will apparently multiply and then shrink to invisibility, as the information they store expands to fill the space through which we move. In the world of ubiquitous computing, we will dip into these invisible currents of information at will, connected by an electromagnetic umbilicus to an overarching matrix of information and communication. As the futurists at MIT put it, describing their ubiquitous computing initiative, “computation … will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe” (MIT Project Oxygen, 2004).

As William Gibson, famous for coining the term “cyberspace,” has observed, the usefulness of the image of the internet “cloud,” “lies in its vagueness, like cyberspace—a word which is also useful for its vagueness” (Holliday & Wieners, 1999). Apparently, one of the term’s current uses is to obscure the very concrete shifts in control over information associated with the recentralization of information and communication resources envisioned by the architects of the internet “cloud.” Consider, for example, the way in which this airy—or cloudy—rhetoric neatly elides the distinction between the “freedom” of the “oxygen we breathe” and that of electricity. Neither power nor batteries are “free” in the sense of being available to all without any consideration of the ability to pay or of access to economic resources. They both come with a charge, as it were, and so will mobile, ubiquitous, networked computing. The creation of ubiquitous “cloud” computing, which internet ideologist and conservative pundit George Gilder (2006) has described as the manifestation of a “newly recentralized computing architecture,” is less a spontaneous eruption of convenience than a business model based on separating users from information and communication resources in order to restructure the terms of access to these resources.

The world envisioned by “cloud” computing is one in which users will rely on privatized communication networks and data storage facilities to access and manage an array of goods and services, from personal documents and music files to online shopping and e-mail. It is presaged by applications like Gmail and Google documents, which provide users with large amounts of storage space on Google’s servers to store their personal documents and correspondence. In return for this convenience, Google reserves the right to mine its rapidly expanding databases for commercial purposes. If this business model is still in its infancy, one of its dominant emerging characteristics has become evident—a reliance on the interactive capability of networks to gather information about users. The terms of access to the “cloud” will include the capture and commodification of information about how, when, and where, we make use of its resources, a fact that renders the metaphor doubly misleading. The portrait of user activity made possible by ubiquitous interactivity will not be ephemeral, but increasingly detailed and fine-grained, thanks to an unprecedented ability to capture and store patterns of interaction, movement, transaction, and communication. Patterns of users’ Web browsing, for example, could be correlated with those of online shopping, communication, and, eventually, advertising exposure. The information clouds here are far from ephemeral, fleeting forms: their details are captured and fixed in a manner that envisions a mechanical and more prosaic version of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional Funes, “who remembered the shapes of the clouds in south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and … could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho” (Borges, 1999, p. 130).

To counter the misleading image of the internet cloud, this essay proposes the model of digital enclosure as a way of theorizing the forms of productivity and monitoring facilitated by ubiquitous interactivity. The model of enclosure traces the relationship between a material, spatial process—the construction of networked, interactive environments—and the private expropriation of information critiqued by Schiller (2007), Boyle (2003) and Lessig (2004). Monitoring, in this context, refers specifically to the collection of information, with or without the knowledge of users, that has actual or speculative economic value. Whereas the promise of universal interactivity is portrayed by the popularizers of the rhetoric of the “digital sublime” (Mosco, 2004) at places like MIT’s Media Lab and Wired magazine as a form of liberation—freedom from the fiber-optic fetters of the wired world—the model of digital enclosure suggests that ubiquitous interactivity also has the potential to facilitate unprecedented commodification of previously nonproprietary information and an aggressive clamp-down of centralized control over information resources.

Consider two examples of digital enclosures in action: Google’s proposed business model for equipping the city of San Francisco with free wireless internet access, and the use of the interactive capability of the internet to enforce increasingly restrictive intellectual property regimes. Google and Earthlink’s proposal for “free” Wi-Fi in San Francisco would be financed by the collection of information about the time-space paths of users who log on to their proprietary network. In addition to generating what Mosco (1989) calls “cybernetic commodities” (transactionally generated demographic information about user behavior), this information would allow Google to target users with so-called “contextual advertising”—ads based on their location throughout the course of the day. Google’s hope is that users will be more likely to click on ads for nearby commercial outlets: “It could be the difference between seeing an advertisement for Macy’s, if a user happens to be in Union Square, or a seafood restaurant if the user is near Fisherman’s Wharf” (Kopytoff, 2006, p. C1). Moreover, thanks to its myriad interactive applications, the potential exists for Google to supplement its customization algorithms with information gleaned from users’ search engine inquiries, their Gmail accounts, their map requests, and so on. Google has already filed a patent application that, as one account puts it, “involves a system in which targeted ads are served to wireless internet users based on the geographic location of the wireless access point (WAP), as well as the behavior and demographics of the WAP’s users, and other criteria” (Telecommunications Industry News, 2006). Behavior and demographics are, needless to say, umbrella terms wide enough to capture the expanding array of information about users that Google hopes to gather with its proliferating array of services. The creation of an interactive “enclosure”—in this case, one large enough to embrace the entire city of San Francisco—promises to be fantastically productive in terms of its ability to generate, capture, and store personal information. The proposed Wi-Fi network, combined with Google’s rapidly expanding data storage and sorting capabilities, makes it possible to gather and process information previously too costly to capture and to transform it into demographic inputs for the marketing process.¹

If proposed enclosures like Google’s Wi-Fi network facilitate information gathering, they also enable unprecedented levels of centralized data control. Consider the example of a friend of mine who stumbled across the limits imposed by interactivity when he tried to play a high-definition DVD he had purchased legally in the United States and then carried halfway around the world with him to Australia. When he attempted to play the high-definition version of the DVD (one of the bonus features) on his laptop computer—which he had also brought with him from the U.S., the region for which the DVD was coded—he was greeted with a pop-up box instructing him to register online. Upon doing so, and entering the code on the DVD case as instructed, he was informed that the movie would not play because he wasn’t in the appropriate region: the version he had purchased was to be played exclusively in the US. He did not have to enter his location when he logged on—the network had located him. By going online, he had entered a virtual enclosure that could pinpoint him in space and time in order to regulate his access to data that he had purchased perfectly legally thousands of miles away.

This type of control is made possible by the broadening reach of a digital enclosure that increasingly encompasses erstwhile “stand-alone” devices. If personal computers were once relatively self-contained, the architects of recentralization at places like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, envision a networked world in which the governing assumption will be that our machines are in constant contact with a broader network that can be used not just to access information, but to monitor its proper use. One apparent solution to the perceived threat posed by file-sharing to the movie and recording industry is not less interactivity, but more. When the devices we use to access content are networked, we may find not only that our consumption patterns can be digitally recorded, but that approved forms of access—such as the type of geographic limitations built into my friend’s DVD—can be enforced via computer code (Lessig, 1999) rather than reliance on the goodwill of consumers. When the video iPod goes wireless and interactive by enfolding itself within the embrace of an iTunes-controlled digital enclosure, the likelihood that users will be able to play illegally downloaded or shared movies will plummet. In the era of digital enclosure, information does not “want to be free,” it (and the “it” here fetishizes the imperatives of those who control the enclosure) wants to stand and be counted. It also wants to go forth and multiply by disclosing details about itself to those with the technology to monitor, record, store, and manage the resulting metadata. A networked iPod will be able to do more than block unlicensed content, it will also be able to keep track of every detail of users’ viewing preferences. Consumers will likely have only the vaguest idea of exactly how much information is being gathered about their listening habits and even less control over what Apple does with the proprietary information about individual behavior it has collected in the “privacy” of its digital enclosure.

This is not an argument about the invasive character of the technology per se. It is certainly possible to create networks that do not collect and store detailed information about users. Rather this is an argument about the forms of productive data gathering enabled by private ownership of and control over interactive enclosures, wired or wireless, that render an increasing array of spaces interactive. The model of enclosure highlights the ongoing importance of structures of ownership and control over productive resources in determining the role they play in what Schiller (2007) has described as “the struggle against continuing enclosures of non-proprietary information” (p. 56). The attempt to foreground questions of ownership counters the determinism of those who insist on the inherently empowering character of interactive networks and the revolutionary telos of the digital era. Such accounts run across the political spectrum from figures like Rupert Murdoch who, upon purchasing MySpace for a half billion dollars observed that, “Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control …” (Reiss, 2006) to mainstream liberals like political consultant Joe Trippi (“the technology is finally here to allow people to reject what they’re being given and demand what they want”) (Trippi, 2004, p. 235) to left-leaning academics and artists like Celia Pearce (“The digital age introduces a new form of international socialism”) (Pearce, 1997, p. 180). The rhetoric of “Third Wave,” cyber-euphoric futurism invokes the promise of a silicon revolution that painlessly eliminates the inequities attendant upon the concentration of control over wealth and productive resources by economic and political elites. The key to this hypothetical revolution is not the redistribution of control over material resources, but their supposed irrelevance in an emerging information economy. In the preamble to their “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” for example, futurists Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and Alvin Toffler (1996), blithely proclaim that “The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter” (p. 295). The implication of course, is that resource ownership no longer matters. This triumphant idealism persists in the popular media’s focus on the gee-whiz gimmickry of ubiquitous computing as well as in the hip radicalism of books like Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life after Capitalism (Bard & Söderqvist, 2002), which proclaims the coming irrelevance of property rights and “ownership of the means of production” (p. 255). Against these persistent remainders of the “digital sublime,” the model of digital enclosure seeks to explain why much still depends on who owns and controls the networks, who sets the terms of entry, and who gathers and sorts this information for what ends.

It is crucial, for the purposes of critiquing interactive surveillance practices and regimes of centralized control over information, to consider the physical and dynamic aspects of the notion of enclosure: to describe the construction of, for example, cellular wireless networks as expanding interactive overlays that endow the world around us with interactive capabilities. Such networks might be described as physical enclosures to the extent that they define a particular space and are able to both provide functionality and gather information within the confines of the geographically delimited area they cover. These enclosures are not exclusive—they can overlap with, contain, and be contained by other delimited spaces that facilitate information gathering and transmission. Rather than thinking in terms of unitary exclusive enclosures we can discern layers of enclosures, both virtual and physical, with varying spatial reaches and information scopes—cellular networks overlapping Google’s Wi-Fi networks, both of which embrace smart homes or offices equipped with radio-frequency indentification (RFID) systems and are in turn encompassed by GPS satellite systems.

These various enclosures facilitate vastly different types of information gathering and transmission. Whereas the enclosure or “cell” encompassed by a mobile phone network might be able to gather pings from and transmit carrier signals to handsets that pass in and out of range, Google may be able to track movements to a much higher degree of resolution and to correlate these with the content of search engine requests and e-mail correspondence. It is also worth noting that different types of enclosures operate with varying levels of symmetry and transparency: book shoppers who go on Amazon.com are able to view why particular recommendations are being made for them: the information-gathering process is relatively transparent to individual users. This is not always the case when, for example, cell phones are used to gather geographic data about users, or even when Amazon.com conducted an experiment in variable pricing, offering a DVD for a lower price to a user who had not logged on as a repeat customer than to a friend of his who had. In many cases—as when search engines gather information about our Web-surfing behavior—we are largely unaware of what information is being gathered, how, and for what purposes. Every now and then we are provided with a reminder of the monitoring capacity of interactivity—perhaps when we log on to the internet in a foreign country and get a different version of Google news, or find an advertisement related to the content of our e-mail messages on Gmail, and so on.

While futurists celebrate the potentially subversive, empowering, or revolutionary character of the internet, commercial entities are working hard to establish the conditions for what Paul Virilio (2005) has described as the contemporary incarnation of “the great Locking Up of the seventeenth century … this time, not on the scale of the asylums or prisons of the Ancient Regime, but on a scale encompassing the whole world” (p. 40). If the creation of enclosures such as those of the prison, the factory, and the asylum referenced by Virilio (following Foucault) facilitated the disciplinary monitoring of inmates and workers, that of the digital enclosure extends the monitoring gaze beyond such institutional walls to encompass spaces of leisure, consumption, domesticity, and perhaps all of these together. If this sounds a touch hyperbolic, consider the ambitious scope of one marketer’s prediction about the future of radio-frequency ID tagging—yet another type of interactive enclosure that allows objects to be tracked as they move through space: “Ultimately, we’ll be tagging every item in the universe” (Bond, 2003, p. A1). The fantasy of total interactivity, in other words, is also one of complete enclosure.

A Digital Enclosure Movement

Digital enclosures literalize the physical metaphor of what legal scholar James Boyle (2003) has described as a “second enclosure” movement devoted to the “enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind” (p. 37). In more concrete terms, this process of enclosure refers to a variety of strategies for privatizing, controlling, and commodifying information and intellectual property. As Yochai Benkler (2006) and Dan Schiller (2007) have argued, this process relies not just on expropriation of previously nonproprietary information, but on the construction of an increasingly restrictive legal regime for the enforcement and extension of property rights over a growing r...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Communicating surveillance: examining the intersections
• 1. Surveillance in the digital enclosure
• 2. Of ziploc bags and black holes: the aesthetics of transparency in the war on terror
• 3. Monstrous play in negative spaces: illegible bodies and the cultural construction of biometric technology
• 4. “War Rooms” of the street: surveillance practices in transportation control centers
• 5. Getting carded: border control and the politics of Canada’s permanent resident card
• 6. Therapeutics of the self: surveillance in the service of the thereaputic
• Afterword The socioalgorithmics of race: sorting it out in Jihad worlds
• Index