1984 and the Panopticon perpetuate analog understandings of digital surveillance.
Today’s surveillance is predominately performed “by ordinary users of social media, but it is enabled by some very complex high technology from some of the largest corporations in the world” (Lyon, 2018, p.132) who rule behind the mask of Western democracy. For Harcourt, users’ willingness to surrender personal information to data companies does not come through freedom of choice, but rather our inability to prevent data companies from profiting off our engagement with these systems. Combined with our social reliance on said technologies, and the ways in which boredom and entertainment are self-medicated by the same systems, we have abandoned our own privacy for the sake of mass media. Capitalism is now involved in the commercialization of nostalgia and the manufacture of desire, and the colonized individual is irrevocably dependent on the surveillance system. In the era of technocracy, there are no laws to protect data that is increasingly becoming human, in part due to the very technocrats who prevent data protection from ever existing. Our exploitation is their profit, and we have “entered an age of costless publicity and dirt-cheap surveillance” (Harcourt, 2015, p.116) for the sake of convenience.
Similarly, Jeremey Bentham’s Panopticon, including Foucault’s work with it as praxis, has become outdated. While these key surveillance systems of the past are helpful as a historical or philosophical framework, they present surveillance practices as something that is done onto us by third party policing systems. The participatory system of today’s surveillance has serfs complicit in the digital network of the surveillance-profit ecosystem. The panopticon functions with a threat of perpetual surveillance, but when voyeurism becomes a way of life, and when surveillance therefore engages in a passive and autonomous process of entertainment to sedate the masses, it is no longer a “threat”. The panopticon’s architecture is dead, but the panopticon’s theory of perpetual surveillance is reborn. Continuous surveillance is no longer an illusion: it is maintained by everyone through their passive engagement with media technologies.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has a stranglehold on Western literature that is grandfathered onto our comprehension of surveillance practices. Yet our continuing to project an analog understanding of surveillance onto the digital infrastructure further obfuscates our relation with the police state. Unfortunately, in much the same ways that Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Panopticon have been invalidated by technological progress in the 21st century, the U.S. police state is accelerating is ways that will invalidate even my thoughts here on the topic.
As surveillance practices have transformed from analog to digital, the manufacture of an outsourced “Other” has become an integral rationale for the allowance of surveillant systems both past and present. In mid-century United States, and in Orwell’s imaginaries, for an object to be surveillant it “would have to be deliberately bugged” (Lyon, 2018, p.92) to transmit data to the surveillance agency. Then the threat of Soviet spies on U.S. territory during the Cold War offered an integral justification for financing the police state. To protect U.S. citizens from foreign surveillance, local surveillance first had to proliferate, for there was no way of knowing which Americans were foreign assets during the manufacture of the Red Scare without surveillance of the public body. In this light, Nixon’s wiretapping political opponents and the eventual Watergate scandal was rationalized as protectionism and patriotism.
According to Tomas Schuman, former KGB propagandist and Soviet defector [11], “xenophobia is a vital and inevitable element of ideological subversion” (1985, p.53)[open endnotes in new window] and perception management. It is important to recognize the irony here. In the Western manufacture of Soviet xenophobia in the 20th century, the West would recreate those very same Soviet ideological practices of surveillance on their own territory and subjects. Xenophobia would then provide the same undercurrent of digital surveillance practices of 9/11 and COVID-19 modernity.
In the wake of 9/11, three years before Facebook would go public and begin the digital arms race for surveillance technocrats, fear would play an integral role in manipulating the desire for safety through surveillance measures (Lyon, 2018, p.39). Through the media’s intentional amplification of Islamophobia, for example, normalizing xenophobia in public spaces provided the ideal excuse for the implementation and increase in surveillant systems; the public would increasingly become willing to sacrifice their own civil liberties to subjugate those fears.
As an example of this fear around borders, the post-9/11 airport is the ideal construct to understand biopolitical control. Airport security enforces a “series of supervisions, checks, inspections, and varied controls” (Foucault, 2007, p.4) that the individual is required to subject themselves to access services. Over the past 25 years, these machines have progressed from simple x-ray imagers that peer into our luggage to whole-body imaging and retinal scanning that capture one’s biometric personhood and catalogue that data for the socio-technical assemblage. Despite near zero instances of on-flight terror, surveillance and biopolitical racial profiling technologies have only escalated. The emergence of ISIS, and subsequent vital xenophobic subversion by legacy and digital media systems, during what should have been a cooling process of surveillance only led to unanimous political support for strengthening those very technologies in the name of countering terrorism (Lyon, 2018, p.67).
This escalation of surveillance structures in the face of declining security threats provides insight into the subtext of social control that permeates security technologies that pretend to keep the public safe. While these surveillance systems may, in their inception, have been implemented in the name of safety and security, the current state of facial recognition and biometric surveillance systems in airports suggests that the objectives of these technologies have simply changed. These systems are becoming more pervasive and increasingly technologically advanced, when logically they should be in a period of phasing out in lieu of the developing security concerns present in other industries. Most critically though we accept such surveillance technologies as something normal. They are something that we will get used to; and for Lyon, technically we have.
On another scale, the social and technological reactions to COVID-19 compounded on the already-pervasive system of social surveillance through digital technologies created under the guise of social security. Countries adopted a new flavour of xenophobia that was necessary to support the social narrative of biopolitics. For example, COVID-19 contract-tracing apps, delivered through smartphones and vaccine checkpoints regulated by biometric data, now enforce a new paradigm of biosecurity [12]. Physical movements of both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are measured and analyzed with quarantine and social distancing laws. Vaccine status has become a metric of social engagement, where compliance with the vaccine system either allowed or prevented citizens from engaging in civic participation. At the time, governments may have encouraged vaccines, but the social sorting metrics and policing of public spaces arose after public spaces required biometric proof for access. Under this system, the citizen “no longer has a ‘right to health’ (health safety), but instead becomes legally obliged to health (biosecurity)” (Agamben, 2020, p.28). Nationalism is a powerful promoter of technologies. Manufacturing the outsourced “Other” is the capitalized antagonist required for national security.
PRISM slide 8 leaked by Snowden. PRISM is the clandestine surveillance program operating under the NSA that collects user data through GAMMA and other tech companies for industrial espionage.
Today, it is corporations, not governments, who are the primary facilitators of surveillance (Lyon, 2018, p.83) largely due to the technocratic caste of elites who rule behind the performance of democracy. While it was indeed governments who enacted 9/11 and COVID surveillance in the name of national security, it was the Western tech companies who supplied the architecture for surveillance and data extraction of local communities [13]. Technophiles and digital fetishism reduce the perceived threat of surveillance, and the logistical gap in knowledge surrounding these technologies allow tech companies to rule unimpeded. Furthermore, the law itself is powerless in the face of the oligarchy.
Under the U.S. oligarchy, Trump’s police state is in unquestioning power. Again, fueled by xenophobia, with the manufactured hatred of migrant minorities proliferated by the same inescapable mass media surveillance organism, the constitutional rights of suspects and innocents are circumvented through perpetual surveillance and our expository society. ICE is performing their role as a paramilitary Gestapo unimpeded by law, deporting U.S. citizens if their racial profile doesn’t align with the far-right’s vision for the technocratic West. ICE and Homeland Security are already intertwined with the tech empire. Specifically, they use Clearview AI–another of Thiel’s investing ventures–to utilize facial recognition technology to fulfil the oligarchy’s mass-deportation agenda (O’Brien, 2025). Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, says he wants his deportation process to run “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings” (Dunbar, 2025). Inhumanity aside, AI-recognition technologies offer the means of digitizing colonial warfare. Here, the automatic process of algorithms invisible to all further makes the suffering of human victims invisible to their oppressors. In the eyes of a colonial conqueror, “savage life is just another form of animal life” (Mbembe, 2019, p.77. In this way, utilizing algorithms to conceal the humanity of neocolonial victims is integral to the success of technocracy.
Supposed chemical manufacturing plant tracked over 4 years by the CIA using Keyhole EarthViewer.
Mass deportations powered by Big Data provide a digitized example of Mbembe’s pro-slavery democracy (2019). It is a democracy only in performance. We are experiencing the same extraction and profit process of colonizing territories, resources, and bodies. But now the territories are both physical and digital spaces, the resources are human lives rendered invisible by technologies as well as human data extrapolated from our participation with networked technologies, and the bodies are us all. With lesser consequences, the ban of TikTok, or more accurately the performance of its ban, was never about privacy. Instead, it is emblematic of surveillance capital being owned by a foreign state power rather than local power [14]. Just as old colonial powers fought for territory in meatspace, new colonial powers are fighting for control over the surveilled subject in cyberspace.
Clearview AI, the world’s largest facial network, regularly supplies facial recognition data to police services.
Palestine: the state of exception
Palestine is the most significant outsourced “Other” of today. It is a seemingly final colonial project where the oppressed are still under subjugation by their colonizers. Gaza is under siege and the West Bank is an open-air prison filled with regulatory systems of checkpoints, enclosures, watchtowers and policed gates, demolition–the ideological assassination of culture that Foucault describes, all of which have “no other function than to intensify the enclaving of entire communities” (Mbembe, 2019, p.43). Algorithmically-mediated oppression is the policing architecture of the occupied territories. Biopolitical control over bodies, spaces, movement, medicine, are the set of mechanisms wherein judicial orders are suspended. North America may now have reconciled the history of South Africa, of Rhodesia, but it can never recognize Palestinian independence because such a thought forces the West to come to terms with its own colonial history. That is, recognition of the Palestinian genocide means not just recognizing our own genocides but also acknowledging the ongoing neocolonial conquest of serfs. If Palestine is recognized as legitimate, then the colonial story of Israel is a failure, and in that light, the colonial success of Canada and the United States must be scrutinized.
West Bank surveillance tower with remote guns pointed at the Arroub refugee camp. Note the structural similarities to the Panopticon. Further reading, see a 2023 report by Amnesty International on the use of AI in automating apartheid.
Palestine is the state of exception [15], where rights and identities are nullified so the sovereign power can operate outside of the law to perpetuate the colony’s subjugation. Here, “the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the state’s murderous function” (Mbembe, 2019, p.71), and this function is funded unequivocally by democracies in the West. The West Bank is the most efficient police state grounded in xenophobia. It has been perfected in ways that South African apartheid could never replicate, in part due to the digital millennium. Coloured ID cards based in the Palestinian population registry have been central to Israeli “efforts to control movement and demographics” (Alsaafin, 2017) within the West Bank by ensuring that the body is regulated by biopolitics. Where South African apartheid had to rely on analog technologies of surveillance to keep blacks in inferior positions, network technology and biometrics have streamlined Palestinian suppression. The Israeli apartheid policies of fragmenting populations is the original colonial technology for regulating human movements (Mbembe, 2019), and this regulation prevents access to roads, infrastructure, homes, education, and healthcare for the state-mandated lower class.
Palestinian ID cards designating the state of exception and Palestinians as second-class citizens.
Pro-slavery democracies of the West orchestrate immense control over Palestinian information, including the recent capture and deportation threats of legal U.S. residents who maintain a presence at pro-Palestinian protests both online and offline (Faguy & Iqbal, 2025). Netanyahu has called for harsher policing and greater force against students involved in any Palestinian solidarity (Guardian, 2024), regardless of their citizenship, and for the further proliferation of the Western police state guided by the success of Israel as a colonizer. In both states, “prisons have reverted to the preevolutionary function of extraction” (Harcourt, 2015, p.235) and the notions of re-education and skill-building are stripped away. Recidivism rates are irrelevant when the goal of the prison–be it the for-profit prison of the United States or the open-air prison of the West Bank or the Reservation of indigenous peoples–is to complete the absolute extraction of bodies achieved through the state of exception.
At the same time, perception management of Palestine and its occupation is paramount to the success of Western neocolonialism and technocracy. Digital infrastructure, enclosed by technocrats, creates a manufactured reality where the access to equitable information no longer exists. In the post-truth West, control over information access, as well as control over what information aligns with colonial narrative, is the status quo. Outside of cyberspace, on-the-ground journalism in Gaza is the deadliest media conflict in recent history. More journalists, independent or otherwise, were killed by Israel this past year than in the entirety of the Iraq war [16]. Control over information is essential, and that includes control over the sources of how information is processed—be that digital infrastructure or through human reporters.
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk arrested on March 25, 2025, by plain-clothes DHS officers for the thought crime of criticizing Israel.
Active warzones have never been an acceptable excuse for the intentional slaying of journalists and doctors, but under Israel’s state of exception, this excuse is commonplace. Information of the genocide cannot reach the world: the colonizer ensures the murder of informants at the source, the technocrats prevent the circulation of surviving information, and the police state ensures activism spreading information never survives. And the ambivalence of the Western techno-serf is in utmost compliance with their feudal rulers.
Digital resistance is a form of resistance, because in an era where the very act of living and existing threatens the ongoing colonial project, it is integral to recognize the systems that allow resistance to succeed. While it is true that information is under siege, it is through those very same systems of surveillance that the world can perceive injustice. Filming police during inevitable protest crackdown, sharing evidence of ongoing violence (Lyon, 2017, p.46), or organizing protests through network technologies and utilizing digital infrastructure to mobilize social movements [17], are some of the ways in which massive social movements have reached an international spectacle. Like Occupy Wall Street encampments, the Arab Spring, or the Umbrella Movement, social media systems were integral in both developing a method for resistance as well as in sharing evidence with anyone who would watch. While it truthfully is a failure to encourage further engagement with these systems of digital oppression, the architecture of surveillance connects us all, and through it bears the network of resistance. Technology is also a source of collective power, and it is easier to destroy something than it is to protect it.
Hopefully future scholars will look at the ways in which surveillant and biopolitical practices function “on the ground” as they are most clearly being played out in the West Bank. Unfortunately, Western academia is largely “waiting” for the genocide to reach resolution so its process can be studied as a symptom of history, rather than an ongoing process. Or, in a process that allows the West to acknowledge their ongoing compliance with genocide. The desired historic lens will reify colonialism as something that happened instead of the process currently happening through the global accumulation of bodies, data, and profit. Academia is another mask of performance largely because it is indebted to these very same systems of control that are integrated into late-stage capitalism.
The West Bank is the most successful police state under Western influence, or with Western ideological support, and it will be important to recognize the ways in which the governing West adopts these very same metrics of migratory control on the local scale. Through North American technophilia, biopolitics may play out in the advance of smart cities, where the interconnectedness of data and citizens will further render certain peoples invisible to injustice. Here, the science-fiction allure of futurism will play out as a convincing metric to allow further suppression of at-risk peoples.
Contemporary biopolitics enacted on political dissidents under current U.S. oligarchy is only just beginning. So too is the rapid acceleration of the police state, and the ongoing calls for legacy media systems to be defunded so the infosphere can be further consolidated amongst a tech empire. A return to corporatism under the guise of neoliberalism will not save democracy from our technocratic rulers.
Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014.
