The Purpose of Surveillance

While surveillance has been a recurring topic on this blog, the technological environment has developed significantly over the past twenty years.

Once upon a time, the only form of real-time surveillance involved so-called closed circuit systems (CCTV), providing a dedicated watcher with a view of what was going on at that moment, although these systems now generally include a recording function, often operate retrospectively, and feed into an open-ended ecosystem of discipline-and-punish. As I noted in May 2008, the purpose of CCTV had extended from monitoring to include deterrence and penalty, and in the process it had ceased to be closed circuit in the original sense.

Fiction has provided some alternative models of surveillance and control. As well as Fritz Lang's 1960 film The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, there are the Palantíri in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, which are indestructable stones or crystal balls enabling events to be seen from afar.

The data company Palantir. whose founders included Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, was originally established to provide big data analytics to the intelligence community. Geoff Shullenberger suggests that Palantir might be understood as an application of the ideas of Leo Strauss (who inspired Thiel): an enterprise that acknowledges the deep, dangerous undercurrent of human violence and harnesses the reams of data generated by the internet to monitor and control it. Meanwhile Moira Weigel notes the contribution of Adorno (who inspired Karp): Adorno’s jargon anticipates the software tools Palantir would develop. By tracing the rhetorical patterns that constitute jargon in literary language, Karp argues that he can reveal otherwise hidden identities and affinities—and the drive to commit violence that lies latent in them.

 

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Geoff Shullenberger, The Intellectual Origins of Surveillance Tech (Outsider Theory, 17 July 2020)

Moira Weigel, Palantir goes to the Frankfurt School (Boundary2, 10 July 2020)

Related posts: Surveillance and its Effects (May 2005), What's in a Name - CCTV (May 2008), As Shepherds Watched (April 2024)

Surveillance@DemandingChange, Surveillance@POSIWID