Ethics and Surveillance

Lunch yesterday was slow-roasted kalua pig, wonderful and tender and savory and maybe even better than East Carolina pulled pork, which is the closest analogue I can come up with from my experience. Only not at all vinegary like that fine Carolina stuff: just rich, moist, a hint of spice. Dinner today, from a tiny little side-street takeout joint, was three substantial slices of furikake-crusted ahi, cooked rare and eaten from a styrofoam tray. It was incredible, and tasted like it had just come out of the ocean. For all I know, it probably had, since the ocean’s only a few blocks away. If the food here in Kailua is this good and this cheap, I won’t even bother taking the half-hour drive back to any of the Honolulu restaurants. And the takeout joint has a grilled ono sandwich that I’m going to try tomorrow.

Anyway: I’ll start by attempting to adequately describe the best presentation I saw at the conference, for which I was fortunate enough to serve as moderator. Christopher Carter and Teddi Fishman constituted a panel titled “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Surveillance” for the first session of the conference.

Chris and Teddi both offered fresh, careful, and insightful perspectives, and I’m planning on e-mailing them and asking for copies of their papers. Absolutely excellent stuff.

Here’s Chris’s brief description of his presentation: “Corporate administrators depict worker surveillance as a means of stopping time-theft and protecting trade secrets, while critics associate it with speed-up production tactics and privacy-invasion. Analyzing web pages by groups on both sides of the debate, I argue that Internet discourse about workplace monitoring demonstrates the globalization of class antagonisms.” So, yeah, you can probably already see why I enjoyed the panel so much, and why John Zuern asked me to moderate.

Chris contends that monitoring pervades both our work and leisure lives, via surveillance cameras, keystroke monitoring programs, Web use tracking, medical and genetic testing, and other means. In fact, employers deploy surveillance for what they term “risk management,” in order to not only monitor but also predict employee behavior. Corporate surveillance seeks to thwart the supposed criminal latent in every employee, and in doing so rhetorically criminalizes each of those employees. This rhetorical practice is part of the neo-liberal economic discourse that names inadequate efficiency “time theft” and demands worker accountability to global capital, constructing a worker’s rights as crimes against the freedom of global markets.

Security software vendors like TrueActive and Advanced Security advertise their surveillance services by declaring that “People do bad things with computers” and offering to protect employers against the always incipient crimes of their employees. Chris uses Althusser’s theories to examine such rhetoric as a form of interpellation, which hails employers as impartial and disinterested observers, and laboring bodies as criminals. This interpellation obscures the workings of expoitation: the construction of surveillance as “risk management” leads to Shoshana Zuboff’s “anticipatory conformity” on the part of employees, and the contemporary technologies of policing may be as capable of inflicting violence as they are of recording it.

Chris notes that the most common response to such problems, offered by the ACLU and other organizations, has relied upon rhetorics of privacy rights and the sanctity of the sovereign individual. Clearly, these rhetorics privilege individual concerns over social concerns, which isolates the exploited and curtails their collective political power. (Yes, I was nodding and grinning when I heard Chris make these points, but I forget at what point he cited John McGrath’s “Loving Big Brother”: something else to read.) The alternative is to promote privacy as a social right: the appeal to privacy can be constructed as an appeal to the right to negotiate conditions of employment for a just and equitable workplace. In this, the rhetoric of the labor movement might offer a productive alternative to the rhetoric of individualism.

Yeah. Good stuff. So is Teddi’s. She summarizes her presentation, “When You Are The Man: Issues of Ethics in Policing the Academy”, as follows. “Criminal investigations and plagiarism inquiries have more in common than one might think. There are even some ways in which educators are actually allowed more investigative freedom than the police. This presentation proposes that we become more critical of our own role as police of the classroom.” Unfortunately, my notes aren’t quite as complete for Teddi’s presentation, but I’ll do my best to offer what I’ve got. The room was full, and for good reason: Teddi was brilliant, and wound up doing much more (and better) moderating than I did.

The USA PATRIOT act, Teddi points out, invades everyone’s privacy: it treats all citizens as if they were guilty in order to use that hypothetical guilt as a pretext upon which to build a rationalization for a search for evidence, under opaque and hermetic “national security” processes. In such a context, Teddi is concerned that we not overstep our own roles as the police of the classroom. In school, we can investigate students’ work, compile evidence, all without even telling these students in our pre-emptive investigations, particularly in the concerns that swirl around plagiarism. Plagiarism detection products like turnitin.com deploy a rhetoric of weaponry and combat, and offer to teachers the possibility of opaquely and pre-emptively running all student papers through their proprietary databases. In other words, campuses that subscribe to turnitin.com and other services are going on fishing expeditions that allow the corporations they pay to own the screened student papers as evidence: turnitin.com brags of having more than 4.5 billion pages in its database. (The ownership issues are especially troubling here.)

As an initial move toward a possible remedy, Teddi suggests that we make our plagiarism investigation technologies transparent to students, and ask them to work with us on possible responses to such technologies. She also suggests that we examine and critique the rhetorical deployment of the term “security”, and her presentation’s examination of the ideology of individualism and exploitation offered a concrete and useful connection to Chris’s. Which makes me wonder: how much of a connection, and along what axes, might Chris and Teddi see between the circumstances of students and workers?

Like I said: it was the best presentation I saw at the conference, and well-attended, with almost all of the classroom’s 20 or so chairs filled.

Today, I found out that the name of the old tom who comes around here and complains for attention is Max, a former stray who adopted the couple that own this cottage. He’s friendly enough, but as a person who’s owned by two indoor kitties, I’m always a little startled to see him coming over the five-foot-high garden wall when I’m typing these evening entries. (Again, this one won’t be posted until I get to the internet café tomorrow.) Now: time for a late-night swim in the cottage’s small pool, and some wine.