Pratik Core Post #3

 

The concept of agency and autonomy is something we should discuss more, especially in relation to surveillance and how much choice we have in giving up our data. Often times around discourses of surveillance, there is a belief that we can just simply not engage with a product or service to circumvent our data being extracted. Additionally, even those that are aware that their personal data is being harvested in the most intimate and private ways often believe that they have nothing to hide, therefore they are somehow immune to the harms of these practices. This third-person effect phenomenon fails to understand the social, political, and cultural contexts in which a lot of these technological mechanisms exist. For example, it is essentially impossible to exist without having certain social media profiles. Even those who might argue this point, have a LinkedIn account boasting of their academic and professional accomplishments because they want to look suitable to the employers' gaze. Vaidyanathan's chapter alludes to the "tradeoffs" between privacy and convenience, which is such a fascinating space of contention. Ultimately, It is extremely difficult for people to give up access, ease, and utility, and these companies are well aware of that and capitalizing off of it. 

I am always a big fan of reading Andrejevic, his texts always push me to think deeper and differently about surveillance and this piece did just that. In this piece where he dives into surveillance as a use to "predict" and "prevent" acts of violence, we are reminded of the violent interventions that go hand in hand with the phenomenon of predictive policing. The process that is designed to negate violence is thus equally if not more violent. Another really fascinating paradox pointed out was how preemptive practices are framed around discourses of doing nothing, implying that not authorizing a drone strike would be the equivalent of complacency. A similar logic is used by law enforcement when they are not sure if someone is armed or not, there is an assumption that the default is a threat unless proven otherwise. Andrejevic says it well, "This is not about prevention in the sense of transforming the conditions that contribute to theft or fighting; it is about being in the right place to stop an imminent act before it takes place. " (p. 883).

Browne pushes us to think about how race is constructed and reconstructed when it comes to surveillance and violence. Resisting against scholars who may imply "surveillance as something inaugurated by new technologies," Browne believes that surveillance is and has been ongoing and that is imperative to how "racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order" (p. 8).

In the introduction of the book, Browne cites an example of racializing surveillance in a simple yet extraordinary way. “Street behaviors of white men (standing still and talking, using a cellular phone, passing an unseen object from one to another) may be coded as normal and thus granted no attention, whereas the same activity performed by Black men will be coded as lying on or beyond the boundary of the normal, and thus subject to disciplinary action. Where public spaces are shaped for and by whiteness, some acts in public are abnormalized by way of racializing surveillance and then coded for disciplinary measures that are punitive in their effects. " (p. 17). This forces us to also think about who are the publics and who defines and dictates acceptable behaviors in public spaces.

In terms of platforms, Gaboury emphasizes the point that the data we give to companies is extremely valuable for them. I like the term, "Compulsory Identification" used in the text. While gender is a significant form of expression to many, it is also a construct that many may not feel aligns with themselves or part of who they are. Nonetheless, Google, Facebook, etc. need a way to measure you, categorize you, and repackage your advertising preferences and behaviors so that you are an ideal consumer subject. The politics of gender are significant, but to platforms, wouldn't gender, age, race, geography, and language, all be simply a data point for targeting and nothing more? As Gaboury references, previous literature has marked queerness as value-less, and undesirable under capitalism, but one could argue now that advertisers could potentially thrive off data points regarding the resistance to hegemonic forms heteronormativity and masculinity as extremely valuable. Gaboury suitably remarkes, "Queerness here is marked by its illegibility to the social order; indeed this is its very value."