Globalization and Surveillance

This book offers a lively, accessible and informative introduction to surveillance through the lens of globalization, and globalization through the lens of surveillance. The story that unfolds is wide-ranging, taking a thoroughly multidimensional and transdisciplinary approach that brings clarity to a complex subject. Drawing a long historical arc, and freely crisscrossing the Global North/South divide, Timothy Erik Ström traces a narrative beginning with colonial land surveys. He convincingly shows how surveillance and capitalism are inextricably linked, illustrated through in-depth studies on Google and China’s Social Credit System and the broader reconfiguration of everyday life. Drawing on a wealth of empirical examples and historical context, his book is a theoretically informed but accessible example of engaged scholarship that provides a provocative and critical examination of the uneven and contradictory subjective and material social meanings and consequences of surveillance and globalization.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Prelude: “You’re in Control” 1 Surveying Surveillance: Overseers, Enclosures, and Colonization 2 The Atom and the Watchtower: Cybernetics, War, and the Reorganization of the World 3 Welcome to the Machine: Google’s Commodification Engines and the Web of Power 4 The Overlords of Automated Debt: China, Usury, and the Financialization of the South Conclusion: The Limits of Control Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

About the Author :
Timothy Erik Ström is an independent writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia.

Review :
With a breathtakingly wide brush—both historical and geographical—Tim Ström paints a compelling picture of surveillance as a crucial companion of colonization, capitalism, and war in the modern world. Thankfully, he also offers clues as to how things could be otherwise. In an important and timely intervention, Timothy Ström has crafted an invaluable conceptual roadmap for understanding the global surveillance economy. This engagingly written and elegantly conceived book locates contemporary surveillance in its broader social contexts with the goal of imagining, against all odds, how these might be different—and better. Upgrading critiques of surveillance for the twenty-first century, Tim Ström reveals its governing paradox of absolute control and utter powerlessness. Governmental and corporate surveillance technologies are locked into the logic of a system that cannot function if its bosses are not themselves completely submissive. In meticulous detail, Ström shows how the smallest engineering decision rests on histories of colonialism and perpetuates a global system of injustice and inequality and how globalization, as a system of exploitation and oppression, shapes and is shaped by the software we so often see as helpful and at worst neutral. A wake-up call for citizens, consumers, students, and activists.