core post 3

Like Raphael, I was interested in other modes or descriptions of surveillance other than the “notion of technological surveillance as something that occurs to us, coming from the outside, a source with higher status and power over us and with somewhat of an invisibility or illusion of invisibility” (Raphael’s core post). I can only listen to the same narrativization of Surveillance’s omniscient, but obfuscated, character so many times. I remember Kelly Gates delivering guest lectures on surveillance throughout my UCSD comm courses. After every lecture, I’d leave with a heightened sense of awareness towards the mechanisms and technologies of surveillance, specifically it’s infrastructure, but felt a sense of alienation in terms of how I figure into the surveillance as such; where might our subjectivities lie and to what extent can we “resist”? I deliberately use “sense” in order to attend to the affective registers of surveillance that I felt, up to this point, have been understated by my reading of any surveillance scholarship. 

For Browne and Gaboury, surveillance is not determined by the technologies or infrastructures, but (unevenly) co-constituted through historically specific, but oppressive, “measurable types” of gender, race, sexuality, “and other forms of difference” (Gaboury). I found Browne’s description of surveillance insightful and generative towards avoiding a technologically-deterministic conceptualization of surveillance. Referencing Hill-Collin’s intersectional paradigms in which “oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type,” she convincingly argues that surveillance is one such paradigm that is necessarily as intersectional and historical as the subjectivities of the “targeted individuals” it surveils. Surveillance is something that “cannot be measured; it’s properties cannot be determined; and so, it remains undetectable…the often invisible substance that in many ways structures the universe of modernity” (Browne 9). That is, she distances herself from any unilateral notion of surveillance in which surveillance as such is simply the act/practice/infrastructure of policing by emphasizing the obverse of surveillance: how is surveillance “sensed, experienced, and lived”? (ibid). To this end, Gaboury examines the potential for a “politics of refusal” among artists and theorists of technology, but I want to bring my own personal anecdotes of, perhaps, such politics.

David Lyon references “sites of surveillance” in order to attend to the specific manifestations of surveillance in varying spaces, environments, and scales of surveillance infrastructure. Among the spaces he lists, he includes the workplace. I used to work in a bookstore that naturally had its café space for the leisurely customer. The café and the bookstore floor were spatially “apart.” However, it was “apart” in other aspects as well: all the colored employees worked in the café, while mostly white employees were on the book floor space as customer service representatives. When I asked the café manager if she knew the reasoning, she went on a 30-minute rant about management. To spare you the 30 minutes, TLDR: management were old, racist, patriarchal, conservative, capitalistic, white men (my attempt to make them "intersectional") who knew that the café was an efficient space to surveil through the 3 CCTVs; us cafe employees were apparently more prone and inclined to employee theft (the food wasn't worth stealing anyways). In addition to racist practices, we were always understaffed in the café but we knew full well that the managers deliberately kept us understaff in order to save the additional budget for themselves or saving the budget for the book floor employees. 

So as “acts” of small resistance against such management, some coworkers and I would monitor the patterns and modes of surveillance. I eventually found out the blind spots in the cameras and we were aware of when the managers would physically monitor café (they wouldn’t ever monitor the book floor). They would come to the café to make sure that we followed drink recipes and protocol that we all knew was extremely inefficient, but most importantly trivial, during rush hour or weekends. With the times in mind, I would tell my coworkers when we would have to make drinks the proper (super super slow way) so that we wouldn’t get yelled at in front of 40+ customers, which frequently occurred; if the district manager wanted us to make drinks “properly” or by-the-book, then he could have given us a proper amount of staff.  We were also discouraged from having breaks and lunches if business was busy--it mostly is if no one can cover your breaks--, so we would lounge around in the blind spots of the CCTV as our break. 

One of my friends works in the Amazon warehouse in downtown, in which Amazon requires that he and his coworkers leave their phones and recording devices at the entrance of the warehouse. When I ask him about the degrees of surveillance that he experiences, he describes the immense layout with all of the cameras, in addition to the terminals that he has to go through incase he might steal something, all while not having a means to record such a intersectional paradigm of surveillance. The “intersection” between surveillance and labor seems to be a fruitful juncture to investigate the implications and consequences of both topics. Fittingly, for our week of labor ahead, my friend just turned in his two weeks.

I'm curious about the limits and affordances of surveillance/counter-surveillance in terms of space, both physically and imaginatively. While my coworkers and I experienced some kinds of liberties with those blind spots and the know-how / tacit knowledge of the store surveillance, we were uncomfortably lodged into corners of the cafe space. For my friend, there is no such blind spot, but such uncomfortability might lie in the imaginative space of feeling surveilled. In other words, whereas there were affordances and consequences with an acceptance towards being surveilled for my friend (ability to physically move around knowing that he's being surveilled), counter-surveillance for myself and coworkers meant different liberties and repercussions (not being able to physically move but knowing that we can take our break).