The surveillance state and performance of democracy through the ongoing biopolitical agenda
of capitalism

by Nick Brandt

Illustration by Saul Gravy from Harvard Gazette interview with Shoshana Zuboff'

Surveillance and eternal colonialism

The dominant assemblage of control in contemporary Western society is that of surveillance. It is an intentional system of control: a surveillance that operates without resistance, without regulation, and without responsibility. It is not accidental, not a byproduct of technological proliferation. Consensual, surveillance is the architecture through which all governance is mediated. If data is the “new oil” [1],[open endnotes in new window] then surveillance is the new offshore drilling, the new fracking. It is the new assemblage of global exploitation.

Technologies are embedded into the most mundane aspects of our lives, and nearly every routine experience is invisibly governed by proprietary models of data collection orchestrated by a handful of private companies. Presented as convenient, as entertainment, as optional, the Western data-collection conglomerates—Apple, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), and Microsoft—enact more control over their subjects than sovereigns of the past. These technologies are not simply a part of our society, they are the supreme mediators of all civic participation; and our non-avoidable engagement with them generates immense capital at the cost of our own freedom. While people are not legally required to use these technologies, a life without them, should one choose to be an active member in civic society, is not possible. An intentional departure from these technologies’ amounts to social suicide [2].

Surveillance is enacted through capitalism, or through whatever mask of contemporary capitalism we choose by which to understand it. Surveillance scholars from a variety of disciplines have spent the past decade contextualizing the modern surveillance state through their respective fields.

Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, defines Western capitalism as a system where technology users are no longer customers, but rather the resource required to fuel an entirely new industrial system. Surveillance capitalism, this mutated economic order of extraction and profit, is a deregulated departure from market capitalism. While Zuboff’s book is not without criticism [3], it is a necessary resource in understanding relations between profit and accumulation. Zuboff well describes the surveillance state as a new form of power rising from market capitalism’s destabilization via the digital millennium.

From the financial sector, Cathy O’Neil (former MIT professor and former financial analyst pre-Occupy Wallstreet) and Yanis Varoufakis (former finance minister of Greece) appraise the contemporary data collection system and uncover invariable ties to financial industry. Varoufakis further explores finance through the lens of settler colonialism, a framework shared by the publications of Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias [4] who explicitly detail how colonialism is not solely an operation of history, nor a metaphorical way to understand modernity. Just as historic colonialism appropriated human territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit (Couldry & Mejias, 2018), data colonialism now captures human life through proprietary data extraction. Digital modernity has made this ongoing colonial process more efficient.

This article will ground its contextualization of surveillance as an architecture of enclosure, and through Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics and bio-power–in particular, his discussion of how neocolonialism has streamlined historic practices of controlling body autonomy through technologies grounded in surveillance and biopolitical control.

In a series of lectures between 1977 and 1978, Michel Foucault presents his working definition for biopolitics as a power structure (political, economic, surveillant, etc.) that exercises control over populations through the regulation of bodies. These power mechanisms, where “the basic biological features of the human species” become the object “of a general strategy of power” (Foucault, 2007, p.1) are rooted in historical colonialism where the seizure of lands and bodies accumulated wealth for European mercantilists.

This accumulation of wealth was actualized through not just the usurping of lands and resources, but by rewriting the foreign human body into another uncapitalized resource. Like land and materials, bodies provided a capital whose labour was unowned [5]. Through the colonial process, said bodies became owned by colonial sovereigns looking to accumulate wealth by force. Control over resources, including biopolitical control over bodies through the Transatlantic slave trade and creation of occupied territories, the plantation, and the intentional redistribution of human groups into subgroups (Mbembe, 2019, p.71), became the defining economic policy of colonial wealth accumulation. Loss of autonomy over capital and biopolitical restructuring of resources were enacted globally during colonialism. However, they were first practiced by British sovereigns upon their own subjects in the centuries prior.

Enclosure of lands which would then be implemented at a global scale.

The enclosure movement, or the feudal period that predated colonial mercantilism, was the period where Britain deliberately removed the common rights that peasants had over their farmlands and replaced those rights with financial agreements that allowed peasants to farm the very same land their ancestors had toiled for centuries. According to Foucault, “mercantilists considered the problem of population essentially in terms of the axis of sovereign and subjects” (2007, p.70). The future land owners solved the “population” problem by the peasants’ eviction, deliberately fencing them off from their lands, and the peasants’ subsequent indentured employment to these rulers of inescapable power. For colonialism to flourish, and for capitalism to be born from said ongoing exploitation, a “shift of power to command from landowners to owners of capital goods” (Varoufakis, 2023, p.64) had to occur. Peasants had to first lose access to common lands and lose the ownership of their own labour for feudalism’s transition into capitalism. And in the new fiscal reality where the number of subjects grew through the colonization of new lands and peoples, power of the sovereign needed to grow to enact control.

Mercantilists capitalized the lands, resources, and bodies of their own serfs in a mass movement of biopolitcal control through the restructuring of capital and repeopling of commons (Mbembe, 2019, p.11). In an abstract sense, the enclosure movement illustrates the period where Britian first colonized themselves, before perfecting that practice and turning colonial methods outwards and throughout the rest of the world. In my perspective on surveillance here, this historical, abstract understanding of self-colonization is necessary because digital infrastructure is grounded in the abstract, in immaterial cyberspace. The colonization of our digital commons must first be understood through digital enclosure. In the same way that feudal enclosure was necessary for colonialism and capitalism to reach global dominance, digital enclosure, or the consolidation of Internet commons via five tech companies, [6] is necessary for the subsequent colonization of digital spaces and emergence of a new logic of extraction and profit—be it surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), data capitalism (West, 2019), techno-feudalism (Varoufakis, 2023), data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2018), or the next academic profile of late-stage capitalism.

The practice of biopolitics and commodification of peasant lands is being recreated by a neo-colonization of the crippled working class, i.e., a creation of techno-serfs. Just as peasant lands were seized and their serfs indentured, digital spaces are privatized and technologically-dependant society flourishes in which the techno-serf cannot function without access to said digital lands. Similar too is how the exploited cannot resist systems of ubiquitous power. For both the serfs of mercantilist Britain and the techno-serfs of today, the intentional loss of their autonomous access to common lands underlies their exploitation. Private ownership of spaces seeks to separate users from means of equitable interaction. Such invisible and unspoken dominance is then reified through the deliberate algorithmic sorting techniques of social media systems that both:

• mediate all information processed through online spaces
• manufacture a filtered reality where engagement is the policing force of social networks [7].

The data revolution of the 21st century has created a deliberate return to a feudalistic social system in which the sovereign technocrats govern serfs through their monetized system of technological engagement. And, just like biopolitical control enacted upon mercantilist serfs and colonial victims, modern day surveillance and biometric collection enact immeasurable control over us all.

At the turn of the 21st century, digital spaces were ungoverned. Now, their enclosure is absolute, and digital colonization is in the process of reconfiguring social and economic exploitation. It is undeniable that immense social power has found consolidation at the hands of a select few unelected oligarchs. Social media systems are not just ways to connect with people. These systems manage all digital information in their totality, and their management is the foundational architecture of propaganda and surveillance. The very same axis of sovereign and subjects is being rationalized today: but today’s solution [8] is grounded in the rise of technocracy.

In the words of Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal alongside Elon Musk and first public investor of Facebook after the Department of Homeland Security (Lyon, 2017, p.124):

“[Technocrats] could never win an election…because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world – without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you – through a technological means” (O’Brien, 2025).

What Thiel is talking about here is undermining the democratic process and replacing it with a technocratic process. People would never vote for the technocrats in his view, but the public would elect leaders who, through technological means, are indebted to a proprietary and invisible ruling class of tech oligarchs. A select few data sovereigns who profit immensely off techno-feudalism. We can see this this exchange in recent elections, which has resulted in data corporations enacting more sovereign power than the elected body.

The power of Western tech oligarchs may have been made apparent by the Trump presidencies, but the systems that encouraged the transfer of rule from the illusion of democracy to a binary of corporatism vs. oligarchy are decades in the making. According to Mbembe, democracy itself cannot exist ideologically if that democracy still bears colonial practice (2019, p.15). Examples of the ongoing colony include the plantation and slave labour of the past and its transition into the for-profit prison system and indentured slavery of the American present; and in Canada, the genocide of Indigenous populations through the residential school systems and blood quantum laws that continue to regulate bodies and restrict rights through DNA testing. Not just metaphorically, ongoing neocolonialism is enacted by tech oligarchs. In addition, pro-slavery democracies adopt a mask of exception founded on “dissimulating or occulting the violence of their origin” (Mbembe, 2019, p.16) wherein the performance of democracy continues to reinvent itself to further obfuscate oppression and exploitation.

However, upholding a myth of democracy in our colonial states is no longer enough. The purpose of the state, both historically and contemporarily, is to subjugate the most marginalized populations because the state’s origin is that of exploitation. Democracy is a performance for the masses, a mask to disguise the governing systems of the West while “technocrats rule as an ennobled caste” (O’Brien, 2025). Behind this mask there is no possibility for democracy because corporatism and oligarchy are the two competing ruling systems of the West, neither of which care about the people as anything more than serfs to fuel tech supremacy. If Trump is the symbol of the oligarchy, then it is Obama who solidified corporatism as its antithesis. Obama famously campaigned on the promise of change, but this change was just another performative mask.

Obama said he would stand up to the “fat cat bankers of Wall Street” (Clark, 2009), but after those very same bankers gambled with taxpayer money on the stock exchange, lost, and caused the subprime mortgage crisis (Varoufakis, 2023, p.44), he bailed them out. Obama campaigned on ending the forever-war in the Middle East, but instead he extended it for his full eight years as President and won a Nobel Peace Prize for remote drone bombing the children of Syria, Yemen, and Libya (Parsons & Hennigan, 2017). Obama condemned the Patriot Act for spying on U.S. citizens, but under his administration, mass electronic surveillance reached what was then an all-time high. Obama could never stand against surveillance because it was those very surveillance systems built by GAMMA that helped elect him through the data collection and microtargeting models of their social media platforms (O’Neil, 2016, p.188). Snowden unveiled these mass-surveillance systems, but Obama branded him a traitor because Snowden betrayed the corporate technocrats responsible for Obama’s election. The American people voted for change, but the only change they got was the colour of the mask who would invariably bend the knee to corporatism—the financial sector, the military-industrial complex, and the techno-surveillance apparatus that intermediates all online and offline participation.

Obama’s HOPE poster, designed by Shepard Fairey, alongside one of many parodies.

In Canada, Mark Carney’s electoral win as the prime minister of Canada is a win for corporatism. Carney is a banker, who served the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and the Bank of England during Brexit and COVID-19. Carney is the first prime minister in Canada’s history to have never held an elected political office at any point in his career. Carney is a technocrat, a member of the financial elite, and a factory-made, economy-first neoliberal mask who is ideal for the perpetuation of corporatism’s rule. He has zero political experience, but it does not matter because we are at the end of democracy’s performance. Like Obama, he will stand for justice only when convenient, and only when corporate actors allow him to do so. Carney’s electoral success is in part due to his administration standing up to Trump’s calls for the annexation of Canada. Or, in a broader sense, in how Canadian corporatism framed the U.S. oligarchy through populism to unite the masses [9]. Since neoliberalism has no vision for the future, it uses populism as a tool to strengthen the status quo and reinforce existing systems of power. And, under the mask of democracy, now colonizing unowned human capital in the form of digital data. In cyberspace, where laws do not necessarily exist, and through utilizing technologies that rapidly outpace the regulatory systems meant to keep them in check, digital fiefdom has succeeded.

Returning to Peter Thiel, the technophile famously wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” (Thiel, 2007). Freedom for Thiel is the libertarian freedom, not equitable freedom, since his surveillance empire regularly brokers human data for the N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the F.B.I. (Dowd, 2017), who all need the predictive analytics of biometrics and the social sorting systems derived from Big Data. To say that the collapse of both freedom and democracy are necessary for technocracy’s rise, Thiel offers the underlying message of his vision for the future. Freedom and democracy are not incompatible with each other, but rather, incompatible with a future governed by technological slavery.

Technologies do not solve social issues, and technophiles are foolish for believing so. Technologies exacerbate existing social inequalities and streamline injustices through proprietary algorithms that operate invisibly and unrestricted by law (O’Neil, 2016). Rapid technological progress and its planned infiltration into every sector of online and offline life dominate our existence and form a new system of governance under late-stage capitalism. This new form of biopolitics and profit combines the “predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, p.337). Democracy no longer exists, but the performance of democracy is thriving vicariously through the elected mask who acts in accordance with the will of technocracy.

Perpetuating the police state

The police state is invariably a surveillance state. An embeddedness of digital media technologies in the everyday perpetuates the police state, yet the current ecosystem of perception and being perceived comprises an entirely new organism compared to surveillance of the past. In this section, I use the concept of the police state as an important metaphor to visualize the datafication and serfdom of society. This is not to suggest that the police state is wholly metaphorical. It is a prolific form of biopolitical control enacted through the regulation of bodies. Population- and reproductive-control, biometric surveillance and facial recognition, tiered healthcare policies, etc.—all these operate through the state of exception. However, it is also through gaining an understanding of the modern police state that we can further understand our own exploitation at the hands of the techno-oligarchy.

Contemporary understandings of the police state are currently plagued by surveillance models that predate the technological revolution. In this light, surveillance scholars David Lyon (former sociologist at Queen’s University) and Benjamin E. Harcourt (professor at Columbia University Law School) spend the first quarter of their books respectively [10] deconstructing the ways in which George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four muddles our understanding of modern surveillance. For both Lyon and Harcourt, surveillance is an everyday fact of life. However, relations between the surveilled subject and the state in today’s networked society operates in ways unimaginable in the analog era. Surveillance is not only performed by specialized agencies, such as the police or governments, but it is performed domestically by everyday citizens and everyone. Lyon coins this new relation participatory surveillance, that is, the ways in which individuals monitor each other. For Harcourt, “we are not so much being coerced, surveilled, or secured today as we are exposing ourselves knowingly, so many of us willingly” (2015, p.18) through our engagement with social media platforms and through the normalization and commodification of digital voyeurism.