Built to lie: Investigating technologies of deception, surveillance, and control

This article explores technological systems that dissimulate by design. Examples include untrustworthy hotel and workplace thermostats, digital applications to spy on workers and family members, and commercial and law-enforcement systems that surreptitiously collect mobile phone data. Rather than view such cases as exceptional, I argue that deceptive communication systems are hidden articulations of normal technological orders. If deception in itself is not the primary problem with such systems, then transparency alone cannot be the solution. As troubling as institutional opacity might be, an analysis of deceptive systems reveals more fundamental problems: imbalances in power and widespread acquiescence to corporate and state efforts to control individuals, groups, and their data. By moving beyond a quest for (or belief in) technological veracity, scholars could redirect attention to power inequalities and the pressing question of how to live together ethically

Editorial: surveillance and inequality

Many domains of social life are being transfigured by new technologies of identification, monitoring, tracking, data analysis, and control. The lived experiences of people subjected to surveillance, however, can vary widely along lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, and nationality. This can be seen with the enforcement of different types of mobilities for different categories. Regardless of the domain, new surveillance systems often amplify existing social inequalities and reproduce regimes of control and/or exclusion of marginalized groups in societies

Somatic surveillance: corporeal control through information networks

Somatic surveillance is the increasingly invasive technological monitoring of and intervention into body functions. Within this type of surveillance regime, bodies are recast as nodes on vast information networks, enabling corporeal control through remote network commands, automated responses, or self-management practices. In this paper, we investigate three developments in somatic surveillance: nanotechnology systems for soldiers on the battlefield, commercial body-monitoring systems for health purposes, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) implants for identification of hospital patients. The argument is that in present and projected forms, somatic surveillance systems abstract bodies and physiological systems from social contexts, facilitating hyper-individualized control and the commodification of life functions

Surveillance as Governance: Social Inequality and the Pursuit of Democratic Surveillance

Monahan, T. 2010. Surveillance as Governance: Social Inequality and the Pursuit of Democratic Surveillance. In Surveillance and Democracy, edited by K.D. Haggerty and M. Samatas. New York: Routledge, 91-110

Algorithmic Fetishism

Surveillance-infused forms of algorithmic discrimination are beginning to capture public and scholarly attention. While this is an encouraging development, this editorial questions the parameters of this emerging discussion and cautions against algorithmic fetishism. I characterize algorithmic fetishism as the pleasurable pursuit of opening the black box, discovering the code hidden inside, exploring its beauty and flaws, and explicating its intricacies. It is a technophilic desire for arcane knowledge that can never be grasped completely, so it continually lures one forward into technical realms while deferring the point of intervention. The editorial concludes with a review of the articles in this open issue

Flexible Space & Built Pedagogy: Emerging IT Embodiments

This paper analyzes the convergence of information technology infrastructures and traditional educational spaces and proposes flexible criteria for material-virtual, hybrid learning environments. I develop the concept of built pedagogy to account for the ways that built environments teach values through their constraints upon social action and interaction and suggest ways that the built pedagogies of hybrid spaces can facilitate learning by inviting students and teachers to participate in the continual re-design of learning structures

Strategies for Obtaining Access to Secretive or Guarded Organizations

Establishing contacts and gaining permission to conduct ethnographic or qualitative research can be time-consuming and stressful processes. Gaining access can be especially challenging when representatives of prospective research sites see their work as being sensitive and would prefer to avoid outside scrutiny altogether. One result of this dynamic is that many organizations that exert a profound influence in governing populations and regulating individuals’ access to basic needs are relatively invisible to the public and shielded from meaningful public accountability. Therefore, it is vital to effectively study secretive or guarded organizations and fill out the empirical record, which in turn could create the conditions for greater public awareness and debate. To that end, this paper draws on our collective research experience and the scholarship of others to present nine strategies that we have found to be especially effective for securing access to secretive organizations

Introduction: Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary Endeavor

Introduction to Surveillance Studies: A Reader

‘I'm still a hustler’: entrepreneurial responses to precarity by participants in phase I clinical trials

This paper questions the implications of entrepreneurial responses to conditions of employment precarity by ‘healthy volunteers’ in phase I clinical trials in the United States. Such individuals are typically serial participants who often identify as professional volunteers and seek out drug studies as their primary source of income. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, this paper illustrates how healthy volunteers selectively import the identity of ‘hustler’ from the street environment and reposition it as connoting a set of valuable creative skills that give them a competitive edge over other participants. An entrepreneurial ethos allows them to view personal sacrifice and exposure to potentially dangerous drugs as smart investments leading to financially stable futures. These discursive moves normalize extractive, and at times dehumanizing, labour relations that offload expenses and risks to workers

The new American school: Preparation for post-industrial discipline

In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in US public schools. We argue that the contemporary mechanisms of control engendered by mass incarceration and post-industrialization have re-shaped school discipline. To illustrate contemporary discipline in the 'New American School,' we discuss the emergence of police officers and technological surveillance in schools. These two strategies of school social control facilitate the link between courts and schools, and expose students to both the salience of crime control in everyday life and to the demands of workers in a post-industrial world. By incorporating police officers and technological surveillance into the school safety regime, schools shape the experiences of students in ways that reflect modern relationships of dependency, inequality, and instability vis-à-vis the contemporary power dynamics of the post-industrialist labor market and the neoliberal state. Introduction In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in contemporary public schools. We focus on two developments that have risen concurrently in the United States-mass incarceration and post-industrialization-and theorize how these developments permeate public schools' disciplinary practices. Specifically, we argue that police officers and technological surveillance in schools articulate larger mechanisms of social control in post-industrial societies. By increasingly relying on police officers and surveillance technologies, schools socialize youth into relationships of dependency, inequality and instability vis-à-vis the contemporary power dynamics of the post-industrialist labor market and the neoliberal state. Our analysis of contemporary trends in school discipline draws upon prior research on the socializing function of schools. Almost a century ago, Joh