LThe surveillance state and performance of democracy, text only

The surveillance state and performance of democracy through the
ongoing biopolitical agenda of capitalism

Surveillance and eternal colonialism

The dominant assemblage of control in contemporary Western society is that of surveillance. It is an intentional system of control: a surveillance that operates without resistance, without regulation, and without responsibility. It is not accidental, not a byproduct of technological proliferation. Consensual, surveillance is the architecture through which all governance is mediated. If data is the “new oil” [1],[open endnotes in new window] then surveillance is the new offshore drilling, the new fracking. It is the new assemblage of global exploitation.

Technologies are embedded into the most mundane aspects of our lives, and nearly every routine experience is invisibly governed by proprietary models of data collection orchestrated by a handful of private companies. Presented as convenient, as entertainment, as optional, the Western data-collection conglomerates—Apple, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon, Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), and Microsoft—enact more control over their subjects than sovereigns of the past. These technologies are not simply a part of our society, they are the supreme mediators of all civic participation; and our non-avoidable engagement with them generates immense capital at the cost of our own freedom. While people are not legally required to use these technologies, a life without them, should one choose to be an active member in civic society, is not possible. An intentional departure from these technologies’ amounts to social suicide [2].

Surveillance is enacted through capitalism, or through whatever mask of contemporary capitalism we choose by which to understand it. Surveillance scholars from a variety of disciplines have spent the past decade contextualizing the modern surveillance state through their respective fields.

Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, defines Western capitalism as a system where technology users are no longer customers, but rather the resource required to fuel an entirely new industrial system. Surveillance capitalism, this mutated economic order of extraction and profit, is a deregulated departure from market capitalism. While Zuboff’s book is not without criticism [3], it is a necessary resource in understanding relations between profit and accumulation. Zuboff well describes the surveillance state as a new form of power rising from market capitalism’s destabilization via the digital millennium.

From the financial sector, Cathy O’Neil (former MIT professor and former financial analyst pre-Occupy Wallstreet) and Yanis Varoufakis (former finance minister of Greece) appraise the contemporary data collection system and uncover invariable ties to financial industry. Varoufakis further explores finance through the lens of settler colonialism, a framework shared by the publications of Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias [4] who explicitly detail how colonialism is not solely an operation of history, nor a metaphorical way to understand modernity. Just as historic colonialism appropriated human territory and resources and ruled subjects for profit (Couldry & Mejias, 2018), data colonialism now captures human life through proprietary data extraction. Digital modernity has made this ongoing colonial process more efficient.

This article will ground its contextualization of surveillance as an architecture of enclosure, and through Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics and bio-power–in particular, his discussion of how neocolonialism has streamlined historic practices of controlling body autonomy through technologies grounded in surveillance and biopolitical control.

In a series of lectures between 1977 and 1978, Michel Foucault presents his working definition for biopolitics as a power structure (political, economic, surveillant, etc.) that exercises control over populations through the regulation of bodies. These power mechanisms, where “the basic biological features of the human species” become the object “of a general strategy of power” (Foucault, 2007, p.1) are rooted in historical colonialism where the seizure of lands and bodies accumulated wealth for European mercantilists.

This accumulation of wealth was actualized through not just the usurping of lands and resources, but by rewriting the foreign human body into another uncapitalized resource. Like land and materials, bodies provided a capital whose labour was unowned [5]. Through the colonial process, said bodies became owned by colonial sovereigns looking to accumulate wealth by force. Control over resources, including biopolitical control over bodies through the Transatlantic slave trade and creation of occupied territories, the plantation, and the intentional redistribution of human groups into subgroups (Mbembe, 2019, p.71), became the defining economic policy of colonial wealth accumulation. Loss of autonomy over capital and biopolitical restructuring of resources were enacted globally during colonialism. However, they were first practiced by British sovereigns upon their own subjects in the centuries prior.

The enclosure movement, or the feudal period that predated colonial mercantilism, was the period where Britain deliberately removed the common rights that peasants had over their farmlands and replaced those rights with financial agreements that allowed peasants to farm the very same land their ancestors had toiled for centuries. According to Foucault, “mercantilists considered the problem of population essentially in terms of the axis of sovereign and subjects” (2007, p.70). The future land owners solved the “population” problem by the peasants’ eviction, deliberately fencing them off from their lands, and the peasants’ subsequent indentured employment to these rulers of inescapable power. For colonialism to flourish, and for capitalism to be born from said ongoing exploitation, a “shift of power to command from landowners to owners of capital goods” (Varoufakis, 2023, p.64) had to occur. Peasants had to first lose access to common lands and lose the ownership of their own labour for feudalism’s transition into capitalism. And in the new fiscal reality where the number of subjects grew through the colonization of new lands and peoples, power of the sovereign needed to grow to enact control.

Mercantilists capitalized the lands, resources, and bodies of their own serfs in a mass movement of biopolitcal control through the restructuring of capital and repeopling of commons (Mbembe, 2019, p.11). In an abstract sense, the enclosure movement illustrates the period where Britian first colonized themselves, before perfecting that practice and turning colonial methods outwards and throughout the rest of the world. In my perspective on surveillance here, this historical, abstract understanding of self-colonization is necessary because digital infrastructure is grounded in the abstract, in immaterial cyberspace. The colonization of our digital commons must first be understood through digital enclosure. In the same way that feudal enclosure was necessary for colonialism and capitalism to reach global dominance, digital enclosure, or the consolidation of Internet commons via five tech companies, [6] is necessary for the subsequent colonization of digital spaces and emergence of a new logic of extraction and profit—be it surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), data capitalism (West, 2019), techno-feudalism (Varoufakis, 2023), data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2018), or the next academic profile of late-stage capitalism.

The practice of biopolitics and commodification of peasant lands is being recreated by a neo-colonization of the crippled working class, i.e., a creation of techno-serfs. Just as peasant lands were seized and their serfs indentured, digital spaces are privatized and technologically-dependant society flourishes in which the techno-serf cannot function without access to said digital lands. Similar too is how the exploited cannot resist systems of ubiquitous power. For both the serfs of mercantilist Britain and the techno-serfs of today, the intentional loss of their autonomous access to common lands underlies their exploitation. Private ownership of spaces seeks to separate users from means of equitable interaction. Such invisible and unspoken dominance is then reified through the deliberate algorithmic sorting techniques of social media systems that both:

mediate all information processed through online spaces
manufacture a filtered reality where engagement is the policing force of social networks [7].

The data revolution of the 21st century has created a deliberate return to a feudalistic social system in which the sovereign technocrats govern serfs through their monetized system of technological engagement. And, just like biopolitical control enacted upon mercantilist serfs and colonial victims, modern day surveillance and biometric collection enact immeasurable control over us all.

At the turn of the 21st century, digital spaces were ungoverned. Now, their enclosure is absolute, and digital colonization is in the process of reconfiguring social and economic exploitation. It is undeniable that immense social power has found consolidation at the hands of a select few unelected oligarchs. Social media systems are not just ways to connect with people. These systems manage all digital information in their totality, and their management is the foundational architecture of propaganda and surveillance. The very same axis of sovereign and subjects is being rationalized today: but today’s solution [8] is grounded in the rise of technocracy.

In the words of Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal alongside Elon Musk and first public investor of Facebook after the Department of Homeland Security (Lyon, 2017, p.124):

“[Technocrats] could never win an election…because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world – without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you – through a technological means” (O’Brien, 2025).

What Thiel is talking about here is undermining the democratic process and replacing it with a technocratic process. People would never vote for the technocrats in his view, but the public would elect leaders who, through technological means, are indebted to a proprietary and invisible ruling class of tech oligarchs. A select few data sovereigns who profit immensely off techno-feudalism. We can see this this exchange in recent elections, which has resulted in data corporations enacting more sovereign power than the elected body.

The power of Western tech oligarchs may have been made apparent by the Trump presidencies, but the systems that encouraged the transfer of rule from the illusion of democracy to a binary of corporatism vs. oligarchy are decades in the making. According to Mbembe, democracy itself cannot exist ideologically if that democracy still bears colonial practice (2019, p.15). Examples of the ongoing colony include the plantation and slave labour of the past and its transition into the for-profit prison system and indentured slavery of the American present; and in Canada, the genocide of Indigenous populations through the residential school systems and blood quantum laws that continue to regulate bodies and restrict rights through DNA testing. Not just metaphorically, ongoing neocolonialism is enacted by tech oligarchs. In addition, pro-slavery democracies adopt a mask of exception founded on “dissimulating or occulting the violence of their origin” (Mbembe, 2019, p.16) wherein the performance of democracy continues to reinvent itself to further obfuscate oppression and exploitation.

However, upholding a myth of democracy in our colonial states is no longer enough. The purpose of the state, both historically and contemporarily, is to subjugate the most marginalized populations because the state’s origin is that of exploitation. Democracy is a performance for the masses, a mask to disguise the governing systems of the West while “technocrats rule as an ennobled caste” (O’Brien, 2025). Behind this mask there is no possibility for democracy because corporatism and oligarchy are the two competing ruling systems of the West, neither of which care about the people as anything more than serfs to fuel tech supremacy. If Trump is the symbol of the oligarchy, then it is Obama who solidified corporatism as its antithesis. Obama famously campaigned on the promise of change, but this change was just another performative mask.

Obama said he would stand up to the “fat cat bankers of Wall Street” (Clark, 2009), but after those very same bankers gambled with taxpayer money on the stock exchange, lost, and caused the subprime mortgage crisis (Varoufakis, 2023, p.44), he bailed them out. Obama campaigned on ending the forever-war in the Middle East, but instead he extended it for his full eight years as President and won a Nobel Peace Prize for remote drone bombing the children of Syria, Yemen, and Libya (Parsons & Hennigan, 2017). Obama condemned the Patriot Act for spying on U.S. citizens, but under his administration, mass electronic surveillance reached what was then an all-time high. Obama could never stand against surveillance because it was those very surveillance systems built by GAMMA that helped elect him through the data collection and microtargeting models of their social media platforms (O’Neil, 2016, p.188). Snowden unveiled these mass-surveillance systems, but Obama branded him a traitor because Snowden betrayed the corporate technocrats responsible for Obama’s election. The American people voted for change, but the only change they got was the colour of the mask who would invariably bend the knee to corporatism—the financial sector, the military-industrial complex, and the techno-surveillance apparatus that intermediates all online and offline participation.

In Canada, Mark Carney’s electoral win as the prime minister of Canada is a win for corporatism. Carney is a banker, who served the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and the Bank of England during Brexit and COVID-19. Carney is the first prime minister in Canada’s history to have never held an elected political office at any point in his career. Carney is a technocrat, a member of the financial elite, and a factory-made, economy-first neoliberal mask who is ideal for the perpetuation of corporatism’s rule. He has zero political experience, but it does not matter because we are at the end of democracy’s performance. Like Obama, he will stand for justice only when convenient, and only when corporate actors allow him to do so. Carney’s electoral success is in part due to his administration standing up to Trump’s calls for the annexation of Canada. Or, in a broader sense, in how Canadian corporatism framed the U.S. oligarchy through populism to unite the masses [9]. Since neoliberalism has no vision for the future, it uses populism as a tool to strengthen the status quo and reinforce existing systems of power. And, under the mask of democracy, now colonizing unowned human capital in the form of digital data. In cyberspace, where laws do not necessarily exist, and through utilizing technologies that rapidly outpace the regulatory systems meant to keep them in check, digital fiefdom has succeeded.

Returning to Peter Thiel, the technophile famously wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” (Thiel, 2007). Freedom for Thiel is the libertarian freedom, not equitable freedom, since his surveillance empire regularly brokers human data for the N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the F.B.I. (Dowd, 2017), who all need the predictive analytics of biometrics and the social sorting systems derived from Big Data. To say that the collapse of both freedom and democracy are necessary for technocracy’s rise, Thiel offers the underlying message of his vision for the future. Freedom and democracy are not incompatible with each other, but rather, incompatible with a future governed by technological slavery.

Technologies do not solve social issues, and technophiles are foolish for believing so. Technologies exacerbate existing social inequalities and streamline injustices through proprietary algorithms that operate invisibly and unrestricted by law (O’Neil, 2016). Rapid technological progress and its planned infiltration into every sector of online and offline life dominate our existence and form a new system of governance under late-stage capitalism. This new form of biopolitics and profit combines the “predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, p.337). Democracy no longer exists, but the performance of democracy is thriving vicariously through the elected mask who acts in accordance with the will of technocracy.

Perpetuating the police state

The police state is invariably a surveillance state. An embeddedness of digital media technologies in the everyday perpetuates the police state, yet the current ecosystem of perception and being perceived comprises an entirely new organism compared to surveillance of the past. In this section, I use the concept of the police state as an important metaphor to visualize the datafication and serfdom of society. This is not to suggest that the police state is wholly metaphorical. It is a prolific form of biopolitical control enacted through the regulation of bodies. Population- and reproductive-control, biometric surveillance and facial recognition, tiered healthcare policies, etc.—all these operate through the state of exception. However, it is also through gaining an understanding of the modern police state that we can further understand our own exploitation at the hands of the techno-oligarchy.

Contemporary understandings of the police state are currently plagued by surveillance models that predate the technological revolution. In this light, surveillance scholars David Lyon (former sociologist at Queen’s University) and Benjamin E. Harcourt (professor at Columbia University Law School) spend the first quarter of their books respectively [10] deconstructing the ways in which George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four muddles our understanding of modern surveillance. For both Lyon and Harcourt, surveillance is an everyday fact of life. However, relations between the surveilled subject and the state in today’s networked society operates in ways unimaginable in the analog era. Surveillance is not only performed by specialized agencies, such as the police or governments, but it is performed domestically by everyday citizens and everyone. Lyon coins this new relation participatory surveillance, that is, the ways in which individuals monitor each other. For Harcourt, “we are not so much being coerced, surveilled, or secured today as we are exposing ourselves knowingly, so many of us willingly” (2015, p.18) through our engagement with social media platforms and through the normalization and commodification of digital voyeurism.

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) 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Notes

[1] The phrase “data is the new oil” has been repeated ad nauseum by economists and tech-accelerationists for the past twenty years. British mathematician Clive Humbly coined the phrase in 2006. See: Arthur, C. (2013, August 23). Tech giants may be huge, but nothing matches big data. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/23/tech-giants-data; LaRock, T. (2022, October 6). ‘Data is the new oil,’ but that also means it can be risky. Database Trends and Applications. https://www.dbta.com/Columns/Next-Gen-Data-Management/Data-is-the-New-Oil-But-That-Also-Means-it-Can-be-Risky-155275.aspx [return to text]

[2] Cutting ourselves off from social networking systems, attempting to be informed on geopolitics without networked news platforms, maintaining employment without LinkedIn, traversing the public square outside of a CCTV network, purchasing groceries without submitting yourself to facial recognition technologies, travelling through an airport without one’s biometrics being quantified under the excuse of national security, etc., is not a solution. An absolute escape from these surveillant systems means an absolute detachment from the illusion of democratic society. A social suicide. This choice, if recommended and if somehow successful, places responsibility for surveillance entirely on the powerless individual rather than holding tech oligarchs responsible for their instrumentation of biopolitical control.

[3] Further reading, see: Wallis, V. (2019). On “surveillance capitalism”. Jump Cut No. 59. https://ejumpcut.org/archive/jc59.2019/VicWallis-Zuboff/index.html

[4] Further reading, see: Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Standford University Press; O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Broadway Books; Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Melville House Publishing.

[5] Unowned, from the perspective of European mercantilists, which invariably means uncapitalized and ready for exploitation.

[6] The Big Five tech companies in the West collectively known as GAMMA – the Chinese tech conglomerates BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi) are not present in this essay as whataboutism and the prolific Western practice of deflecting criticisms of Western surveillance onto Chinese companies further solidifies unfounded trust in the Western technocracy.

[7] Further reading, see: Pariser, E. (2011) The filter bubble: How the personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. Penguin Books.

[8] Solution, as explored by Foucault’s lectures on the axis of sovereign and subjects.

[9] Populism here refers to a symptom of post-democracy wherein the pillars of democracy (i.e., the parties, campaigns, elections, and representative government) continue to exist, but the system of rule has exited from the democratic process (Mbembe, 2019). Instead, the performance of democracy becomes the goal of the elected leader, and democratic function is increasingly influenced by the elites, the technocrats, and market forces. Further reading, see: Mouffe, C. (2018). For a left populism. Verso Books.

[10] Further reading, see: Lyon, D. (2018). The culture of surveillance: Watching as a way of life. Polity Press; Harcourt, B. (2015). Exposed: Desire and disobedience in the digital age. Harvard University Press.

[11] Tomas Schuman, pen name of Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, was a Soviet journalist for the Novosti Press Agency, a front for espionage, propaganda, disinformation, and subversion. Schuman worked as a real-world Winston Smith during Soviet propaganda assignments in New Delhi where he worked to destabilize social and moral customs through “encouraging class and ideological struggle” (Schuman, 1985, p.9).

[12] Further reading, see: Agamben, G. (2020). Where are we now? The epidemic as politics. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

[13] Digital policing systems have been intertwined with profit for technocrats since the early days of Facebook. The Department of Homeland Security would use Facebook as a source of personal data once Facebook became public (Lyon, 2017); Keyhole, the geospatial mapping company that would become the backbone for Google Earth (Zuboff, 2019) was an instrumental technology in the Iraq War (Engel, 2014); ICE uses facial aging technologies trained similarly to Snapchat filters to identify migrant children as they age (Guo, 2024), etc.

[14] Through subversion and propaganda, there is national pride in Western technological surveillance and supremacy. There is national fear in that same supremacy for foreign technology. By outsourcing surveillance fears onto foreign technologies (largely Chinese, a further example of xenophobia being necessary for perception management) the West has chosen to celebrate their own colonization so if it is done by a “trustworthy” local oligarchy. It is necessary, through our reliance on mass media technologies, that the techno-serf is “sufficiently docile so that their behaviour no longer threatens the system” (Kaczynski, 2018, p.94).

[15] Further reading, see: Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception. University of Chicago Press; and Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

[16] Not to mention the slaying of doctors and food supplies. Further reading, see: CPJ. (2025, February 4). Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war. Committee to Protect Journalists. https://cpj.org/?p=321571

[17] Further reading, see: Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.

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