Surveillance, Social Control, and Democratic Governance

The underlying conditions of most contemporary surveillance systems run counter to principles of democratic governance. Because, at its core, surveillance is about control, it tends to produce conditions of constraint, wherein human and technical action is regulated and limited. The degree and kind of constraint vary according to the values and assumptions that are embedded in respective surveillance apparatuses and generated by surveillance practices. Today’s surveillance systems are inflected by and reproduce neoliberal rationalities of market-based solutions to social problems and disciplinary exclusions of marginalized populations. I develop this argument across three sections. First, I draw upon STS writings on democracy and technology to frame technology as political in its own right, apart from its use by government agencies, corporations, or others. Second, I analyze the dominant functions of surveillance today with regard to the differential treatment and automated control of populations, both of which are functions that produce identities of marginality and resist democratic participation or oversight. Finally, to avoid deterministic conclusions about surveillance, I explore several examples of democratically empowering surveillance systems that encourage openness, transparency, participation, and power equalization among social groups and institutions. Because surveillance societies appear to be here to stay, democratic ways of life may depend on tempering the growing hegemony of differential and automated control with alternative, power equalizing forms of surveillance