Governance and surveillance¶

Missing cards

Two sources have no PDF and no card: foucault2007security (Foucault 2007, Security, Territory, Population) and stahl2019sousveilling (Stahl & Kaempf 2019). The page builds on the other five. Foucault 2008 is an excerpt with OCR errors (see the card).

What the cluster is about¶

The cluster brings together texts on surveillance and power, from state intelligence to companies' tracking of consumers [T]. Foucault's text on panopticism is the classic reference: visibility that makes the observed discipline themselves (Foucault 2008, pp. 6–7) [U].

Two texts concern the Snowden revelations. Bauman et al. 2014 describe a transnational network of intelligence agencies and companies that blurs the line between the domestic and the foreign (pp. 122–126) [U]. Gros et al. 2017 analyse how the European Parliament's hearings turned the Snowden files into public evidence and distributed responsibility (p. 73) [U].

Two texts concern commercial data collection. Fourcade 2017 describes how digital capitalism extracts value from data about people (p. 661) [U]. Ruckenstein & Granroth 2020 show how Finnish consumers react to targeted advertising with fear, irritation and pleasure (p. 17) [U].

Sources in the cluster¶

Source	Main claim in one sentence	Role in the cluster (central/peripheral)
Bauman et al. 2014	The post-Snowden debate cannot be limited to surveillance versus privacy; much more is at stake (p. 121) [U]	Central [T]
Gros et al. 2017	The hearings turned the Snowden files into valid evidence, but the debate was ‘descaled’ to technical and legal solutions (pp. 73, 79, 86) [U]	Central [T]
Foucault 2008	The Panopticon is a generalisable model of power through visibility (p. 9) [U]	Classic background [T]
Fourcade 2017	Economic value is produced both when people are aligned with the system and when they deviate from the norm (p. 661) [U]	Peripheral [T]
Ruckenstein & Granroth 2020	Consumers want contradictory things: less tracking and more relevant predictions (p. 12) [U]	Peripheral; only Nordic empirical study [T]
Foucault 2007	No PDF	–
Stahl & Kaempf 2019	No PDF	–

Shared questions and assumptions¶

Invisibility and naturalisation recur:
- Bauman et al. describe surveillance as fluid and hard to grasp, and the unease about metadata as ‘Kafkaesque’ (p. 141) [U].
- Fourcade writes that the most effective data infrastructure is ‘baked into the background’ (p. 672) [U].
- Ruckenstein & Granroth write that personal data collection has become naturalised (p. 14) [U].
- Foucault, by contrast, describes power that is visible but unverifiable (p. 6) [U].
- Whether digital forms of surveillance are more invisible than the panoptic one is a question the texts raise but do not settle [T].
The boundary between state and company: data collected for commercial purposes is handed over to intelligence agencies (Bauman et al. 2014, p. 123) [U]. The companies in the European Parliament's hearings said they only followed lawful orders (Gros et al. 2017, p. 85) [U].
People's acceptance: Bauman et al. describe a surprisingly calm public reaction to the revelations (pp. 142–143) [U]. Ruckenstein & Granroth describe how the pleasure of relevant advertising can override privacy concerns (p. 21) [U].

Disagreements and tensions¶

Normative critique or material practices? Gros et al. place Bauman et al. 2014 in a literature that offers important political critique but pays less attention to the concrete and situated practices through which surveillance becomes known, contested and regulated (Gros et al. 2017, p. 75) [U]. At the same time they make an exception for Bauman et al. p. 124 (‘but see’) (Gros et al. 2017, p. 75) [U]. On pp. 124–125, Bauman et al. describe how analysts work with relationships and visualisations (Bauman et al. 2014, pp. 124–125) [U]. Both sides have been checked against the source texts.
Big Brother and the Panopticon: Bauman et al. write that fears about Big Brother are largely irrelevant; the problem is belief in systems that ‘read’ big data (p. 125) [U]. This can be read as a comment on how well classic images of surveillance fit, but Bauman et al. do not discuss Foucault's Panopticon directly on these pages [T].
Fourcade and Callon: Fourcade argues that Callon is wrong that market devices only produce calculating actors (p. 672) [U]. Callon is not in the source list, but the disagreement bears on how markets are understood in Asdal et al. 2023, which also criticises the economisation literature (pp. 5–6) [T].

Use of concepts¶

Surveillance: used for intelligence (Bauman et al., Gros et al.), for discipline (Foucault) and for commercial tracking, dataveillance (Ruckenstein & Granroth, p. 13) [U]. The word thus covers very different practices in the cluster [T].
Privacy: Bauman et al. distinguish between the right to privacy as the overarching human right and data protection as a duty derived from it (pp. 131–132) [U]. Gros et al. show that privacy was presented in the hearings as part of European identity (pp. 85–86) [U].
Public: Gros et al. use Marres' concept of material publics (p. 75) [U]; Ruckenstein & Granroth write that the public sphere is weakened when people are left alone with algorithms (p. 22) [U].
No separate concept pages have been made yet (docs/begreper/).

Connections to other clusters¶

Documents and issues: Gros et al. build on Marres (pp. 73, 75) [U], and their method – analysing an official forum and its documents – is close to Asdal [T]. See dokumenter-saker.
Privacy and law: Bauman et al. and Solove both criticise the ‘balance’ framing (Bauman et al. 2014, p. 137; Solove 2011, pp. 34–37) [U]. See personvern-rett.
Democracy and trust: Steiger 2019 uses NSA surveillance as one of three cases (pp. 74–78), and Hankey et al. 2018 describe Snowden as the first step in a cultural shift (p. 25) [U]. See demokrati-tillit.
State and politics: Bauman et al. mention Norway as a supporter of the 2013 UN resolution on privacy (pp. 133–134) [U]. NOU 2022:11 refers to the Snowden revelations and the panopticon effect in its discussion of chilling effects (pp. 32–33) [U].

Possible use in the thesis [T]¶

The cluster provides concepts of surveillance and power that can help in reading how the documents describe the state's use of data, but most texts concern intelligence or companies, not welfare and administration [T].
Gros et al. can be a methodological example of how an official forum makes an issue public and distributes responsibility [T].
‘Descaling’ (Gros et al. 2017, p. 79) and naturalisation (Ruckenstein & Granroth 2020, p. 14; Fourcade 2017, p. 672) can be lenses for asking whether the documents make political questions about data technical or self-evident [T].

Open questions for Rebekka¶

Do you have the PDFs for Foucault 2007 and Stahl & Kaempf 2019?
Is surveillance a theme of its own in the thesis, or background for the state's use of data more generally?
Do you use Foucault as a theory of surveillance (Panopticon) or of governmentality (Foucault 2007), or both?
Do Fourcade and Ruckenstein & Granroth belong here, or in the privacy cluster?