Week 2: Origins & History

<aside> 💡 What fascinated me about this week's readings were, if read in chronological order of their publication, how the overarching themes were presented. In Foucault's third chapter in Discipline & Punish: Birth of the Prison, he lays the groundwork of the majority of surveillance studies discourse with Bentham's Panopticon and panopticism. In "A contextual Approach to privacy online", Nissenbaum explores privacy concerns and proposals to fortify notice-and-consent shortly after the media's coverage of Facebook's and Google's privacy gaffes and, interestingly, just a couple of years before Edward Snowden's NSA leak. Browne's Dark Matters challenges Foucault's groundwork and the current discourse in surveillance studies by recognizing the violence history of racializing surveillance. Kumar and Kundnani explore the evolution of contemporary racialized surveillance in the post-9/11 and post-Snowden era in "Race, Surveillance, and Empire".

During the class lecture on the selective history of computer culture, I couldn't help but notice that white males were often the "founders" or "leaders" of the technological advancements. It's not surprising given the white male dominated spaces of the technology sector and academia. From Computer Lib! / Dream Machines to Apple's expos and ads, the marketing of technology as a dream for "changing the world" reminds me of the Enlightenment philosophies that inspired colonialism and its pursuit of development for the sake of human society. What they seem to share is an ego-driven patriarchal global North worldview that conveniently glosses over the classisms, racisms, sexisms, and other -isms that the real world experiences.

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