The de-realization of Black bodies in an era of mass digital surveillance: A techno-criminological critique

Introduction: A brief history of de-realization

The phenomenon of de-realization is a matter of historical record. It represents a set of contingent truths borne out by de-realization's cultural artifacts (e.g. Foucault, 1977). De-realization occurs when things, people, and events are experienced as unreal, as other-worldly. When de-realization and its human sequelae chronically persist, then detachment or de-personalization follows (Guralnik and Simeon, 2010). This is the point at which de-realization as de-personalization becomes clinical disorder (Millman et al., 2021). At this juncture, “pathologies of personhood” surface because “the seam between self and world” is ripped (Guralnik and Simeon, 2010: 400, 406). This article draws critical attention to the underlying cultural dynamics of de-realization for Black bodies (of social movement protest) in the current era of mass digital surveillance.

The truths of de-realization tell the story about distinct periods of human relating and of economic exchange, commencing with the period of modernity and extending to late modernity, and then to the period of post-modernity and extending to the ultramodern age (e.g. Beck, 2009; Delanty, 2009; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Importantly for criminology, we might think of each of these historical epochs as revealing and reflecting different provisional truths given the cultural (political-economic) conditions within which crime control policy emerges and from which it takes (and has taken) on form (e.g. Arrigo and Sellers, 2021; Garland, 2002).

The cultural artifacts in question for this article include the reified forms of de-realization that populate the “historical present” (Foucault, 1977: 31). The meaning of this Foucauldian notion was explained by its author in an interview: “I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present” (Kritzman, 1988: 262; see also Garland, 2014). In this article, the question posed is as follows: what productive purposes do the technologies of mass digital surveillance serve in relation to Black identity and the lived experience of Blackness?

Our view of reification is informed by Lukács (1971). He theorized the following about this pre-cognitive process:

[It]stamps its imprint upon the whole [of one’s] consciousness … [The subject’s] qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of [his or her] personality, they are things which [one] can “own” or “dispose of” like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which [one] can bring his [or her] physical and psychic “qualities” into play without [them] being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.

The historical present is the period of ultra-modernity. In this era, truth regimes follow from the trade in pre-crime predictive analytics, post-criminology institutional dataveillance, and hyper-securitization risk governance (Arrigo et al., 2020). This is the trade in algorithmically managing human relating (e.g. disruption and disorder, irreverence and dangerousness) as currency, as commodity, in which behavioral choices scraped from unexamined and situated experience are transformed into raw material to harvest This is the point at which the human subject becomes an economic object of digital abstraction to territorialize (i.e. to de-politicize) (Deleuze, 1992) and to monetize (i.e. to de-personalize) (Zuboff, 2019).

Accordingly, the following article analyzes this territoriality, this form of de-realization, in relation to Black identity and lived experience from within the theorizing on techno-crime control and techno-criminology. Specifically, this article describes the ways in which existing methods of surveillance and big data collection have contributed to the current de-realization of Black bodies. These methods encompass all forms of algorithmic surveillance (e.g. data-driven risk assessment, predictive policing, and actuarial justice), implicating all jurisdictions (e.g. the UK, the USA). We acknowledge that there are important jurisdictional differences in the nature and racial implications of algorithm deployment. For example, the widely used risk assessment algorithms are primarily public sector tools in the UK while they are mostly commercialized in the USA. While these differences raise rather distinct political-economic questions, they are tethered to the imperatives of techno-crime control. In the present era, de-realization consists of datafication (i.e. digital profiling techniques and life mining strategies) in support of techno-crime control policy. The process of de-realization both de-politicizes Black identities and de-personalizes the lived experience of Blackness.

In order to make explicit our thesis, section one proposes a techno-criminological theory of de-realization. The theory explains how the racialized construction of surveillance in the ultramodern age is mediated by the algorithmic logic of pre-crime and the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology. In order to anchor our overall theorizing, section two explains how Black bodies have historically been the subject of excessive and invasive forms of de-realization. In part, this history includes slavery and visceral forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of branding), as well as political opposition to Civil Rights and volatile forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of suspicion). In the current era, the de-realization of Black bodies consists of the mass digital surveillance of social movements (i.e. bodies of activist social change), including BLM, that are policed through the technologies of information analytics. Section three speculates on the criminological fall-out stemming from present day manifestations of de-realization. This conjecture emphasizes how history, theory, and culture are relevant to historicizing the administration of injustice in the ultramodern age of digital reality construction.

Theorizing techno-crime control, de-realization, and race: Directions from surveillance studies and critical criminology

The term “techno-crime” was added to the criminological lexicon as a way to better conceptualize the acts of cyber-criminality (e.g. Holt and Bossler, 2020; Steinmetz and Nobles, 2018). Techno-crime consists of criminal actions involving the use of computers or other thinking machines (Leman-Langlois, 2013: 3–4). Thus, it is technology itself that functions as an instrument for furthering delinquent conduct or criminal choice-making, and as a human extension of divergent justice practices mediated through digital surveillance routines (Haggerty et al., 2011; see also, Arrigo and Sellers, 2021; Ashworth and Zedner, 2014; Powell et al., 2018). In order to secure the imperatives of governance through order maintenance, techno-crimes are screened and processed by crime control institutions (e.g. the police) that rely on digital management tools, and correspondingly, information-gathering techniques (e.g. Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Lyon, 2001; O’Malley, 2010). In this way, we might think of the systems of justice as reaffirming the priorities of “algorithmic risk governance” (Hannah-Moffat, 2019: 453).

For purposes of this article, our reliance on the term “techno-crime control” refers to the ways in which technology is deployed and used (often pre-reflexively) to determine who is (or those groups that are) under suspicion/uncertainty for risk. These methods consist of statistical computations derived from algorithmic risk assessments and social sorting protocols (Amoore and De Goede, 2005: 158; Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 432). In most instances, these methods are themselves the source of taken-for-granted ontological conventions and epistemological commitments. Moreover, our theorizing on and about techno-crime control emerges from and builds upon existing efforts from within critical and/or radical criminology (e.g. Banks, 2018; Hannah-Moffat, 2019; Pfohl, 2015; Phillips et al., 2020; Ugwudike, 2020, 2021). As such, several assumptions form the basis of our preliminary theorizing.

First, we reject system-reinforcing definitions of techno-crime control. These definitions simply reproduce the relations of capitalist production without fundamentally challenging the political-economic values on which these relations are based (Banks, 2018; Dyer-Witheford, 1999). Instead, we use the term to denote the ways in which state surveillance technologies are excessive and invasive. Their deployment both intrudes upon and undoes the civil liberties of targeted citizen-suspects (Browning and Arrigo, 2020). One case in point is the de-realization of Black identity, de-politicized and de-personalized through the statistical manipulation of Black bodies (Glover, 2008). When this manipulation is “standardized”, then the “digital racialization of risk” prevails (Ugwudike, 2020: 482; see also Magnet and Rodger, 2012; Wang and Tucker, 2017) as industry.

Second, de-realization depends on “methods of datafication” (e.g. dataveillance, data mining, data profiling) (Van Dijck, 2014: 197). These methods are iteratively deployed, generating replications of one's identity and derivatives of lived experience. These “data doubles” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 607) are then used to determine one's level of risk suspicion (Aas, 2006: 153–155; Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 432). Consider, for example, China's Social Credit Score System (Ma, 2018). It utilizes mass surveillance, facial recognition technology, and big data analysis that algorithmically profiles (i.e. socially sorts and ranks) citizens. The sorting and ranking are derived from routine behaviors and social interactions, especially including unlawful conduct or deviant activity as proscribed by the state. China's Social Credit Score System promises to standardize the assessment of the social reputation of citizens (i.e. individual and/or group identity) and the economic standing of businesses (i.e. corporate status) through the assigning of a social credit score. Both of these are measures of risk suspicion (Arrigo et al., 2020).

Third, we accept as iatrogenic that persistent and ubiquitous digital surveillance reconceives human consciousness as conveyed through the discourse of dataism, re-embodies subjectivity as personified in the digital humanity of data doubles, and recalibrates human purpose as manifested in the technologies of institutional and governmental dataveillance. These activities form the “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 605; Thomas, 2020). Put another way, the excesses of and invasions by mass digital surveillance—on identity and lived experience—“de-vitalize” human capital and “finalize” multiple representations of (co)existence (Arrigo and Sellers, 2018: 81–85). These excesses and invasions function to reduce and repress the project of being (evolving, intersectional, multi-dimensional identity), and their maintenance reifies forms of captivity (in shared consciousness, inter-subjectivity, and in manifest expressions of collective power). The normalization of these forms of human relating reproduces “digital harm” (Hannah-Moffat, 2019: 456), including the “colonization of the psyche” (Pfohl, 2015: 101).

Fourth, we question the legitimacy and efficacy of techno-crime control governance and policy writ large. This is especially the case given the ways in which consciousness, subjectivity, and power have all been reassembled (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) in support of prediction analytics (Zedner, 2007) dataveillance truth regimes (Van Dijck, 2014), and hyper-securitization optics (Schuilenburg, 2015; Schuilenburg and Peeters, 2020). These undulating conditions—in which the human project is “in orbit, a continuous network” (Deleuze, 1992: 6)—usher in the era of pre-crime and of post-criminology (Ashworth and Zedner, 2014; McCulloch and Wilson, 2016). This is the post-disciplinary society of control. In the post-disciplinary society of control, “freedom, privacy, and sovereignty are all illusions because people, events, objects, and spaces are all sites of information to be processed and policed through passwords” (Sellers and Arrigo, 2018: 133). In the post-disciplinary society, human risk (e.g. identity) gets translated into algorithms that pre-determine (e.g. catalogue, monitor, profile and predict) “the situation” (Lippens, 2011: 175). The situation is human experience that has yet to be lived. Increasingly, the situation has become the neoliberal site of information processing and human abstraction. The by-products of this neoliberalism include digital forms of governmentality (e.g. pre-crime-control policy). These by-products signify the diffusion of power (e.g. dataveillance), and it is this diffusion that places identity and experience all the more under the reifying restrictions of techno-rationality (e.g. hyper-securitization optics) and the system-reinforcing constraints of cyber-capitalism's “information civilization” (Zuboff, 2015: 75; see also, Dyer-Witheford, 1999).

Fifth, we take as self-evident that the traditional human agent is dis-located and adrift in control society. Indeed, as Deleuze (1992: 6) observed, “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’.” Consequently, mass digital surveillance methods and data collection techniques have brought new meaning to cognitive and social constructs such as privacy, community, and corporeality. Of these constructions, we note that the encoding and encryption of the body is particularly problematic. Digital representations are separated from terrestrial human experience (Dubbeld, 2003: 152). All bodies are algorithmically profiled (i.e. digitally branded through the technology of information analytics). However, these algorithms are contingent upon asymmetrical judgments made through surveillance technologies and social sorting protocols derived from unexamined assumptions about “observers and the observants” (Dubbeld, 2003: 153). For purposes of our techno-criminological theorizing, the de-realization of Black bodies stems from a process of “digital epidermalization” (Browne, 2015: 91). This process occurs when bodies of color are territorialized through techno-crime control surveillance that de-politicizes (redesigns) and de-personalizes (redefines) race algorithmically as risk to govern (Chan, 2008; Glover, 2008; Hannah-Moffat, 2019).

Historical analysis: Black (social) movements and surveillance

The de-realization of Black bodies in an era of mass digital surveillance: Criminological speculations

In what follows, we highlight the criminological fallout that ensues from the de-realization of Black bodies in the current era of ubiquitous digital surveillance. We refer back to our theoretical assumptions about techno-crime control to both situate and amplify our provisional commentary. The commentary emphasizes how history, theory, and culture are relevant to historicizing the administration of injustice in the ultramodern age of algorithmic reality construction.

Assumption 1: The Problematic Truth about De-realization—we postulated that mass digital surveillance technologies de-realize. More specifically, we asserted that the technologies of information analytics de-politicize Black identity and de-personalize Black lived experience. We further maintained that de-realization intrudes upon and undoes the civil liberties of targeted citizen-suspect groups in ways that are both excessive and invasive.

The problematic truth about de-realization in the historical present differs from previous epochal incarnations of human relating. Cultural conditions (e.g. political-economic currents and intensities) fuel historical periods and these periods both reflect and reveal important contingent truths about crime control. Beyond the realm of branding and outside the remit of suspicion is the rationale of post-criminology. Post-criminology manages the racialized situation (including the space of awaiting social movement politics) asymmetrically. Stated differently, struggle is forecasted and dissent is predicted through the cognitive prism of Whiteness. Within this schema, bureaucratic techno- rationality (e.g. accountability measures, best practices, and efficiency protocols) is emphasized, absent a recognition that Black resistance and lived protest emerge from and are embedded within a multilayered and misbegotten history of de-realization. Reliance on this prism reproduces “doxic experiences” (Peterson, 2017: 251) that are central to the social unconscious (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015). Ominously, the structure of this unconscious “mask[s] the [W]hiteness of mainstream academic activity as race becomes other people’s (research and teaching) business, typically relegated to the periphery of the discipline” (Phillips et al., 2020: 430). This is why Black luminosity functioning as panoptic power is essential to the structuration of the social unconscious; it has always been so.

Assumption 2: The Problematic Truth about Datafication—we theorized that, in the current era, de-realization depends on methods of datafication (e.g. dataveillance, data mining, data profiling). These methods—derived from predictive algorithms—generate bytes of behavioral information that establish a digital imprint of one's identity and of lived experience. These data are then used to determine one's level of risk. The respective technologies of branding and of suspicion were deployed during previous historical periods and also functioned to manage risk (Black slaves and Black Civil Rights) as trade. This truth is altogether lost in algorithmic translation.

The state's routine reliance on and enforcement of digital profiling strategies and life mining practices are used (have been used) to predict the behavioral choices and actions of Black bodies organized in solidarity as a social movement of protest and change. The ongoing deployment of these strategies and practices has been standardized in the case of BLM. This standardization—sourced within mostly unexamined ontological conventions and epistemological commitments—is how risk gets decoded into a racialized algorithm in support of surveillance capitalism's techno-crime control imperatives of pre-crime policy. Routine reliance on SMMS by state and federal law enforcement agencies as well as military entities amply illustrates this political-economic point. This is the moment when dissent, opposition, and resistance—along with the historical residue of slave rebellion and protest politics—get asymmetrically converted into and redefined as prediction equations about “calculated” precaution and “forecasted” preemption. This is how Black luminosity manifests perniciously as techno-crime control trade in the historical present, in the ultramodern age. The tools of this new trade guarantee that Black bodies are illuminated by algorithms. These tools consist of BIE assessments, social media monitoring (in particular, SMMS), biometry, and other dataveillance regimes. But, these regimes are iatrogenic; they de-realize. More pointedly, they displace history and colonize culture by disavowing Blackness and dismissing Black lived experience through the digital imprinting of hashtags, thermal camera imaging, and other information analytic technologies that merely manufacture de-personalized and market de-politicized data doubles.

Assumption 3: The Problematic Truth about Digital Harm—the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology governs bodies of Black resistance and movement politics as calculable human risk to manage. The datafication of Black identity as protest and lived experience as struggle generated through reliance on SMMS de-vitalizes and a-historicizes the legacy of Black de-realization. Datafication assumes that the criminological problem of predicting and staving off opposition and revolt is solved by techno-crime control practices without computing how techno-crime control practices are, in fact, constitutive of Black activism (i.e. BLM outrage, dissent, and discord). In a similar way, the technologies of branding co-shaped the visceral experience of slave resistance and the technologies of suspicion co-shaped the volatile experience of Black Civil Rights protest (e.g. Browne, 2015).

The potential iatrogenic effects of such institutional dataveillance are even more problematic. In short, the excesses of and invasions by mass digital surveillance—on identity and lived experience—“colonize” human (co)existence (Pfohl, 2015: 101) at the level of Black historical consciousness. This is the consciousness of de-realization as endemic to the Black experience of (un)civil society. In the current era, Black protest as a shared space of psychic unrest, as a discursive instance of human interrelatedness, and as an opportunity for expressing collectivist power is racialized algorithmically as human risk to predict and to govern absent a consideration of culture or context. This governance reifies forms of digital harm. It is this harm that currently instantiates de-realization's “pathologies of personhood” (Guralnik and Simeon, 2010: 400).

Assumption 4: The Problematic Truth about Control Society—the unsettling truth about control society is that, increasingly, its chief cultural by-product is the de-realization of the masses. In the ultramodern age of control society, everyone is a citizen-suspect, a would-be offender, or is managed as a potential human threat (e.g. Beck, 2009; O’Malley, 2010). This is why administrative systems of regulation and governance warrant critique, including techno-crime control policy writ large (e.g. Schuilenburg, 2015; Schuilenburg and Peeters, 2020). However, in the case of BLM as a social body for movement activism and protest, the process of de-realization de-politicizes and de-personalizes differently. The regimes of truth that follow from BLM territorialization and monetization reassemble consciousness, subjectivity, and power.

Indeed, the productive purposes that the technologies of mass digital surveillance serve in relation to Black identity and the lived experience of Blackness include the abstraction and repression of Black history. The trade in algorithmically managing BLM relatedness (e.g. disruption and disorder, irreverence and dangerousness) as human currency, as risk commodity, obscures the situated psychic meanings that both anchor and stain the historical present. These meanings extend to the technologies of branding and of suspicion that inform the consciousness of Blackness today. Instead, as in the past, Black bodies become economic objects of (digital) commodification to territorialize (e.g. to demonize, to vilify) and to monetize (i.e. to market, to sell). This is how Black identity and experience get de-politicized and de-personalized within the social consciousness of control society.

Assumption 5: The Problematic Truth about Digital Epidermalization—when the algorithmic trade in digital surveillance racializes Black identity and Black lived experience as human risk to police, then dissent and opposition, objection and resistance, get iteratively computed as pre-crime to control before these phenomena take on pre-cognitive form and are lived as states of human consciousness, inter-subjectivity and power. We take this view to be consistent with Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012, 2015) critique of criminology's disciplinary unconscious. What is challenged here are the “racialized modes of thought” (Phillips et al., 2020: 431) that underpin criminology and the de-realizing effects that this reinforcement exercises non-reflexively against Black bodies within control society. This critique extends to criminology's:

traditions and national particularities, its obligatory problematics, its habits of thought, its shared beliefs and self-evidences, its rituals and consecrations, its constraints as regards publication of findings, all of which combine to determine the nature of criminology's knowledge of race.

The maintenance of this disciplinary unconscious constitutes the productive purpose guaranteed by the technologies of mass digital surveillance, especially when they are deployed expressly to monitor Black identity and the lived experience of Blackness. BLM is one prototypical example. The disciplinary unconscious is the undulating psychic force that sustains a process Browne (2015: 91) termed “digital epidermalization”. This process occurs when bodies of color are territorialized through techno-crime control surveillance that de-politicizes (redesigns) and de-personalizes (redefines) race algorithmically as risk to govern. This “position-taking” governance is how criminology's scholastic unconscious (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015) operates asymmetrically without “self-criticality and self-awareness” (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2012; Phillips et al., 2020: 431). In relation to race and criminology, the scholastic unconscious:

tends towards the elevation of theoretical abstraction into a kind of discrete zone of moral cognitive and aesthetic inquiry taken to be necessarily superior to an interpretation of the lifeworlds of the people who are its subject. It lives in the ivory tower—with the emphasis on “ivory” … free to question everything but itself.

Summary and conclusion

In the ultramodern age of digital reality construction, the technologies of information analytics are utilized in the service of techno-crime control policy. As this article has argued, this is policy based on the reproduction of surveillance data that is racialized algorithmically (e.g. Browning and Arrigo, 2020; Hannah-Moffat, 2019; Ugwudike, 2020, 2021). The everyday effect of this racialization is the de-realization of Black identity and lived experience. To be clear, the Black experience as de-realized is not new. Instead, for people of color, de-realization is an artifact of history. The respective technologies of branding and of government suspicion are visceral and volatile relics of de-realization's personally invasive and politically excessive fall-out.

However, when de-realization occurs in the ultramodern age, then Blackness is de-politicized and de-personalized differently. In the current era, the excessive and invasive manifestations of de-realization function to undo the nature of shared consciousness, the experience of inter-subjectivity and the very expression of insurgent power. As our techno-criminological theorizing explained, the algorithmic logic of pre-crime and the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology mediate and manufacture the racialized construction of surveillance. What this means, then, is that social movements (e.g. BLM as a body of activist social change), are policed through the predictive technologies of information analytics, including their unexamined ontological conventions and epistemological commitments about “prevention and precaution”, “law and security”, “disruption and violence”, and “community and citizenship”. These conventions and commitments represent reified forms of “algorithmic governance” deployed for purposes of “risk prediction in justice systems [that perpetuate] power and control over people's lives” (Ugwudike, 2021: 484). We asserted that, in the ultramodern age, the most excessive and invasive manifestations of algorithmic governance de-realize Black identity and lived experience.

History, theory, and culture have much to teach criminology. Much like Freud warned, we repeat what we do not psychically understand. De-realization is one phenomenon whose criminological biography cannot be ignored or repressed; otherwise, de-realization as clinical condition will suffer persistent misunderstanding. Regrettably, and still, we are administering an injustice. This article drew critical attention to this misapprehension's ill-fated and iatrogenic endurance, noting de-realization's present day human sequelae for Black bodies.

Surely, we can and must do better so that we can become better. The patient's recovery depends upon the emotional labor of becoming. This labor liberates by illuminating the social unconscious and the debilitating structures of domination on which it stands. Without such deep psychological work, radical de-realization is certain to follow, and with it, individual and collective agency, regrettably, will become its casualty.