Core Post: Virtual Reality, Disciplinary Fantasy, and State Surveillance

Concerns about technologically mediated surveillance raised in this week's readings are applicable to another medium which is almost exclusively associated with entertainment or creative and therapeutic experiences: virtual reality. Immersive virtual reality is in effect the promise of a comprehensive calculable space. Ivan Sutherland developed one of the earliest virtual reality head-mounted displays in 1968. Due to the size and weight of its components, the system required a large ceiling-mounted pole for support. As a result, Sutherland and his team facetiously named their apparatus, The Sword of Damocles. While VR researchers insist that this is a purely formal reference to the intimidating beam overhead, it is worthwhile to consult its namesake for meaning. The Sword of Damocles is parable of paranoid power. When a greek subject, Damocles, expresses how fortunate his king, Dionysus, is to live in luxury, the king offers to switch places with him for a day. Damocles eagerly agrees to sit on the throne; however, the king orders a sword to be hung by a single horsehair above the royal seat to represent the feeling of constant threat that comes with supremacy. Damocles does not have the fortitude to withstand these precarious conditions and forfeits his day in the position of ultimate power. References to this moralizing tale have circulated in Europe for centuries, often accompanied by the phrase, METUS EST PLENUS TYRANNIS; fear is plentiful for tyrants.

Suspiciously, though, the sword is installed—by royal decree—to intimidate a common subject. Perhaps the state of precarity for those in power does exist, but the narrative of threat-to-rule can also be used as a justification for imposing controls on others. The sword, pointing down from above, uncannily resembles both specimen pin and the virtual normal, posed to fix the subject in place. Likewise, Sutherland’s apparatus constrains the user’s movement, circumscribing its radius and orientation, while claiming to enhance it. This early head-mounted display is a blindfold of optical and tactile dissonance. Sutherland, confronting the limitations of his invention proposes the ultimate display, a totalizing omnipotent control system: “The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked” (Sutherland, 2). His window into the mathematical wonderland of the computer is explicitly tied to bio and necropolitical control—a computer graphics pathway to state project that Foucault lays out in Discipline and Punish . The recent resurgence of virtual reality has confirmed that “having a display apparatus mounted on our heads may bring temporary distraction, but we are more often in a world of isolation and stasis than remote presence or alternate identity” (Anderson, 234).  Sutherland’s carceral framing of his early virtual reality system presages its more effective application as a tool for military surveillance and control.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, is now undertaking the project of enhancing state surveillance systems with virtual technologies. Following Sutherland’s example, he named his new company Anduril, after Tolkein’s flaming sword of the West . The company has accrued massive investment dollars from venture capital as well as from the United States military, which has a contract with Anduril Industries to construct a virtual border wall. If colonial strategies of spatial control and the architectures of European disciplinary society were latent in virtual reality, then Anduril has unleashed them. Importantly, these mechanisms are not only operating within virtual space, they are reimposed on physical terrain by an arsenal of robotic sentry towers, unmanned aerial vehicles, and an IoT mesh network of sensors. These fortifications are augmented with machine learning to more accurately detect migrants in the landscape. The company’s promotional materials explain: “once alerted, a Lattice user can strap on a pair of VR goggles and get a bird’s-eye view of what triggered the alarm, or toggle between the individual streams coming from each sensor. The goal is to give users a kind of local omniscience—perfect situational awareness of what’s around every corner and behind each hill.” (Dean) Activists have already come out against the dangers of a system that so efficiently tracks humans with the express purpose of feeding them into the nation’s privatized detention centers. Mijente, an immigrant rights advocacy group, published a statement that Anduril represents “a surveillance apparatus where algorithms are trained to implement racist and xenophobic policies” (Dean) The company’s founder, however, expressed his faith in US authority and the precedent that it has set through its implementation of other technologies: “we’ve shown throughout history that we are leaders in using technology ethically, using technology responsibly … We have to continue to lead, the same way that we led with nuclear weapons, where we were able to define the way that they were used because we were the leader in the space.” (Dean) This statement is a terrifying affirmation of the United State’s exceptional supremacy, which allows it to dominate, even obliterate space and its inhabitants, as it did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Anduril’s suite of distributed machines exceeds the possibilities of Foucault’s Panopticon. Rather, it exemplifies what Manuel Delanda calls the Panspectron: “instead of positioning some human bodies around a central sensor, a multiplicity of sensors is deployed around all bodies: its antenna farms, spy satellites and cable-traffic intercepts feed into its computers all the information that can be gathered. This is then processed through a series of "filters" or key-word watch-lists. The Panspectron does not merely select certain bodies and certain (visual) data about them. Rather, it compiles information about all at the same time, using computers to select the segments of data relevant to its surveillance tasks." (Delanda, 206). Anduril, the flaming sword of the West, uses photography to present its Panspectron technologies as part of a sublime landscape. This marketing strategy epitomizes, and concretizes, Delueze and Guattari’s description of how state power leverages media to lock down its territories: “one of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire ‘exterior,’ over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon” (Deleuze + Guattari, 385). Virtual tools are prosthetic to the colonial ambition of capturing everything. Anduril is yet another example of how technologies are continually leveraged to surveil specific "epidermalized" (Browne, 8) identities and to reinscribe racialized histories and agendas.

Sutherland, Ivan. “The Ultimate Display,”Information Processing Techniques Office, ARPA, OSD, 1965.

Anderson, Steve F. Technologies of Vision:The War Between Data and Images. MA: MIT Press, 2017, 234.

Dean, Sam. “A 26-year-old billionaire is building virtual border walls — and the federal government is buying,” LA Times, July 26, 2019.

DeLanda, Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2003, 206.

Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari Félix, and Brian Massumi. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 385.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015, 8.