"Automated Surveillance"

This chapter explores the emerging logic of surveillance in the era of automated digital data collection, which transforms the scope, scale, and goals of surveillance practices and institutions. However, in the era of automated surveillance it is neither the individual nor the population that is at stake, but the pattern. If the superintendent served as a symbolic stand-in for an omniscient gaze, automated surveillance envisions the construction of omniscience in reality. Panopticism relies upon the symbols of surveillance: tower, camera, microphone, one-way glass, and so on, whereas automated surveillance no longer needs to represent itself to make itself present to targets precisely because it is everywhere, and so it recedes into the environment. Automated surveillance turns out to be even more productive than its Panoptic predecessor. Machlup’s findings laid the groundwork for myriad studies of so-called white-collar employment and occupations, especially in developed, affluent societies.