Table Of ContentVol. 7, Issue 2/2021
Olga Moskatova, Anna Polze, Ramón Reichert (eds.)
Networked Images
in Surveillance Capitalism
The journal is edited by
Pablo Abend, Mathias Fuchs, Ramón Reichert,
and Karin Wenz
Editorial Board
Maria Bakardjeva, David Berry, Jean Burgess, Mark Coté,
Colin Cremin, Sean Cubitt, Mark Deuze, José van Dijck, Delia
Dumitrica, Astrid Ensslin, Sonia Fizek, Federica Frabetti, Orit
Halpern, Irina Kaldrack, Denisa Kera, Lev Manovich, Janet
H. Murray, Jussi Parikka, Lisa Parks, Dominic Pettman, Rita
Raley, Richard Rogers, Julian Rohrhuber, Marie-Laure Ryan,
Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Jens Schröter, Trebor Scholz, Tamar
Sharon, Roberto Simanowski, Nathaniel Takcz, Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young, Sally Wyatt
Indexed in EBSCOhost databases
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
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Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld
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ISSN: 2364-2114
eISSN: 2364-2122
Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5388-5
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Content
Introduction
Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism
Olga Moskatova, Anna Polze and Ramón Reichert 5
I Image Platforms
Kind of Blue
Social Media Photography and Emotion
Michelle Henning 31
Embedding Heterogenous Forms of Surveillance in China’s Autocratic
Networked Media
How the Government Supports and Controls Platforms, Companies,
Online Celebrities, and Users
Cornelia Bogen 55
Black Squares and Gucci
Networked Images and the (In)Visibility of Surveillance
Sascha Hosters and Silke Roesler-Keilholz 97
Automating Platform Spectators
Algorithmic Montage and Affective Scroll in TikTok
Alexandra Anikina 119
II Datafication
and Operative Images
Seeing Like a Border
Biometrics and the Operational Image
Mark Andrejevic, Volcic Zala 141
Doing Google Maps
Everyday Use and the Image of Space in a Surveillance Capitalism Centrepiece
Peter Gentzel, Jeffrey Wimmer, Ruben Schlagowski 159
The Invisualities of Capture in Amazon’s Logistical Operations
Armin Beverungen 185
III Automated Vision
Apple Memories and Automated Memory-Making
The Networked Image Inside the iPhone Chip
Gabriel Pereira 205
Images of Resistance
Thinking about Computer Vision AI in Surveillance Capitalism
through Images of Marielle Franco
Vinicius Ariel Arruda dos Santos, Bruno Moreschi,
Amanda Jurno, Didiana Prata, Monique Lemos,
Lucas Nunes Sequeira 229
IV Gaze, Normalization, Subjectivation
The Digital, Capitalist Gaze
Jens Schröter 247
Nudged to Normal
Images, Behaviour, and the Autism Surveillance Complex
Daniela Wentz 265
V Methodological Reflections
Detained through a Smartphone
Deploying Experimental Collaborative Visual Methods to Study
the Socio-Technical Landscape of Digital Confinement
Carolina Sanchez Boe and Henry Mainsah 289
Urban Data Analytics as Research Topic,
Method and Ethical Concern
Daniel Trottier, Ju-Sung (Jay) Lee and John Boy 311
Biographical Notes 329
Introduction
Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism
Olga Moskatova, Anna Polze and Ramón Reichert
In 2020, in the middle of a world-wide pandemic, the artist and hacker Thomas
Webb launched an online exhibition called “Exercise in Hopeless Nostalgia” at
König Galerie. For this, Thomas Webb created a virtual multiplayer game-world in
nostalgic 8-bit-aesthetics – a “World Wide WEBB” inviting users to travel to Berlin,
Osaka and Kanagawa, to visit the simulated exhibition rooms of the gallery, and
to interact with other gamers or the artist’s featured digital artworks. Creating
a digital space for social interaction and art reception during the pandemic, the
digital exhibition was of course commenting on the transformation of private and
professional activities under the conditions of distant socialising. While doing so,
it was also a reflection on the economies and the mechanisms of today’s networked
images and digital spaces for social interaction: The game was advertised, among
other places, on Instagram and could be played in a regular web browser or in
the Instagram app. Before starting the game and choosing their avatars, the
gamers were asked to enter their Instagram usernames and, thus, to reveal their
digital identity. The game was driven by an artificial intelligence that analysed the
decisions made and the real-time data produced during the game. The AI used
the personality test developed by Cambridge Analytica in order to deduce one of
the 16 possible personalities, and to personalise the further gameplay by offering
tailored information from the “real world”. While Cambridge Analytica harvested
data of Facebook users to sway the US-presidential election in 2016, “Exercise in
Hopeless Nostalgia” is less about data privacy, and more about the commodifica-
tion of everyday online activities and networked visual practices. Webb’s aim was
to mimic data-mining strategies without monetising them (Webb/Reese 2021).
The game and the artworks presented in it, such as Rainfall (2018) or Depressed
Twitter (2017), explored a virtual world where data could be a common property
and shared good, not monopolised by big companies, where users would have
control over their data without being exploited by technologies (Webb 2021). After
successfully completing the game, insights into the gathered data and algorithms
were offered to the gamers.
Inviting the user to engage experientially, aesthetically and interactively
with dataveillance, Thomas Webb’s exhibition intervenes into the discourse on
digital, data-driven economies that prevail on the web, social media and image
sharing platforms such as Instagram. Capturing personal data in exchange for
free services such as image sharing, phatic communication, online playing, or
DOI 10.14361/dcs-2021-0202
DCS | Digital Culture and Society | Vol. 7, Issue 2 | © transcript 2022
6 Olga Moskatova, Anna Polze and Ramón Reichert
real-time streaming is now ubiquitous in networked media, and recently led to
diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism (Zuboff 2019; Srnicek 2017).
In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticised as
new forms of digital work and capitalist exploitation for some time (cf. Allmer
2015; Andrejevic 2012; van Dijck 2014; Fuchs 2013; Scholz 2013; Trottier 2012).
While Webb’s game and artworks subversively and reflexively engage with
economic surveillance, everyday networked images usually form a constitu-
tive part of platforms and their extractive mechanisms. With the general trans-
formation of the open web into an ecology dominated by commercial platforms
(Hands 2013; Helmond 2015; Langois/Elmer 2013; Gillespie 2018), platformisation
and economic surveillance are also redefining digital visual culture, facilitating
new forms of images, everyday practices and online visibility, while expanding
the logics of social media to the rest of the web. From social photos (Jurgenson
2019), selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing,
playing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic –
the digital image is not only predominantly networked (Rubinstein/Sluis 2008)
but also accessed through platforms (van Dijck 2013; van Dijck et al. 2018) and
structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algo-
rithmic processing. Today, participation and commodification are closely linked
to the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual
communication, raising the question of the role networked images and aesthetics
play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.
Linking images and surveillance automatically brings traditional concepts
such as the panopticon and its numerous modifications into play, since they
rely on optical and visual metaphors (Haggerty 2006; Buschauer 2016). In his
famous analysis of the panopticon, Michel Foucault showed to what extent power
can be exercised through visuality and so produce specific subjects. However, as
frequently noted (Deleuze 1992; Haggerty/Ericson 2000; Kammerer/Waitz 2015),
this form of power seems incapable of fully grasping the dynamics of networked
digital media technologies. Today, not only media but also the techniques of
surveillance and control are increasingly networked and unobtrusive. In surveil-
lance and platform capitalism, many of their contemporary forms do not rely on
the visible demonstration and internalisation of the gaze, but on automated data-
based and algorithmic forms of control that are motivated economically. They
are not “salient”, but “silent” (Introna/Wood 2004) and even “calm” technologies
(Weiser/Brown 1997) that proliferate in everyday life and diffuse through envi-
ronments. Although the relationship between visuality and surveillance is being
transformed, images are nevertheless an important part of post-panoptical media
assemblages and their silent forms of power. Since many successful economic
platforms and our everyday networked practices are image-based, an evaluation of
surveillance capitalism that takes media differences seriously becomes decisive.
This special issue thus invites the examination of questions about digital
economies from a media-specific and media aesthetics point of view. The ground-
Introduction 7
breaking work on digital economies and economic surveillance on social media
and networked media, exemplified by authors such as Zuboff, Srnicek, Andre-
jevic, Fuchs or Trottier, rarely considers aesthetic issues, or differentiates between
the types of medialities actually involved in the media constellation called “social
media”. However, this kind of issue concerns media studies in the first place. This
is not to say that political, social and economic problems of capitalist surveillance
should be replaced by a focus on aesthetics. On the contrary, one of the character-
istics of media studies and their methodologies is that they enable us to integrate
different facets and to relate aesthetics to economies as well as to technologies of
power, subjectivation and social formations.
This special issue therefore aims to interrogate the manifold relationships
between economic surveillance and networked images, and to identify their inter-
sections. In particular, it focuses on the tension between a visual aestheticisation
of capitalism and the anaesthetisation of images or/and surveillance techniques,
i.e., on the dynamics between visibility and invisibility. On the one hand, it asks
to what extent and using which aesthetic strategies images can create incentives
for, and stabilise surveillance capitalism, i.e., how they contribute to its aestheti-
cisation. On the other hand, it is interested in the transformation of pictoriality
in post-panoptical, ambient media environments, resulting in forms of the anaes-
thetisation of images. Closely linked to the problems of anaesthetisation is the
question of whether and how the regimes of the gaze are transformed in appara-
tuses of dataveillance and algorithmic control, and what kind of subjectivities are
produced within them.
Platform Surveillance
Before questioning the aesthetics and anaesthetics of surveillance capitalism, it is
helpful to introduce and contextualise the main notions and concepts guiding this
special issue and the contributions to it. While economic surveillance has been
known and problematised for several decades, Zuboff’s (2015; 2019) diagnosis of
“surveillance capitalism” attracted a lot of attention, offering a much-discussed
“retheorization of data-driven, algorithmic commercial surveillance as instru-
mentarian power” (Cohen 2019: 240). By surveillance capitalism, Shoshana
Zuboff means a form of digital economy and a business model that is premised
upon surveillant extraction, accumulation and management of transactional and
“behavioral data” (2019: 74). Its aim is to anticipate, predict and modify behaviour
in order to secure profit and market – something she calls “behavioral future
markets” (ibid.: 96). In her voluminous book and an earlier article (2015), Zuboff
tries to identify and describe the main mechanisms of, and the discursive and
social preconditions to this form of “informational capitalism” (Castells 2010). In
her account, it was especially Google, later followed by Facebook and Microsoft,
who implemented the core model of surveillance capitalism by starting to use
8 Olga Moskatova, Anna Polze and Ramón Reichert
people’s search data to target them with personalised advertising. For Zuboff,
surveillance capitalism benefited, among other things, from a lack of internet laws,
and exceptional events such as 9/11 and the resulting expansion of security appara-
tuses. According to the author, surveillance capitalism poses a threat to democracy
by establishing instrumentarian power, which does not aim at the “engineering
of the soul” (Zuboff 2019: 355) as the totalitarianism of the 20th century did, but
premises upon radical behaviourism and technologies of behaviour modification.
By exploiting people’s dependency on the internet for conducting their social and
professional lives, it enforces unilateral, abusive forms of contracts, “contracts of
adhesion” (ibid.: 48). It reduces human experience to measurable and observable
data and raw material, and establishes a knowledge regime based on asymmetry,
certainty and predictability, i.e., one that aims not at the automation of informa-
tion flows, but at “the automation of the self” and “the automation of society”
(ibid.: 382). By focusing on the predictive regime of knowledge and power that is
based on stimuli, operates below reflexive subjectivities and capitalises on behav-
ioural traces, surveillance capitalism shows parallels to what Antoinette Rouvroy
(2013) calls “algorithmic governmentality”.
The telos of surveillance capitalism is to find ever more sources for extraction
of data, surpassing the model of personalised advertisement and expanding the
extraction into many other online and offline sectors (Zuboff 2019: 10). Digitisation
and computerisation of work, living spaces, everyday activities, health, consump-
tion, etc., which even boomed during the recent years of the global pandemic are
means to achieve this goal. Surveillance capitalists, therefore, do not simply collect
incidental data; they create technologies, smart things and “ubiquitous computa-
tional architectures” (ibid.: 8) that hook and lure users into extractive applications,
securing new sources for behavioural data. Zuboff compares industrial capitalism
to surveillance capitalism. Whereas the former tries to intensify the means of
production, the latter tries to intensify the means of gathering and modifying
behaviour: “Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every
human’s experience” (ibid.: 9). Although the expansive striving for data has conse-
quences for privacy and security, Zuboff’s analysis deals with economic issues and
forms of digital-capitalist exploitation. Zuboff even warns against reducing it to
issues of privacy or data protection (ibid.: 90), i.e., to a simplified idea of “surveil-
lance”, minus the capitalism.
Zuboff’s analysis has been rightly criticised for being techno-determinist
and for affirmatively reproducing the narratives of technologists and corpora-
tions (Murakami Wood/Monahan 2019: 3), overestimating their manipulative and
persuasive powers (Doctorow 2020: 12-22). Her historical and conceptual under-
standing of capitalism also has its flaws. In her account, “surveillance capitalism”
seems to be a deviant or “rogue” form of a formerly “good”, or at least “normal”
or “rational” capitalism, the development of which Zuboff attributes to Thomas
Edison and Henry Ford (2019: 17). The story of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
is very US-centred and follows a narrative of decline (Evangelista 2018: 246-247)
Introduction 9
instead of acknowledging that there is no innocent form of capitalism. Over
and over, the developments seem to be attributed to the actions and reasoning
of few tech-savvy capitalists, i.e., a handful of Western males, while her critique
of radical behaviourism, which drives data extraction, evokes a positive image of
liberal humanism, of free will and autonomy. Her very Western perspective on
the rise and consequences of surveillance capitalism calls for a decentring and a
supplement with accounts from non-Western countries (Evangelista 2018: 250),
as offered, for example, in Cornelia Bogen’s contribution to this special issue.
Following Zuboff, she analyses the entanglement of surveillance capitalism and
state power in China.
In a different critical reading of Zuboff, David Murakami Wood and Torin
Monahan note that surveillance capitalism needs to be “defined only in conjunc-
tion with the concept of the platform” (2019: 4), thus preferring Srnicek’s work on
“platform capitalism” to Zuboff’s. It is obvious that Zuboff’s notion of “surveil-
lance capitalism” has similarities with Srnicek’s understanding of “platform capi-
talism”. Both concepts concentrate on the digital economies of networked media
and the role datafication plays in them. Focusing on players such as Google,
Facebook and Amazon, while exempting Apple, Zuboff actually deals with organ-
isational and infrastructural forms that Srnicek calls “platforms”, without theo-
retically and discursively engaging with this notion. In contrast, Srnicek does not
foreground the problems of surveillance, but without completely ignoring them.
Besides offering an alternative historical account of the rise of data-driven capi-
talism, Srnicek especially enriches the discourse by analysing the different mech-
anisms and types of platforms, thus reflecting on the differences of data-driven
business models and their balancing between free and paid services. Understood
as intermediary digital infrastructures that enable and mediate the interaction of
different actors, platforms present themselves as neutral spaces, while embodying
politics (Srnicek 2017: 44, 47). Moreover, “platforms produce and are reliant on
‘network effects’: the more numerous the users who use a platform, the more
valuable that platform becomes for everyone else” (Srnicek 2017: 45).
The idea that the two concepts by Zuboff and Srnicek could be used and
thought of as complementary is acknowledged by the very term “platform surveil-
lance” coined by David Murakami Wood and Torin Monahan in the Surveillance &
Society-issue of the same name (2019) – a perspective that is especially productive
for analysing networked and platformed images. Using the term “platform surveil-
lance”, Wood and Monahan do not only state that datafied surveillance happens
on platforms; they are more interested in the ways that platforms transform social
relations and produce social divisions, set the terms for individual, institutional
and even governmental interaction, engender specific subjectivities, and impose
the logics of platform capitalism upon more and more existing practices and insti-
tutions (2019: 1). Combining both Zuboff’s and Srnicek’s concepts, Murakami
Wood’s and Monohan’s term emphasises that “surveillance is essential to the oper-
ations of platforms” (ibid.: 1-2). Their notion has the advantage of relating surveil-
