Introduction to special section
Perspectives on global surveillance

by Gary Kafer

At the climax of the science fiction film Neptune Frost (dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman), Neptune and Matalusa share a kiss. A telepath and a coltan miner, the two are star-crossed lovers, brought together by visions from their future child to lead the Unanimous Goldmine hacker collective in the hilltops of Burundi. It’s a subtle and tender moment, one amplified by the black circular vignette that frames the encounter and the shimmering digital noises emitted from the monitors in the background. As the two embrace, the moment is quickly ruined. Aware of the spectator’s presence, Neptune’s eyes dart to the camera, her head tilting in irritation. Her hand comes into view—its middle finger raised. Suddenly, the image glitches and the hand turns into pixels that rapidly expand outwards to fill the entire image. Gradually, the pixels disperse, leaving only the flickering cosmos of cyberspace and a cascade of code that seeks to destroy it.

Premiering in 2021 in the Directors Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival, Neptune Frost tells the story of a group of marooned miners who seek to overthrow the patriarchal authoritarian regime of big tech. Instigated by the death of his brother Tekno, Matalusa initiates a worldwide hack with the help of Neptune—a hack which threatens to undermine the entire economic and political infrastructure of telecommunications. Throughout, the Unanimous Goldmine expresses its frustrations and dreams in song, calling attention to the violent machinations of resource extraction that power the “motherboard” of the global North while keeping them shackled to the earth as a disposable labor force. Brothers Gone! Windows On! Sisters Gone! Google On! Theirs is a call for liberation, one that they understand will come through the exercise of violent force rather than milquetoast reformations to source so-called “ethical minerals.” Indeed, this liberation undermines the very worldmaking force of colonialism that extends itself through the digital architectures of the historical present, those that are predicated upon the destruction of human and non-human life alike. Coltan gone! All cars on! Mountains destroyed! iPhone on! It is also a call for opacity, understood here not as the simple invisibility to power structures, but rather as, to borrow from Édouard Glissant, the illegibility of groups based upon the dominant terms of classification that mark transnational settler colonial circuits of chattel slavery, genocide, and resource extraction.[1] [open notes in new window] This opacity is the desire to unleash the erotics of a kiss not meant for you. Nobody knows I’m not alone. Tell them I need somebody.

At its core, the film itself is a manifesto that demands the unmaking of categories of value, gender, and rights that keep these miners—and the many other invisible laborers of the digital empire—within zones of austerity and depletion. To this end, what makes the film exceptional is how it locates this demand on the level of content and form. Throughout the film, the characters consistently break the fourth wall, thus turning its global politics onto the spectator’s own relation to the film. Such is the rhetorical weight of the middle finger, which speaks directly to an imagined audience—a “you” in the global North who benefits from the injustices of the technocratic regime of resource extraction and must now bear witness to the violences typically erased in mainstream media, education, and journalism. You betrayed me and then you’re rich. So fuck Mr. Google. Beyond its wrath, the conceit here is that direct address can lead to consciousness raising. As one of the hackers Memory states, rather than make a more direct demand for action, the collective might instead share “thoughts, critiques, meditations, poetry. It can help impart understanding. Understanding is all that is missing.” Unfortunately, direct address can mire understanding. In speaking to its imagined audience, the film reproduces the dilemma of the subaltern, calling into question whether the middle finger can in fact provoke sedentary epistemes or if it will be met with skepticism. As one reviewer for the film writes, while extraordinary for its Afrofuturist vision of techno-justice, the film “sometimes gets bogged down in turgid polemic.”[2] A shame, really. With so much at stake, the film perhaps limits itself by trying to make its demands legible within the discursive system of the ruling classes that has already consigned its vision as the underside of politics.

Throughout Neptune Frost, characters continually break the fourth wall, thus indicating their knowledge of an outside viewer.	Matalusa gives the camera the middle finger.

I begin this editorial introduction with Neptune Frost to limn the conceptual stakes of global surveillance—the topic of this dossier for Jump Cut. Through its interrogation of international telecommunications infrastructure, the film itself is generative for unpacking the global as a fraught, if not necessary, framework to grapple with the contemporary politics of surveillance. Indeed, the global is a bit of a soiled term: in the decades since Marshall McLuhan announced the arrival of the “global village,” we have come to witness how networked interconnection in fact generates racialized fractures across transnational commerce and migration.[3] Neptune Frost suggests as much, revealing how the universalist ambitions of Silicon Valley tech companies produce uneven relations to telecommunication networks in various parts of the world, including mining alcoves, factory workers, and data cleaners. However, in remarking upon the geopolitical circuits of power that animate digital telecommunications infrastructures, the film exposes the global as a problem of orientation. The middle finger is case in point; in attempting to provoke audiences in the global elsewhere, it is nonetheless directed and interpreted by those hailed in advance as privileged within the hierarchy of digital rights. The film thus makes clear that the global is as much an ontological issue (e.g. “is surveillance actually global?”) as much as it is discursive (“what does it mean to call surveillance global, and for whom?”). Borrowing from Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré, if we are thus to understand surveillance as global, “we ought to deal with embarrassing questions concerning not only the unequal distributions of power and resources across the globe but also the political economy of knowledge production.”[4]

Following suit, this special dossier of Jump Cut brings together scholars across media studies and related fields to provide varying perspectives on the topic of “global surveillance,” exploring a range of surveillance sites including the installation of platform capitalism, state-making projects of occupation, and archives of national trauma. In doing so, this dossier aims to underscore how the framework of the global brings into view multiple conflicting frameworks for grasping the politics of twenty-first century surveillance felt across worldmaking systems of capitalist and colonial power.

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Within the twenty-first century, the global has become a seductive framework to grasp the political force of surveillance. A worldwide project, surveillance is not simply an agenda limited to the individual nation. Rather, as a vast network of monitoring systems supported by governmental and corporate actors, surveillance breaches the traditional state boundaries in order to track populations, secure borders, and enable communications. Such a vision of surveillance was emblematized in the Snowden leaks of 2013, which bore witness to the transnational surveillance network fostered by the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). In a slide detailing the XKEYSCORE program, we see for example how the National Security Agency targeted countries around the world in order to monitor internet data in real-time. Ten years later, similar graphics exhibit the near global scope of China’s proposed Digital Silk Road, announced in 2015 as key part of the larger Belt and Road Initiative. With the goal of positioning China as a geopolitical superpower, the Digital Silk Road consists of a set of agreements between countries across Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Europe through which China will provide digital and telecommunications infrastructure, including artificial intelligence, e-commerce systems, and cloud computing. Like the Five Eyes’ XKEYSCORE program, the Digital Silk Road enables recipient countries to engage in novel forms of electronic surveillance, which in turn are posed to assist in China’s own intelligence systems. Taken together, such visualizations gesture to the global as not only a technological fact of surveillance itself, but also as its aspirational promise—the global as an orienting fiction through which the world becomes visible, and thus conquerable.

By now the globalization of surveillance is a familiar story. In the last decades of the twentieth century, surveillance studies scholars proclaimed the arrival of a “surveillance society” which was predicated upon the extension of bureaucratic techniques of information management and population control through the formation of the modern state.[5] At the turn of the century, this surveillance society became global due to a number of political, economic, and technological transformations that aligned with first-wave globalization theory, which sought to articulate a networked planetary “space of flows” as the new basis for social power.[6] These include (but are not limited to): the proliferation of bordering and policing practices, the spread of networked communication technologies like smartphones, the strengthening of neoliberal regimes of governmentality and infrastructures of finance capital like blockchain, the militarization of publics and the emergence of counterinsurgency operations in the Cold War era, and the rise of ecommerce markets and platforms for distributing labor and predicting consumer trends.[7]

Graphic displaying the global impact of IBM’s Blockchain World Wire system. Source: IBM, https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-blockchain-world-wire-revolutionize-cross-border-payments

The key idea supporting this global turn is that surveillance has been tied to modern structural developments of the western world since WWII. Thus, explains David Lyon, “as modernity globalizes, surveillance globalizes along with it.”[8] In addition, the events of 9/11 prompted a surfeit of novel convergences between state and corporate surveillance across the world in order to preempt threats, justify warfare, and safeguard capital. At work here is the presumption that surveillance is necessarily a defining feature of social life beyond specific forms of political economy and sociocultural production, which in turn naturalizes the global as its proper scale of operation. As David Murakami Wood remarks, surveillance “is distributed and carried out through a proliferation of public agencies, quasi-public bodies and private companies, and networked through both formal and informal settings that penetrate far beyond the narrowly economic. In other words, there is a global surveillant assemblage.”[9]

While the construction of a ‘global surveillant assemblage’ is hard to deny, such phrasing risks misrecognizing what makes surveillance global on two counts. First, they often insinuate that what has made surveillance global at the turn of the twenty-first century is the indelible spread of monitoring technologies tied to the nation-state form. However, as Arjun Appadurai asserts, the global is “never a total project capturing all geographies with equal force,” but rather “the mutual transformation of circulating forms” that produce the localities in which we live.[10] In this sense, the global is not simply a description of how surveillant technologies, procedures, and policies circulate across national boundaries, but rather of the heterogenous relations of power that articulate experiences of surveillance across shifting political formations within local, regional, and transnational contexts. Indeed, we might all live under surveillance, but we sense its global force in unique ways—perhaps as a minor inconvenience or as an inexhaustible violence—depending on our relation to broader geopolitical systems.

Second, globalizing frameworks often ignore how surveillance is a historically contingent process that finds its precedent within earlier transnational networks of trade, migration, and slavery.[11] As the preeminent Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, “if by ‘globalization’ we mean the massive flow of goods, people, information, and capital across huge areas of the earth’s surface in ways that make the parts dependent on the whole, the world has been global since the 16th century.”[12] Following suit, the sudden emergence of surveillance as a global phenomenon maneuvered by transnational telecommunications systems is not merely specific to a world of late-stage capitalist development and post-9/11 securitization but is rather an extension of much longer projects of colonial and imperial domination that operate through information processing and population management. As Alfred McCoy demonstrates, attending the construction of the modern metropole were colonial outposts where surveillance techniques were first developed, such as in the Philippines where the US colonial forces took up Spanish imperial authority to create what is arguably “the world’s first surveillance state” through experiments in population-level security “whose sum was a modern police panopticon.”[13] It’s worth remembering here that the panopticon itself was inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s own voyages along England’s colonial frontiers across Egypt and Turkey where he witnessed firsthand the techniques of the slave trade used to monitor captive bodies.[14]

In recent years, surveillance studies scholars have begun to take note of the disappointments of the “global” for grasping the particularities of surveillance within specific geographic regions, especially in the wake of colonial and imperial exploitation. Such work has invigorated a new turn in the field invested in tracing the processes of state-making, migration, and violence that underpin contemporary digital technologies, including artificial intelligence. Consider, for example, India’s Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identification system containing fingerprints, iris scans, and photograph of its nearly 1.4 billion citizens.[15] Launched in 2009, the goal of this system is to centralize identification technologies to allow for more efficient forms of distributing welfare, voting, registering for school, and submitting tax forms. And yet, as Arora Payal has noted, the database is preceded by a 1992 government campaign to deport undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants through population monitoring.[16] In addition, the technical standards of facial recognition used in Aadhaar are rooted within statistical methods like the Mahalanobis Distance Function, a method devised by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in 1920s British-controlled India to determine caste distinctions.[17] And before that, Aadhaar is preceded by nineteenth century fingerprint databases that took shape under British rule in order to keep track of Indian colonial subjects and soon after criminal populations within England.[18] Such histories not only attest to the transnational character of earlier surveillance practices, but also to the enduring legacies of discrimination that now shape contemporary systems. Just as the British fingerprinting system produced forms of violence and discrimination within the colonial body, so too is Aadhaar posed to reinforce inequalities according to normative conceptions of gender, age, socioeconomic status, and caste. Databases in Rwanda, Jamaica, and South Korea have similarly been met with skepticism as they are posed to exacerbate colonial legacies of ethnonationalism, class hierarchy, and heteropatriarchy.[19]

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis’s description of the castes of Uttar Pradesh used to create statistical clusters describing national identity, as well as biometrics verification technologies. P. C. Mahalanobis, D. N. Majumdar, M. W. M. Yeatts and C. Radhakrishna Rao, “Anthropometric Survey of the United Provinces, 1941: A Statistical Study,” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 9.2/3 (1949): 200.

Sample interface from Taxi.Rio, an app developed by the Rio de Janeiro government, to combat surging prices on ride sharing apps like Uber.

At the center of new critiques in surveillance studies is the conceit that surveillance is not uniformly distributed, but constructed through a series of interlocking regimes of control that maintain transnational relations of geopolitical power. To borrow from Catherine Besteman, we might say that surveillance today unfolds through a “globalized structural violence” in which countries in the North—including North American countries like the U.S and Canada, the European Union, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, Russia, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and East Asian countries like China, Japan, and South Korea—practice techniques of militarized apartheid in order to insulate themselves from the South.[20] Big Data studies, for example, has wrestled with theories of “data colonialism” and “digital colonialism” to underscore how big tech conglomerates centralize control over international digital assets and networked connectivity.[21 Consider how Uber has extended its services in Brazil where the platform has produced uneven distributions of precarity in local working conditions, which in turn has prompted the Rio de Janeiro city government to create an app that connects riders with the traditional taxi service.[22] Through digital labor, the US continues to exert international influence in South America while major tech companies emerge as imperial actors in their own right.

However, it’s important to note that many scholars of the Global South have called into question the North-Side divide as a heuristic for parsing global surveillance. In a significant article on surveillance in Pakistan, Mahvish Ahmad and Rabia Mehmood contend that simply tracing the historical trajectories of imperial and colonial domination within the present (such as in US drone strikes) risks treating security in the South as “a bad carbon copy of its counterparts in the West.”[23] Rather, scholars must account for how regional and local politics often trouble the frameworks of counter-surveillance and anti-authoritarianism that typically mark western left-wing discourses of anti-imperialism. Such issues are especially pertinent in Pakistan, for example, where issues of race, privacy, and legal reform do not exist in the same way as other sites of power within transnational surveillance networks. One might similarly question how certain high-tech surveillance systems imported from the US, China, and Europe are uneasily integrated with certain regionally specific low-tech systems. Here we might look to Palestine where the Israeli state uses paper identification cards to construct hierarchies of immobility in tandem with artificial intelligence systems or to Nigeria where community surveillance is often conducted by gendarmes that operate through networks of personal contacts in conjunction with the police.[24] To this end, issuing a critique of global surveillance from the South might rather prioritize how regional and local politics unsettle hegemonic conceptions of agency, innovation, and reparations while also exploring new lifeworlds and imagination from the margins.[25]

Taken together, while the global is a problematic framework for surveillance, we need not necessarily abandon it. As more recent research in surveillance studies suggests, to grasp surveillance as global is to attend to the complicated and fragmented arrangements of governmentality that define the spatiotemporal conditions under which life becomes legible to power as a matrix of information. In this case, critiques of global surveillance are not obliged to address systems that take the planet as its privileged target—for example, DARPA’s Blackjack, which seeks to create a networked sheath of low orbit satellites around the world that would provide the US government and military persistence coverage and intelligence. Rather, following Neptune Frost, we might instead understand the global as an orientation to planetary systems of capitalist extraction and exploitation. Indeed, the contributions to this dossier make clear that global surveillance can be felt anywhere one looks so long as we attune ourselves to mapping the plural and textured ways that surveillance appears simultaneously across local, regional, and transnational scales of analysis.