An archive of contestation: Digital surveillance and human–machine recompositions of resistance

This article proposes to make sense of the ‘atmosphere of failure’ diagnosed by key players in the mobilisation against mass surveillance in the United Kingdom. Firstly, by entangling oral history interviews and computational analyses of NGO websites, we recompose an archive of contestation that is not temporally limited to the Snowden ‘moment’. We advance the notion of a ‘discordant machine’ to render the generativity of discordances and surprises in entangling qualitative and digital methods. Secondly, we argue that the campaigns against surveillance did not lead to a shared vocabulary of critique and a collective practice of contestation. We show that contesting digital state surveillance was mostly expressed through the conduits of privacy and transparency, while more collective democratic claims were connected instead to ‘elsewheres’, such as democratisation in Global South states. Although the Snowden disclosures were a key moment for academic scholarship, our analysis shows that they played little role in mobilisations against mass surveillance. References to oversight were limited to the immediate post-Snowden moment. Finally, corporate surveillance remained a feature of NGO advocacy but was represented mainly at a distance from state surveillance. Our analysis suggests that the challenge for mobilisations against digital surveillance is not only to hold together its complexities but also to articulate its antidemocratic effects.