Does a data-double vote? Political speech in a surveillance society
The following blog post from Brian Brock offers insight to the thinking behind his recent Surveillance & Society article, “Seeing through the Data Shadow: Communing with the Saints in a Surveillance Society.”
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The most powerful decision-makers in contemporary developed nations increasingly treat our data-doubles as the real democratic citizens. The citizen who matters is the citizen who purchases, who travels, who has a smartphone, who posts online and can be located 24 hours a day. What are the implications of seeing the “real” person through the lens of data-gathering technologies?
“Seeing through the data shadow” was my attempt to explore the moral and political implications of these developments. In several previous works I have examined the problematic implications of devaluing explicit political speech for democratic practice. It is easy to undermine the trust that is basic to political converse. To treat people’s purchase or travel patterns as more factual than what they say in their explicit political speech is one of the ways this is happening today.
What seems clear is that this gap between the political rhetoric of governing elites and the language of the masses is producing a growing range of problematic political repercussions. The systematic disenfranchisement of those who do not, or cannot, purchase with a credit card or live on their smartphone does not bode well for the stability and justice of western societies. Public discussions of surveillance rarely find a way to address this difficult problem in assuming the problem of surveillance is primarily a matter of finding ways to protect the privacy of citizens from the onslaught of routine neoliberal big-data surveillance.
What if we reposition the discussion by asking how changes in the ways we look at each other in modern democratic societies? A survey of different regimes of seeing that have characterized different historical epochs helpfully exposes how deeply ways of seeing others are shaped by our cultural context.
People once thought of all human beings in terms of virtue and vice, for instance. Competent or incompetent, tall or short, male or female — behind such traits every person was assumed to be fundamentally virtuous or immoral. Assumptions about virtue this facilitated people picking up subtle social cues and weaving them into a fine-grained picture of the “essence” of a person. I suspect we do much the same thing today. Instead of understanding people as the invisible meeting of their good and bad acts, however, for us people are imagined as the invisible meeting point of the traces they have left on sensors.
For Enlightenment thinkers, to know truly was to see everything. These are the historical roots of the way of viewing other human beings out of which our surveillance society has grown.
This shift in perspective ultimately raises theological questions. Modern westerners tend to picture God along monotheistic lines, as an all-seeing eye. Enlightenment thinkers explicitly incorporated this picture of knowledge into their aspiration for comprehensive knowledge. For Enlightenment thinkers, to know truly was to see everything. These are the historical roots of the way of viewing other human beings out of which our surveillance society has grown. From these roots grows the seemingly unstoppable drive for ever increasing visibility. In this article I propose a re-examination of this dream by recovering a more complex appreciation of the ways that this dream undermines trusting human community.
