“In his essay on surveillance and capture, Agre offered a model for thinking about power. Or, I should be clear, his particular lens was “privacy.” But I think we can easily extrapolate to a more general model of power, within which privacy was and is a central concern. In a nutshell, Agre turned away from surveillance as the central mechanism of power, and toward what he called capture.”
“Likewise Agre characterized the capture model, contrasting it point for point with the surveillance model. Instead of being secretive and surreptitious, capture actively intervenes. Instead of having affinities with states or political movements, Agre insisted that capture’s goals were “philosophical” rather than political; capture technologies have structural effects and aspirations, whereas surveillance technologies have territorial effects, according to Agre. And, perhaps most importantly, Agre wrote that capture technologies are not visual so much as linguistic, and are not centralized so much as decentralized.”
“Computational vision doesn’t work like a centralized guard tower surveying an array of multiple cells. It works more like a multiplicity of parallel observations working in concert. At the risk of belaboring the tired old panopticon metaphor, computational visuality is a bit like if the guards moved to the perimeter of the prison, while the object under scrutiny moved to the center. Also, we’re all the guards now.”