Liquid Surveillance

A Conversation

Zygmunt Bauman, David Lyon

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745662831, 9780745662824
• eBook ISBN: 9780745664026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Today the smallest details of our daily lives are tracked and traced more closely than ever before, and those who are monitored often cooperate willingly with the monitors. From London and New York to New Delhi, Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro, video cameras are a familiar and accepted sight in public places. Air travel now commonly involves devices such as body-scanners and biometric checks that have proliferated in the wake of 9/11. And every day Google and credit-card issuers note the details of our habits, concerns and preferences, quietly prompting customized marketing strategies with our active, all too often zealous cooperation.

In today's liquid modern world, the paths of daily life are mobile and flexible. Crossing national borders is a commonplace activity and immersion in social media increasingly ubiquitous. Today's citizens, workers, consumers and travellers are always on the move but often lacking certainty and lasting bonds. But in this world where spaces may not be fixed and time is boundless, our perpetual motion does not go unnoticed. Surveillance spreads in hitherto unimaginable ways, responding to and reproducing the slippery nature of modern life, seeping into areas where it once had only marginal sway.

In this book the surveillance analysis of David Lyon meets the liquid modern world so insightfully dissected by Zygmunt Bauman.  Is a dismal future of moment-by-moment monitoring closing in, or are there still spaces of freedom and hope? How do we realize our responsibility for the human beings before us, often lost in discussions of data and categorization? Dealing with questions of power, technology and morality, this book is a brilliant analysis of what it means to be watched – and watching – today.

1

Drones and social media

David Lyon With those introductory comments about liquid surveillance in mind, the first question I’d like us to explore is this: In what you call a liquid modern world, surveillance morphs into some significant new forms, of which drones and social media offer fine examples, as you noted in a blog post recently. Each produces personal information for processing, but in different ways. Are these media complementary, such that the blithe use of one (social media) naturalizes us to the more unwitting extraction of personal data in another field by means of miniaturizing drones? And what do these new developments mean for our anonymity and relative invisibility in the everyday world?

Zygmunt Bauman I guess the little piece which you mention, published a few months ago in a blog post on the Social Europe website, would be a good point to start; I hope you’ll forgive my quoting it at length. In that essay I juxtaposed two apparently unconnected items of news that appeared on the same day, 19 June 2011 – though neither of them made headlines and readers could be forgiven for overlooking one of them or both. Like any news, the two items were carried in by the daily ‘information tsunami’: just two tiny drops in a flood of news ostensibly meant and hoped to do the job of enlightening and clarifying, while serving to obscure the vision and befuddle the looking …

One item of news, authored by Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker,¹⁹ told of the spectacular rise in the number of drones reduced to the size of a dragonfly, or of a hummingbird comfortably perching on windowsills; both designed, in the juicy expression of Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, ‘to hide in plain sight’. The second, penned by Brian Stelter, proclaimed the internet to be ‘the place where anonymity dies’.²⁰ The two messages spoke in unison, they both augured and portended the end of invisibility and autonomy, the two defining attributes of privacy – even though each of the two items was composed independently of the other and without awareness of the other’s existence.

The unmanned drones, performing the spying and striking tasks for which the Predators have become notorious (‘More than 1,900 insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas have been killed by American drones since 2006’), are about to be shrunk to the size of birds, but preferably insects (the flapping of insects’ wings is ostensibly much easier to imitate technologically than the movements of birds’ wings and, according to Major Michael L. Anderson, a doctoral student in advanced navigation technology, the exquisite aerodynamic skills of the hawk moth, an insect known for its hovering skills, have been selected as a target of the present designing flurry – not yet attained, but certain to be reached soon – because of its potential to leave far behind anything ‘our clumsy aircraft can do’).

The new generation of drones will stay invisible while making everything else accessible to be viewed; they will stay immune while rendering everything else vulnerable. In the words of Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, those drones will usher wars into the ‘post-heroic age’; but they will also, according to other ‘military ethicists’, widen still further the already vast ‘disconnect between the American public and its war’; they will perform, in other words, another leap (the second after the replacement of the conscript by a professional army) towards making the war itself all but invisible to the nation in whose name the war is waged (no native lives will be at risk) and so that much easier – indeed so much more tempting – to conduct, thanks to the almost complete absence of collateral damage and political costs.

The next-generation drones will see all while staying comfortably invisible – literally as well as metaphorically. There will be no shelter from being spied on – for anyone. Even the technicians who send drones into action will renounce control over their movements and so become unable, however strongly pressed, to exempt any object from the chance of falling under surveillance: the ‘new and improved’ drones will be programmed to fly on their own, following itineraries of their own choice at times of their own choice. The sky is the limit for the information they will supply once they are put into operation in the numbers planned.

This is, as a matter of fact, the aspect of the new spying and surveilling technology, armed as it is with the capacity to act at a distance and autonomously, that most worries its designers, and as a result the two news writers reporting their preoccupations: ‘a tsunami of data’, which is already overwhelming the staff at Air Force headquarters and threatening to outrun their powers to digest and absorb it, and thus also to run out of their (or anybody else’s) control. Since 9/11, the number of hours needed by Air Force employees in order to recycle the intelligence supplied by the drones went up by 3,100 per cent – and each day 1,500 more hours of videos are added to the volume of information clamouring to be processed. Once the limited ‘soda straw’ view of drone sensors is replaced with a ‘Gorgon stare’ able to embrace a whole city in one go (an imminent development), 2,000 analysts will be required to cope with the feeds of just one drone, instead of the nineteen analysts doing the job today. But that only means, let me comment, that fishing out an ‘interesting’, ‘relevant’ object from the bottomless container of ‘data’ will take some hard work and cost rather a lot of money; not that any of the potentially interesting objects could insure themselves against being swept into that container in the first place. No one will ever know for sure whether or when a hummingbird might land on his or her windowsill.

As for the ‘death of anonymity’ courtesy of the internet, the story is slightly different: we submit our rights to privacy for slaughter of our own will. Or perhaps we just consent to the loss of privacy as a reasonable price for the wonders offered in exchange. Or the pressure to deliver our personal autonomy to the slaughterhouse is so overwhelming, so close to the condition of a flock of sheep, that only a few exceptionally rebellious, bold, pugnacious and resolute wills are prepared to make an earnest attempt to withstand it. One way or another, however, we are offered, at least nominally, a choice, as well as at least a semblance of a two-way contract, and at least a formal right to protest and sue in the event it is breached: something never granted in the case of drones.

All the same, once we are in, we stay hostages to fate. As Brian Stelter observes, ‘the collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not’. It took Rich Lam, a freelance photographer taking pictures of street riots in Vancouver, just one day to trace and identify a couple caught on one of his photos (by accident) passionately kissing. Everything private is now done, potentially, in public – and is potentially available for public consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet ‘can’t be made to forget’ anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. ‘This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private.’ All those technical gadgets are, we are told, ‘user friendly’ – though that favourite phrase of commercial copy means, under closer scrutiny, a product that is incomplete without the user’s labour, along the lines of IKEA furniture. And, let me add, without users’ enthusiastic devotion and deafening applause. A contemporary Étienne de la Boétie would probably be tempted to speak not of a voluntary, but a DIY servitude …

What conclusion can be drawn from that meeting between the drone operators and the Facebook accounts operators? Between the two kinds of operators acting apparently at cross-purposes and activated by ostensibly opposite motives, yet nonetheless cooperating closely, willingly and highly effectively in bringing about, sustaining and expanding what you have, so felicitously, dubbed ‘social sorting’? I believe that the most remarkable feature of the contemporary edition of surveillance is that it has somehow managed to force and cajole oppositions to work in unison, and to make them work in concert in the service of the same reality. On the one hand, the old panoptical stratagem (‘you should never know when you are being watched in the flesh and so never be unwatched in your mind’) is being gradually yet consistently and apparently unstoppably brought to well-nigh universal implementation. On the other, with the old panoptical nightmare (‘I am never on my own’) now recast into the hope of ‘never again being alone’ (abandoned, ignored and neglected, blackballed and excluded), the fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed.

The two developments, and above all their reconciliation and cooperation in promoting the same task, were of course made possible by exclusion being substituted for incarceration and confinement in the role of the most awesome threat to existential security and the major source of anxiety. The condition of being watched and seen has thereby been reclassified from a menace into a temptation. The promise of enhanced visibility, the prospect of ‘being in the open’ for everybody to see and everybody to notice, chimes well with the most avidly sought proof of social recognition, and therefore of valued – ‘meaningful’ – existence. Having one’s own complete being, warts and all, registered in publicly accessible records seems to be the best prophylactic antidote against the toxicity of exclusion – as well as a potent way to keep the threat of eviction away; indeed, it is a temptation few practitioners of admittedly precarious social existence will feel strong enough to resist. I guess that the story of the recent phenomenal success of ‘social websites’ is a good illustration of the trend.

Indeed, the twenty-year-old Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg must have stumbled on some kind of a goldmine, in inventing (some people say stealing)²¹ the Facebook idea – and launching it, for the exclusive use of Harvard students, on the internet in February 2004. That much is pretty obvious. But what was that gold-like ore that lucky Mark discovered and goes on mining with fabulous, and still steadily rising, profits?

On the official Facebook site you can find the following description of the benefits credited with tempting, attracting and seducing all those half-billion people to spend a good deal of their waking time on Facebook’s virtual expanses:

Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest groups and ‘like pages’ (formerly called ‘fan pages’, until April 19, 2010), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising.

In other words, what the legions of ‘active users’ enthusiastically embraced when they joined the ranks of Facebook ‘active users’ was the prospect of two things they must have been dreaming of, yet without knowing where to seek or find them, before (and until) Mark Zuckerberg’s offer to his fellow students in Harvard appeared on the internet. First, they must have felt too lonely for comfort, but found it too difficult for one reason or another to escape their loneliness with the means at their disposal. Second, they must have felt painfully neglected, unnoticed, ignored and otherwise shuttled on to a side-track, exiled and excluded, but once again found it difficult, nay impossible, to lift themselves out of their hateful anonymity with the means at their disposal. For both tasks, Zuckerberg offered the means they had hitherto found terribly missing and sought for in vain; and they jumped at the opportunity. They must have been ready to jump, feet already in the starting blocks, muscles tensed, ears pricked for the starter’s shot.

As Josh Rose, the digital creative director of ad agency Deutsch LA, has recently observed, ‘The Internet doesn’t steal our humanity, it reflects it. The Internet doesn’t get inside us, it shows what’s inside us.’²² How right he is. Never blame the messenger for what you found to be bad in the message he delivered, but do not praise him either for what you found to be good … It depends, after all, on the recipients’ own likings and animosities, dreams and nightmares, hopes and apprehensions, whether they’d rejoice or despair at the message. What applies to messages and messengers applies in certain ways to the things the internet offers and its ‘messengers’ – the people who display them on our screens and bring them to our attention. In this case, it is the uses that we – Facebook’s ‘active users’, all half-billion of us – make of those offers that render them, and their impact on our lives, good or bad, beneficial or harmful. It all depends on what we are after; technical gadgets just make our longings more or less realistic and our search faster or slower, more or less effective.

DL Yes, I too appreciate the emphasis on what the use of the internet and social media reveals about our social relationships, not least because this gives us clues about what is changing. Questions of ‘privacy’, for instance, are in flux and are much more complex than was once imagined. We see something similar in the connection of privacy with secrecy, the latter being an important theme in Georg Simmel’s sociological classic.²³ For Simmel, not divulging information is crucial to shaping social interaction; how we relate to others depends deeply on what we know about them. But Simmel’s article was first published in English in 1906 and the discussion needs updating not only for the ways information flows are facilitated, blocked and diverted today,²⁴ but also for the renewed challenges in terms of the ‘secrets’ that exist and their impact in the public domains of social media.

By the later twentieth century, Foucault’s ideas on ‘confession’ became well known. He thought that confession – say, of a crime – had become a key criterion of truth, something pulled up from the depths of someone’s being. He noted both the very private means of confession, for instance to a priest, and the public ones that make the headlines. As Foucault understood it, the religious confession was literally ‘good for the soul’, while its contemporary secular counterparts have personal health and well-being at their heart. Either way, thought Foucault, individuals take an active role in their own surveillance. Now, whether or not Foucault would have thought of the gut-spilling blog or the ‘intimate’ Facebook post as confessional is a matter for debate. And what is ‘public’ and what ‘private’ must be at issue. The Christian confession, whispered to one person, is about humility. The blog is broadcast to anyone who chooses to read it and it is self-advertising. It is about publicity, or at least publicness.

ZB There is a deep difference between the premodern (medieval) understanding of confession – as first and foremost an admission of guilt for something already known, in advance, to the torturers, bodily or spiritual, who extricated it as a restatement and reconfirmation of verity as an attribute of the pastoral superiors – and its modern understanding, as the manifestation, externalization and assertion of an ‘inner truth’, of the authenticity of the ‘self’, the foundation of individuality and the individual’s privacy. In practice, however, the advent of the present-day confessional society was an ambivalent affair. It signalled the ultimate triumph of privacy, that foremost modern invention – though also the beginning of its vertiginous fall from the peak of its glory. It was the hour, therefore, of its victory (Pyrrhic, to be sure): privacy invaded, conquered and colonized the public realm – but at the expense of losing its right to secrecy: its defining trait and most cherished and most hotly defended privilege.

A secret, like other categories of personal possessions, is by definition that part of knowledge whose sharing with others is refused or prohibited and/or closely controlled. Secrecy draws and marks, as it were, the boundary of privacy – privacy being the realm that is meant to be one’s own domain, the territory of one’s undivided sovereignty, inside which one has the comprehensive and indivisible power to decide ‘what and who I am’, and from which one can launch and relaunch the campaign to have and keep one’s decisions recognized and respected. In a startling U-turn from the habits of our ancestors, however, we’ve lost the guts, the stamina, and above all the will to persist in the defence of such rights, those irreplaceable building blocks of individual autonomy.

These days, it is not so much the possibility of a betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but the opposite: shutting down the exits. The area of privacy turns into a site of incarceration, the owner of private space being condemned and doomed to stew in his or her own juice; forced into a condition marked by an absence of avid listeners eager to wring out and tear away the secrets from behind the ramparts of privacy, to put them on public display and make them everybody’s shared property and a property everybody wishes to share. We seem to experience no joy in having secrets, unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of researchers and editors of TV talk shows, tabloid front pages and the covers of glossy magazines.

‘At the heart of social networking is an exchange of personal information.’ Users are happy to ‘reveal intimate details of their personal lives’, ‘to post accurate inf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Drones and Social Media
• 2 Liquid Surveillance as Post-Panoptic
• 3 Remoteness, Distancing and Automation
• 4 In/Security and Surveillance
• 5 Consumerism, New Media and Social Sorting
• 6 Probing Surveillance Ethically
• 7 Agency and Hope
• Notes
• Index