Core Post 3: The Deistic Aspirations of Surveillance

      God Friended Me is a popular dramatic television series that premiered on CBS in 2018. It follows Miles Finer, a black atheist living in New York City who is friended by an entity claiming to be God on Facebook. Each episode sees Miles being sent a new friend suggestion by God, whereupon he investigates the person’s life to determine how best to help them.

    God Friended Me is a show about predictive analytics as much as it is about divine intervention. Indeed, it makes the case that the two are often indistinguishable. Miles, a committed skeptic, also investigates “the God account” throughout the series, endeavoring to prove that it is in fact an advanced predictive algorithm and not the work of an omniscient being. Miles constantly butts up against “the symbolic Real” when the God account performs some unintelligible action (such as checking in to location or ‘liking’ a business). As Andrejevic and Gates put it, “[t]he algorithms do not integrate the findings into our ‘horizon of meaning’ … they simply function.” As in any good procedural, the dots between seemingly disparate threads are connected by episode’s end, but as one man Miles is incapable of collating all of this data himself, at least without the aid of God.

     Here we observe the rationalist, deistic fantasy of total omniscience through identification of data. In the view of scientific determinism, the mapping of every particle in the universe allows one total predictive power over future events; in much the same way, the algorithm in God Friended Me which alerts Miles to people in need is so sophisticated that it has come to resemble divinity. As Browne notes, “rationalization” is just one of many “common threads” which provide the ideological basis for the contemporary surveillance state. But in the show, rationalism is paired alongside such nebulous formulations as “fate,” which Miles reads as yet another obfuscation barring him from unmasking the true algorithmic character of God. We might even say God comes to occupy the space of the null ‒ he is queered in the sense that his intervention is at once affirmed and denied, legible to some and patently false to others.

    Finally, it is important to mention how God Friended Me deploys the surveillance state apparatus as a “weapon of the weak,” in that Miles’s friend suggestions are almost invariably well-meaning citizens who have been abused or cast aside by failing or corrupt social systems. In other cases, Miles intervenes in the lives of people burdened with family trauma or by natural disasters. Privacy is non-problem; it is always through the acquisition of more (never too much) information that lives can be changed for the better.