Surveillance And Neoliberalism

Scott mentioned last week in our discussion of Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media that new media describes functions of itself under the regime of neoliberalism, and that this is less about technological capacity and more about operations of economic contexts. In her blog post for last week, Kelly also astutely saw the connection between Manovich and books on neoliberalism by Wendey Brown and David Harvey. The ways that neoliberalism is bolstered by technology also came up in our class discussion of Donna Haraway, and the intersection between technology and neoliberalism comes up again in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Programmed Visions: Software Memory. In her introduction, Chun writes, “computers in the period this book focuses on (post-World War II) coincide with the emergence of neoliberalism” (7) and she goes on to describe David Harvey’s very clear formulation of neoliberalism as being a social order where economic policies are prioritized around freedom in the market and de-regulation rather than social democratic values.

Chun argues that our dependence on computers groom us for greater indebtedness to neoliberalism: “By individuating us and also integrating us into a totality, their interfaces offer us a form of mapping, of storing files central to our seemingly sovereign-empowered-subjectivity” (9). She goes to mention how data-mining further contributes to this mapping. Data-mining isn’t a brand new trend, but the ubiquity of computers, internet use, smartphones, and social media have made data-mining more common, powerful, and invasive. Chun asks the great question “Who needs surveillance when you constantly document your life?” (page unnumbered). This seems to connect to Manovich’s emphasis on the database, and a social network like Facebook can easily be considered a database where the sovereign corporation The Facebook may theoretically have access to all its users’ branches of information. In his Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Harvey notes that with neoliberalism’s rise “surveillance and policing multiply” (26). Chun also describes the ways that Google and cable companies survey their users in this high-tech neoliberal world. Like Scott mentioned in class, neoliberalism’s meaning can be slippery and can have different definitions, but I think that paying attention to how technology supports neoliberalism and vice versa seems important for both this class and thinking about neoliberalism in general.