Week 10; Marisol Vasquez Core Response 4 / 5

    Disclaimer: For the readings this week, I realized I miscalculated the page numbers and accidentally read the entirety of the recommended reading entitled Obfuscation and I also read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters (also I will have the other readings certainly finished before class on Thursday). Despite my fluke, I thought these offered interesting contrasts to one another since they both consider surveillance and counterstrategies of surveillance. However, Browne’s work Dark Matters might offer a rich comparative point to Obfuscation. Both works center surveillance yet how each author problematizes surveillance diverges quite drastically, with the rather obvious difference is that Browne’s mobilization of racializing surveillance considers race and different surveillance and countersurveillance strategies imposed and refused by Blackness.

    In regard to Brunton and Nisenbaum’s Obfuscation typically centers its concern on privacy, including information and data. The authors outline the problem with surveillance and privacy in chapter three when considering asymmetrical power relationships (49). According to the authors, asymmetrical power relationships occur through processes of information collection. What’s at stake in these relationships, is the question of choice—that choice is rarely there “as to whether or not we are monitored, what is done with any information that is gathered, or what is done to us on the basis of conclusions drawn from that information” (49). Chapter also proposes another problem in these asymmetrical relationships through “informational of epistemic asymmetry” (50). Laced within an informational or epistemic asymmetry is the potentiality of total surveillance. As the authors suggest “We produce enormous volumes of data everyday. Those data stay around indefinitely, and the technology that can correlate them and analyze them keeps improving.” In other words, the authors raise the question of what happens to these enormous collections of data once confronting emergent technologies. Uncertainty looms, as they suggest: “we don’t know what near-future algorithms, techniques, hardware, and databases will be able to do with our data (50). Surveillance itself, however, situates as the implicit rather than foremost concern in the author’s critique of power asymmetries. Instead, asymmetrical power relationships mostly involve the question of information gathering and the choice in how that information / data is used, for either forms of civic life or the prospects of new technologies. To question choice, and the loss of choice itself, I think is the kind of implicit racial bias that Browne hopes to dismantle by an explicit consideration of how black bodies have been surveilled either through the pleasure derived from domination and violence or through the eighteenth-century lantern laws she refers to as “black luminosity.” Not every body of difference has ever had control, agency, or choice over how they may be surveilled.  

    Therefore, to offer up a consideration of Brown’s conception of surveillance, rather than taking ‘surveillance’ and ‘surveillance studies’ at face value, Browne constructs a thorough discursive backdrop of surveillance studies to ultimately argue for its occlusion of race, and in particular, of blackness. Through blackness, constitutes “racializing surveillance” (8). According to Browne, the combination of blackness and surveillance studies insist that “when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race, and where the outcome of this is often discriminatory and violent treatment” (8). Browne points to the significance of her intervention as “the surveillance of blackness as often unperceivable within the study of surveillance, all the white blackness being that nonnameable matter that matters the racialized disciplinary society” (9). Browne’s insertion of race and difference into surveillance studies brushes up against one of the major problems that I also encounter with much about these theoretical considerations of ‘theories of the digital,’ namely the occlusion of race itself. I find this occlusion surfacing in the discussion within Obfuscation, not only through the rather divergent stakes of surveillance studies—whether information or race—but also through how the authors of Obfuscation quite literally try to weaponize their rhetoric and reframe issues of obfuscation against surveillance as a warring effort. For example, the authors constantly use the word “enemy,” etc. In Brown’s Dark Matters, the question of counterstrategies of surveillance often have to be double coded and fly under the radar for the purpose of survival and escape (Browne 21). 

    This question of counterstrategies leads me to my next point revolving around surveillance. In Obfuscation, the authors define it as “the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection” (1). Although this book parses through many forms and strategies of obfuscation—and one in particular that I appreciated was the spider and its web—as a counter-surveillance strategy it is largely concerned with the problem of privacy. More significantly, however, this question of privacy for the authors also involves the loss of privacy, as if there was something that had to be forfeited in the first place. Browne, on the other hand, refers to the countersurveillance strategy in Dark Matters as “dark sousveillance” (12). According to Browne, “dark sousveillance” is “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight” (21). Thus, dark sousveillance is a site of critique “of contending with antiblack surveillance or lantern laws” to “facilitate survival and escape” (21). I believe one of the ultimate issues and questions that Browne’s intervention into surveillance studies, brought to the fore through its differentiation from Obfuscation, postulates the fact that the question of loss of privacy is one rooted in Western liberal ideology, one that belongs to Man as possessive individual. In other words, the obfuscation as a counter strategy is concerned with leveraging control—by 'defeating a warring side'—to return the concerns of privacy, information, and data to the individual. This question of individualism and of returning one's property and ownership underneath their own helm once again refers to a dominant intimacy rooted in Western individualism.