Political Economy of Surveillance

Summary

This study reconstructs a genealogy of surveillance capitalism from both a conceptual and historical perspective. It traces a conceptual journey across the archipelago of surveillance—from slave plantations to digital platforms—proposing to understand surveillance not as a purely technological phenomenon but as an assemblage of dispositifs and techniques designed to produce and mobilize the transparency of subjectivities in order to facilitate their control and exploitation. Throughout different accumulation regimes, surveillance has operated simultaneously as a mode of governance and as a mechanism of accumulation through processes of datafication and repression, structuring social life by means of extraction, classification, and control. From the slaveholder on the plantation to the capitalist owners of contemporary algorithms, a regime of rationality based on quantification endures as a form of machinic control, both social and individual. The early 21st-century hegemonic regime of digital capitalism rests on the private control of much of everyday digital infrastructure, within which mass, opaque, and largely unregulated surveillance has become the norm. As Deleuze foresaw, the control and regulation of data flows reveal a new stage of capitalist governmentality, in which circulation, total visibility, and the management of the social feedback loop constitute the central nodes of the contemporary model of accumulation. From a political economy perspective, surveillance emerges as the organizing principle of platform capitalism. Data functions as its raw material, while infrastructures of capture, storage, and classification ensure its continuous extraction. The contemporary landscape of power is defined by corporate concentration, technological dependency, environmental exploitation, and the commodification of collective and individual knowledge, technologies, and epistemologies. This regime of exploitation and dispossession simultaneously reproduces and expands existing gendered and colonial hierarchies that determine who can be seen, and under what conditions.