Surveillance is not necessarily directed at the poor or marginalised to maintain social hierarchies, either; it has become much more widespread. Surveillance is also being directed at non-human subjects, a development that unsettles the control argument, and this form of surveillance has even brought social benefits. Different social actors are also using surveillance, not just the state. The democratisation of surveillance technologies has also meant that ordinary citizens can use inverse surveillance, turning these technologies against the powerful and exposing their abuses of power: practices that have become known as ‘sousveillance’.13 Protesters, for instance, can use video cameras to record police violence. These capacities, when put in the hand of citizens, problematise the view that all surveillance is necessarily bad. Other examples of neutral definitions abound in surveillance literature.14 Haggerty has argued that surveillance scholars tend to avoid studying positive examples of surveillance, as their immersion in critique makes them blind to these phenomena.15
Different and even alternative metaphors to the panopticon have also been offered, based on the argument that Foucault did not foresee computerisation and the rise of consumerism, which have greatly expanded the scope for surveillance.16 These developments mean that there is not one single point where surveillance takes place, but multiple points. Thomas Mathiesen’s term ‘the synopticon’ – where the many watch the few by using the mass media – has become popular in surveillance studies, as it recognises these more recent developments. In other words, mass audiences are able to peer into the lives of celebrities and other public figures, placing them under unprecedented levels of scrutiny to which audiences themselves are not subjected.17 However, Mathiesen did not necessarily propose the synopticon as an alternative to the panopticon; in fact, the two are interlinked in that both are still structures of domination, and he was not necessarily optimistic about the mass media’s effects in society.
Surveillance in contemporary society has even been described as a surveillant assemblage, where surveillance practices do not take place in one part of society only, but where information is gleaned from multiple sources and locations.18 Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have argued that discrete surveillance systems have converged, leading to a rhizomic levelling of surveillance. No longer is it conducted on a top-down basis and primarily by states – as the panoptic metaphor suggests – but diverse media can be connected to pursue surveillance for multiple purposes, and human surveillance efforts can be augmented by computers. Scattered centres of calculation, from police stations to banks, undertake surveillance, and as a result surveillance transcends the boundaries of separate institutions.19 Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon have termed such surveillance ‘liquid surveillance’, or a form of surveillance that relies on the body being encoded by data and tracked through multiple data flows.20 Deleuze himself recognised the fact that surveillance practices had changed from the early modern period about which Foucault wrote, in that computerisation had made constant surveillance possible at a reduced cost, allowing for continuous control rather than periodic examination. As a result, Deleuze argued, contemporary societies should not be described as disciplinary societies, but as societies of control.21 In other words, power over individuals is not necessarily exercised through fixed institutional structures, but through mobile and rapid ICTs, which enable control ‘on the go’: a form of control that is perfectly suited to societies defined by flexibility. At the same time, electronic tagging still allows surveillance to take place, to ensure that individuals are in a permissible place.22
Other theorists have argued that Foucault’s ideas still remain highly relevant to today’s surveillance society, and that he would not have been surprised by recent attempts to universalise surveillance using the internet and other technologies. Far from being a technology linked to societies of control – which, according to Deleuze, have replaced disciplinary societies – the cellphone can be understood as a portable panopticon, in that it allows users to be tracked and monitored invisibly.23 In fact, the Snowden revelations have brought Foucault back to the fore, with an emerging group of scholars arguing for his continued relevance. They maintain that there has been an unfair dismissal of his work, even though the panopticon may not describe the functioning of the internet with precision.24 For instance, Gilbert Caluya has argued that what he terms the Deleuzian turn in surveillance studies – with its influential metaphor of the rhizomic surveillant assemblage – does not necessarily represent a significant break from Foucault, who recognised that a myriad forms of surveillance characterised modern society and rejected state-centric conceptions of power.25 Furthermore, while the internet is a distributed medium, it is inherently surveillant in that in its current state it allows for the invisible filtering of information as an exercise of power. Its surveillant potential enables governments to shift their interventions from direct enforcement of the law to more invisible, decentralised, technologically based forms of enforcement. This fits Foucault’s conception of power very well. However, contemporary surveillance operates vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and people also participate in their own surveillance. This added dimension has led David Lyon to insist that researchers should take the cultures of surveillance seriously, as they need to understand the circumstances under which people willingly participate in surveillance activities through their social media and internet usage.26
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND MARXIST THEORIES OF SURVEILLANCE
Political economy theorists have also argued that while contemporary surveillance takes place undeniably on a far more distributed basis than in the period Foucault wrote about, the means of surveillance are much more centralised than is often acknowledged. The internet – and the applications and infrastructure it relies on – is dominated by a few major companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook.27 They have co-operated with NSA surveillance through the surveillance programme known as PRISM, handing over internet data based on selectors that the NSA provided. The programme was apparently directed at foreigners in the main, but US nationals were caught in the dragnet too: a fact that the NSA denied initially, but was subsequently forced to admit.28 Capital has an insatiable desire to control every aspect of human existence, to open up new vistas of profit-making and to minimise resistance to commodification: that is why it has moved into so many areas of life previously considered private, such as personal information. While the capitalist state incorporated elements of surveillance in earlier periods in history, technological developments associated with computerisation have allowed an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance capacities of the state. Since the 9/11 attacks on the US, public and private institutions have poured resources into enhancing their surveillance capabilities, while relaxing laws governing these capabilities on the pretext of national security. Surveillance has also been used to track groups that powerful interests feel threatened by, such as political activists and journalists. To this extent, the growth in surveillance technologies could be considered a surface manifestation of a deeper capitalist crisis, and surveillance has become integral to neoliberal state formation.
However, political economists have not paid sufficient attention to the fact that the relationship between the state and business is not one of straightforward co-operation, and the relationship between the political and the economic cannot be seen in narrow deterministic ways. Communications companies have begun to recognise that there is a business case for privacy; they have become more willing to push back against state surveillance practices. For instance, Apple has fought back against Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attempts to make it unlock the cellphone of a criminal suspect.29 However, the convergence of interests between the surveillance industry and governments is strong enough for Ben Hayes to refer to the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex.30 Hayes argues that – far from being deployed in a sporadic fashion – surveillance technologies have become central to population control through policing, intelligence work, border control and other forms of population management. The industry and government are linked through security specialists shifting from the one to the other, leading to what has become known as the ‘revolving door’ syndrome. Governments also outsource key surveillance tasks to the private sector and may even fund the development of surveillance technologies from innovation funds, while the private sector relies on governments for contracts. The fact that both the military and the police have turned inwards and