Tecnopolíticas da vigilância brings together critical analyses of contemporary life viewed through the disputes taking place across informational territories. Rejecting assumptions that treat the spread of networks as a universe parallel to the real world, the texts collected here reflect on the intertwining of data with different spheres of social life: politics, culture, processes of constructing visibility and invisibility, and strategies for challenging sociotechnical control mechanisms.
Edited by Bruno Cardoso, Fernanda Bruno, Lucas Melgaço, Luciana Guilhon and Marta Kanashiro, the book presents the results of research and debates promoted by the Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology and Society Studies (Lavits), which has operated since 2009 as an important center of reflection in the Global South on the practices and spheres of surveillance.
In dialogue with other researchers, the book also includes the first Portuguese translation of Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff’s seminal article “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” (2015). Zuboff dissects the distinctive features of surveillance capitalism, an economic regime in which power (the Big Other) is concentrated in companies such as Google and Facebook that operate at hyperscale. These companies can not only modulate behavior by extracting individual data (small data), but possess an even greater power: to predict those behaviors by storing and analyzing large data sets (big data).
In this context, insurers can, for example, rely on vehicle monitoring systems to check whether their customers are driving safely and thereby decide whether to maintain their policies. We are entering a new territory where contracts cease to express social arrangements and instead function according to processes dictated by tracking through apps and sensors.
As the various texts in this collection show, this algorithmic revolution, taking place in a world of the Internet of Things and smart cities, cuts across words, objects, emotional and social relationships, health systems, location and countless political and economic spheres. It thus redefines conceptions of architecture, the boundaries between public and private, aesthetics and the very ways of seeing and being seen.
Surveillance begins to function in a distributed manner, fed by devices that react to citizens’ presence and inform databases concentrated on the servers of a few companies, yet operating in numerous cities across Brazil and the world.
In this process, another biopolitics takes shape, in which DNA processing technologies, on the one hand, and the instrumentalization of networked sociability, on the other, impose a state of compulsory data donation. In its interstices, new forms of dissent emerge. These are the focus and principal contribution of this book.
Giselle Beiguelman