SURVEILLANCE AS INFRASTRUCTURE
Matt Shafer // New Haven
A constitutive feature of the stable social environment
How do you keep a disease from spreading? In an early April tweet, a former commissioner of the American Food and Drug Administration put it straightforwardly: in mitigation and monitoring efforts, “the goal is widespread surveillance and containment of active infection so we don’t have to live with constant epidemics.” (1) In recent years, “surveillance” has typically been a term of opprobrium, regarded as the name of a social and political danger to be contained and restricted even where its use is necessary or justified. Now, suddenly, that connotative sense is shifting. In the fight against the new coronavirus, the language of “surveillance” increasingly functions in a value-neutral way, as a descriptive rather than evaluative concept, signifying not so much an oppressive tactic of governance or control as a basic, constitutive feature of the stable social environment. With social distancing comes contact tracing; with lockdown and quarantine comes the patrol of public space. Facial recognition finds new purpose in the monitoring of movement outdoors; (2) mobile location data reveal new hotspots and disclose the vectors between them. (3)
This discursive shift on surveillance hasn’t unfolded without critique. Activists and scholars are of course justified in questioning the implications of how pandemic monitoring is implemented (4)—not only as it is practiced during the catastrophe itself, but also and especially in relation to how the breakdown of old assumptions about privacy and public health will reshape the apparatus of governance after the pandemic is contained. (5) Yet missing, all too often, from the critical perspectives on epidemiological surveillance (as with those on policing surveillance and national-security surveillance) is any real reckoning with the fact that what we can only too easily categorize and condemn as “surveillance technology” is not simply a mechanism of social control but something that has become so deeply entwined with the social contract that it may not be desirable, or even possible, to break the two apart.
Like all conditions of crisis and emergency, the present pandemic has the uneasy virtue of confronting us with what, in the everyday, we would otherwise prefer to ignore: “surveillance technology” is today directly constitutive of our social spaces, not merely an external exercise of power over them. This imbrication of surveillance and sociality has been fundamental to modern network technology since its inception in the internet precursor the ARPANET. (6) It remains still the inexorable precondition of all our digital rhythms, from the phone calls that reveal our location as we check in with our friends to the social media patterns that allow our next purchase to be predicted before we know it ourselves. The same tools and practices and policies that make it possible for governments to monitor our movements (for purposes nefarious or benevolent) or for corporations to model our behavior (whether for useful optimization or for exploitative monetization) are also the very means by which we construct our relations with each other. Technologies of proximity are always also technologies of knowability; techniques of interconnection are, inherently and not incidentally, mechanisms of observation.
It’s become something of a cliché to compare the so-called Information Revolution with the Industrial Revolution—to say that the rise of computers and of network technology radically transformed the twentieth century in ways analogous to how the rise of mechanized production and of the factory transformed the nineteenth. But in the long view, this seemingly grand assessment may prove rather too cautious, too conservative. The invention of the internet is less like the invention of the factory than it is like the invention of the city. For like the city, networked life constitutes something perhaps more fundamental even than a change in the structure of economic production: it transforms the nature of proximity itself. The rise of network computing technology has irrevocably transformed the structure of social space. It should not therefore be a surprise that proliferating as endlessly amidst the pandemic as the polemics on surveillance have been the think pieces on the surprising delights of sociability moved even more fully online: because of the lockdown, old friendships are rediscovered via Zoom and HouseParty and FaceTime; new forms of connection rush to stave off the difficulties of isolation.
Just as the city developed as a technology of proximity, so too did it develop as a surveillance technology—life in the close quarters of urban space puts everything rather differently in view. The logic of the city configures the meaning of privacy and knowability, of openness and anonymity, into particular, historically specific forms. The rise of networked society does the same, and for the same reasons: proximity works differently in the Information Age, and all the correlative concepts that depend on a stable notion of proximity for their own internal coherence—privacy, visibility, anonymity, and even “public health”—are likewise in the midst of profound transformation.
As the world “reopens” in the coming weeks and months, the shape of public space—both physical and virtual—will continue to change, as practices of epidemiological monitoring and social interconnection adapt to circumstances we still cannot fully predict. The coronavirus crisis is already altering our awareness of, and relationship to, the mechanisms by which the information generated in our everyday activities provides the raw material for the technological organization of society. In confronting the developments that are still to come, we will need new ways of understanding the very terms in which we interpret the material structure of daily life, for we can no longer maintain the illusion of any clean distinction between the architecture of “bad surveillance” and that of “good interconnection.” The global response to the pandemic makes this clearer than it ever was before. “Surveillance” is an inept name for what is better understood as a new kind of infrastructure.
Notes:
1) Scott Gottlieb, Twitter post, April 7, 2020, 10:11 AM, https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1247527412641878021.
2) Patrick Reevell, “How Russia is Using Facial Recognition to Police its Coronavirus Lockdown,” ABC News, April 30, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/russia-facial-recognition-police-coronavirus-lockdown/story?id=70299736.
3) Nuria Oliver et. al, “Mobile Phone Data for Informing Public Health Actions Across the COVID-19 Pandemic Life Cycle,” Science Advances 6, no. 23 (2020): accessed June 10, 2020, https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/27/sciadv.abc0764.
4) For example, Edward Snowden questioned government responses to the virus in an interview with Vice, while political theorist Danielle Allen reflected on the surveillance implications for public health monitoring in an OpEd for the Washington Post. Trone Dowd, “Snowden Warns Governments are Using Coronavirus to Build the Architecture of Oppression,” Vice News, April 9, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvge5q/snowden-warns-governments-are-using-coronavirus-to-build-the-architecture-of-oppression; Danielle Allen, “We Need Tech and Government Help with Contact Tracing. That Doesn’t Have to Mean Big Brother,” Washington Post, April 3, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/03/we-need-tech-government-help-with-contact-tracing-that-doesnt-have-mean-big-brother/.
5) “Growth in Surveillance May be Hard to Scale Back After Coronavirus, Pandemic Experts Say,” Guardian, April 14, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/growth-in-surveillance-may-be-hard-to-scale-back-after-coronavirus-pandemic-experts-say.
6) See, for example, the journalist Yasha Levine’s densely researched book on the military origins of the Internet in US counterinsurgency projects. Surveillance Valley (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/yasha-levine/surveillance-valley/9781610398039/.
Bio:
Matt Shafer (PhD, political theory, Yale University) studies the politics of language and the language of politics in contemporary technological capitalism.