Excerpt

Ongoing mass mobilizations against both the radically invasive surveillance state and the extrajudicial murder of black people begs the question of their relation: is anti-black violence but a parochial version of a more generalizable problem of power? The interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies typically responds in the affirmative. Finding commonalities across various sites of social control, surveillance studies has become especially preoccupied with new, inclusive tracking enabled by technological innovation. We are all, so surveillance studies says, increasingly affected by the intensified (and even internalized) scope and scale of modern monitoring. This line of theorization, however, flattens the longevity and…