“All the data that is ceaselessly being produced about us and by us is so important to us in part because we are constantly invited to live our lives through updates, comments, shares, and other manner of informational self-presentation. This invitation is extended to us not only by the cool new social media startups and digital device manufacturers who profit from all the data, but it is also the message we frequently get from colleagues, contacts, family, and above all the “friends” who implicitly promise to pay attention to the data we produce.”
“The sheer number of facts being collected is unprecedented if not in fact unfathomable. To make sense of the new political power that can be built out of all this data requires metaphors, and these metaphors themselves are not without political stakes. Metaphors help shape the meanings of the activities in which we are engaged and they thereby help condition what possible actions we can conceive ourselves as undertaking. Metaphors thus have a political stakes in that they define the forms of power that control us and the forms of possible resistance to power we can imagine.”
“With this heightened awareness of their own visibility, prisoners quickly learn to discipline themselves to avoid additional punishment. They become their own guards. In Bentham’s words, the panopticon is “a mill for grinding rogues honest, and idle men industrious.” It was a machine that would make men visibly mechanical.”
“Some two hundred years later, with panopticism serving as a paradigm for social engineering across all kinds of institutions — military barracks, psychiatry wards, medical clinics, schoolrooms — we readily act as if we are always being watched. We vigilantly normalize ourselves into conformists who nobody would care to take special note of. We encourage diligent obedience in friends, family, colleagues, and especially in our children. We teach them (because we were taught) to behave as if visual surveillance is inescapable. We do so regardless of the degree to which actual watchers actually see and the extent to which some of our actions are even capable of being seen at all.”
“The present moment of our obsessive data production seems to be defined by a genre of social media in which we have come to recognize ourselves in our online “profiles.” And the next stage of this obsession may well become, as data anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll suggests, a whole kit of wearable technologies that promise better living for the seemingly small price of a continuous self-tracking that runs silently in (and as) the background of our lives.”
“The form of power appropriate to this data flood is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic. We may still be docile disciplinary subjects who conceive of ourselves as constantly under the gaze of parents, teachers, and society at large, but we have also become subjects of our data, what I like to call “informational persons” who conceive of ourselves in terms of the status updates, check-ins, and other informational accoutrements we constantly assemble. An informational flood flows out of us without our awareness. Our phones and computers are constantly communicating even when we are not — and even where we are made aware of it we are coaxed into not questioning it because we are told that it has become obligatory to be online and to have an online presence.”
“This informational flotsam is made up of familiar standardized data through which we have come to define ourselves: school transcripts, health records, credit scores, property deeds, legal identities. Today, these entrenched types of data selfhood are being expanded to cover more and more of who we can be: how many steps we take each day, how much water we drink every hour, how many friends we have, what books and movies we browse, how many cute cat videos we like to watch at night.”
“Though many of us actively showcase much of the information we produce, the algorithms work on this information in silence whether we showcase it or not. We never see the algorithms doing their work, even as they affect us. They scan and scoop and store, and eventually they are able to produce us in their ciphers, all unseen, buried away in black boxes silently composing symphonies of zeroes and ones.”
“Snowden hopes that the world “says no to surveillance.” Most advocates of privacy and critics of governmental and corporate tracking agree with him. But what if saying no to the watchtower does not yet amount to saying no to the algorithm? We have a sense of what is involved in saying no to surveillance. But who among us really knows how to say no to information ubiquity? And who among us would be audacious enough to stop churning out the data that increasingly defines our very selfhood?”