Irreristible Barguains - Robert M.

Pallitto (2018)

According to Jonas - A surveillance society is inevitable and irreversible. More interestingly,

I believe a surveillance society will also prove to be irresistible. This movement is not only
being driven by governments; it is being driven primarily by consumers — you and me — as
we eagerly adopt ever-increasing numbers of irresistible goods and services, often not
knowing what personal information is being collected, or how it may end up being used.

‘Jonas is writing in the context of information sharing by organizations that provide

consumers with a service (such as information storage or e-mail); thus he is concerned
specifically with surveillance in the sense of collection and aggregation of personal data. In
exchange for the service provided, organizations acquire knowledge about individual
consumers, and in turn that knowledge provides leverage to the organization and also to
anyone else to whom the data is sold or given.

...When we think about surveillance we tend to assume that the state is doing the
surveilling, but Jonas is referring to private actors rather than state actors. Their data
gathering surveillance is instrumental to successful marketing or to the commerce of
information sharing, whereas state actors, by contrast, seek ultimately to preserve and
increase state power when they decide to utilize surveillance techniques. The practice of risk
assessment cuts across this public/private division: insurance companies and governments
have reasons to assess and manage risk, and data gathered by one actor can be useful to
another. Thus, the surveillance society is constituted and supported by a range of
actors and activities, both public and private. And the line demarcating state from
corporate is blurred, in many ways. Consultants report to and advise state policy-makers,
and governments contract out privately their traditional state functions, from policing to
prisons. Telecom providers share call data and records with the government, and private
contractors sell surveillance technology to government. An important aspect of the
“irresistibility” of the surveillance society consists in the engagement of consumers
with organizations selling products, but state and corporate actors are multiply
connected...

...Nikolas Rose offers an alternative to a bright line divide between state and corporate
surveillance practices. He envisions social relations flowing through circuits of inclusion and
exclusion. Both facilitate social control, but they work in different ways. Circuits of
inclusion and Circuits of exclusion.

And both kinds of circuits function in inconsistent and even contradictory ways. Moving
through them, individuals “engag[e] in a diversified and dispersed variety of private,
corporate and quasi-corporate practices, of which working and shopping are
paradigmatic.”

...In other words, it is not impossible, but rather very difficult, to resist engagement
with the surveillance society…

Nonetheless, resistance is a challenge, and consumers often do find these bargains

irresistible. There are at least five components of this irresistibility. Specific bargains can be
(or seem to be) irresistible:
- in terms of convenience
- in terms of efficiency
- in terms of ubiquity
- in terms of the networked life-world
- in terms of the source of sharing being hard to pinpoint