Abstract
In the last few decades, an astonishing range of new surveillance techniques has spread across the globe. Whereas surveillance used to be identified with CCTVs, fingerprints and patrolling security officers, contemporary techniques are a little bit harder to grasp. Today, surveillance tasks may be executed by drones the size of a fly, by ‘radio-frequency identification chips’, tracking down products along the supply chain, or by ‘quick response codes’, the square codes consumers can scan with their smartphones, leading them to a web page with additional information, playful extras and vital links to social media. They may not look as if they have much in common, but they all take part in a strangely familiar ‘world of monitoring, tracking, tracing, sorting, checking and systematic watching’ (p. iv). As such, they have given rise to a number of pertinent questions: what happens with all the data they produce? Who accesses, analyses and controls these data, if anyone particularly? And, more sociologically, how does the rise and spread of these new surveillance techniques affect our social, cultural and political ways of life?
In their respective oeuvres, Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon have taken quite some effort in answering these questions, yet it is only in Liquid Surveillance that they have joined forces for the first time. Similar to a number of Bauman’s recent publications, this book is thereby set up as a topic-centred conversation with a second scholar, the latter introducing specific issues and questions. As a result of its dialogical set-up, Liquid Surveillance is at its best when Bauman’s broader frame of ‘liquid modernity’ is complemented with Lyon’s more precise expertise in contemporary surveillance technologies. These backgrounds lead them to suggest, for instance, that we should move beyond the classical concept of the ‘panopticon’, which they associate with the age of ‘solid’ rather than the current ‘liquid’ modernity. For indeed, contemporary surveillance no longer requires a central observation point in which one human tyrant sees and masters all. Instead, the gained data are increasingly cut up into little pieces, which are then dispersed across different places, digital check-points and – although no longer necessarily – human analysts. During these processes such data can thereby end up in different categories in different databases, and they may be used for multiple purposes at once.
A popular way of using these data, the authors argue, can be grasped quite adequately by what Didier Bigo has called the ‘ban-opticon’. Especially at national borders, a massive stack of surveillance data are used to prevent unwanted individuals (such as specific types of migrants) from entering the national territory. Rather than serving as a ‘panoptical’ device for directly monitoring every move, these techniques are more broadly used as a digital wall, ensuring that potential intruders remain outside. A similarly widespread use of such surveillance data consists of constructing consumer profiles and networks, in order to match the right advertisements with the right individuals. Interestingly, this seems to embody a radicalization of the self-disciplinary aspect of the classical panopticon: consumers enthusiastically agree to share their personal data. On the one hand, Bauman and Lyon argue, consumers are tempted to do so, by the comfortable perspective of tailor-made consumption suggestions, or by simply enjoying the exposure of their inner world to the outside world – what Lyon dubs ‘scopophilia’. On the other hand, Bauman stresses, consumers are increasingly scared into exposing themselves, as not doing so means risking isolation and exclusion.
Despite their intellectual common ground, both authors nevertheless tend to emphasize different dimensions of the social and political effects of contemporary surveillance. Lyon, for instance, conceives of surveillance first and foremost as a means of sorting people, of distinguishing, for example, between different types of migrants and consumers. As their data are scanned, dispersed and analysed, people are in fact automatically categorized according to where they come from, how long they should stay, which websites they consult or apps they download, what they are likely to do and buy, and, most importantly, how they should thus be treated. Bauman’s key perspective, on the other hand, is bent on highlighting the increasingly technical nature of surveillance, as it implies a growing chasm between those analysing the data and those whose data are being analysed. In his earlier work, Bauman has often identified such distancing with the concept of ‘adiaphorisation’: the suppressing or obscuring of the moral element of social relationships. With respect to surveillance, the most extreme example is undoubtedly the so-called ‘Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles’ or drones. While these ‘intelligent’ aircrafts are meant to scan and identify adversarial targets, the accidental killing of citizens comes to be increasingly justified in terms of technical, rather than moral errors.
In February 2011, the adiaphorical element became astonishingly clear when ‘twenty-three Afghan wedding guests were killed’, and the ‘button pushing operators’ explained their error as a merely technical one. Staring at the rapidly changing figures one day after another, ‘the screens had turned into drool buckets’, they claimed. For them, the error they had made was only pertaining to the data they ‘missed’ amidst the masses of digits at their screens, and not necessarily at the human lives those numbers represented. In a much less violent form, a similar principle underlies online dating sites, allowing people to select potential partners by filtering on a range of separate properties rather than developing a relationship with the (moral) person in its modest entirety.
In Moral Blindness, Bauman and Leonidas Donskis address moral-sociological discussions such as these from a broader perspective. The book’s key question is twofold: how may contemporary social structures constitute an increasing ‘insensibility’ towards other people’s suffering, and where can we find the legitimate hope and agency to actually do something about it? Moral Blindness thus returns, in a way, to the central issues driving Bauman’s sociological project of the last couple of decades. For indeed, after Bauman had elaborated his general theory of morality in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) and Postmodern Ethics (1993), he began approaching the moral dimension of social relations from a myriad of perspectives by concentrating on a series of issues and themes – surveillance being one of those themes. It should not come as a complete surprise, then, that Moral Blindness begins by restating some of this project’s general points of departure – the increasing ‘insensibility’ towards the suffering of others through technological distancing – after which a wide range of topics are addressed in terms of their consequences for our ability to act morally. It is in this sense that the second chapter plunges the reader into the question of what playground remains for moral agency – roughly, the capability to see and actually change perceived injustice. More specifically, this chapter focusses on the fate of political institutions in the context of economic globalization and the rise of high-speed social media.
The third chapter explores a number of ways in which cultures of fear are currently manifesting themselves, ranging from the political capitalization of insecurity and uncertainty to social strategies of dealing with the loss of meaningful and stable communal ties. In the fourth chapter Donskis expands upon the commodification of universities, particularly in Eastern Europe, while Bauman contextualizes this issue by pointing at similar evolutions in more private social relations. The fifth and last chapter, increasingly pessimistic in tone, revolves around a double discussion of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. Donskis’ re-appropriation of The Decline of the West from its popular far-right reading, I am tempted to suggest, fills the most impressive and nuanced pages of this book.
The most fundamental shortcoming of both Moral Blindness and Liquid Surveillance is that they present the reader with reflections and concepts the authors have dealt with more elaborately and in a more nuanced way in their earlier work. In addition – and again, as in Bauman’s other recent (co-)publications – some paragraphs appear to recur in precisely identical formulations across these books. In spite of these shortcomings, Liquid Surveillance proves to be one of the better of these ‘conversations’. One reason is that Lyon challenges Bauman just a little bit more than his other conversation partners; he keeps reformulating his initial questions, thereby inclining Bauman to endow his arguments with more detail and nuance. In Moral Blindness, by contrast, Donskis’ and Bauman’s perspectives often seem too congenial to each other for creating a fertile intellectual tension. All too often they simply affirm and applaud each other’s stances, rather than criticizing or confronting one another, as a result of which their arguments remain trapped on a rather superficial level. A second reason why Liquid Surveillance may be a more rewarding read is that it seems to have been edited more thoroughly than Moral Blindness. Whereas the latter contains several passages discussing the same issues without adding any new insights, the former is at least minimally embedded in the more recent literature on surveillance, both throughout the main text as well as through the mere presence of footnotes.
In sum, both books lack the depth and nuance with which their authors have addressed similar issues previously. Nevertheless, I would expect Liquid Surveillance to be an inspiring introduction for those unfamiliar with contemporary trends in surveillance studies. Instead of reading Moral Blindness, on the other hand, I suggest potential readers would benefit more from returning to one of Bauman’s original works on the moral condition of our world.