Forthcoming from Boitempo is the book Tecnopolíticas da vigilância, which reflects on surveillance in the age of big data. Edited by Bruno Cardoso, Fernanda Bruno, Lucas Melgaço, Luciana Guilhon and Marta Kanashiro, it results from research by the Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology and Society Studies (Lavits).
The essays discuss how data is intertwined with different spheres of social life: politics, culture, the construction of visibility and invisibility, and strategies for challenging mechanisms of control.
One highlight is the first Portuguese translation of the seminal article by Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” (2015). Zuboff dissects the particularities of surveillance capitalism. In her account, this is an economic regime in which power is concentrated in hyperscale companies such as Google and Facebook.
These companies can modulate behavior by extracting individual data ( small data), and they possess an even greater power: the ability to predict that behavior by storing and analyzing large data sets ( big data). Insurers, for example, can use vehicle-monitoring systems to check whether customers drive safely and thereby determine whether to maintain their policies.
Algorithmic surveillance
We are entering new territory, in which contracts cease to express social arrangements and operate instead through processes dictated by tracking applications and sensors.
As the different essays in this collection show, the algorithmic revolution unfolding in the world of the Internet of Things and smart citiesredefines our conceptions of architecture, the boundaries between public and private, aesthetics, and the very ways of seeing and being seen.
Surveillance begins to operate in a distributed manner. It is fed by devices that react to citizens’ presence and inform databases concentrated on the servers of a handful of companies operating in cities across Brazil and the world.
The book also includes analyses and case studies of projects seeking to confront this state of molecular surveillance. This is the focus and main contribution of a work I already consider essential reading.
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