Technologies of Surveillance:  Tracking People as Economic Subjects

Kenneth Lipartito, March 30, 2009

4:30pm - Adamson Wing, 136A Baker Hall

In England today, 4.2 million cameras, one for every fourteen people, peer at the public. The average British citizen is caught on camera 300 times per day. To be a citizen in a modern society is to be seen. We know, from classic works of modern literature, about the dangers of state surveillance: Orwell’s all-seeing telescreens, Kafka’s all-knowing state, Bentham’s ever alert prison warder. Dystopian schemes of total information awareness reappear frequently as answers to the dangers of deviance, criminality, and terrorism. But state sponsored surveillance, however powerful, is of secondary significance to the tremendous watching that goes on in the private sector. With the expansion of the market has come an expanded desire to know people as consumers, workers, borrowers, as economic subjects whose desires, behaviors, and decisions can be seen, recorded, analyzed and fed back into the economic decision making apparatus.

Professor Lipartito traces the evolution of the technologies of economic watching from the early credit reporting bureaus of the nineteenth century, through the workplace surveillance methods of the industrial corporation and out into the consumer marketplace of the twentieth century. As with the state, the desire by firms for total economic information awareness has proven an almost irresistible impulse. Yet as with state surveillance, we have reason to be skeptical of these tools and technologies of knowing. The increasingly powerful optics of economic surveillance, as recent financial market disasters should remind us, do not necessarily yield the sort of clear transparency and superior rationality promised by their promoters. Like all ways of seeing and knowing, they rest on unstated assumptions, unexamined categories and struggles of power and control.