Sousveillance Capitalism

Abstract

The striking commercial success of Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, provides us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on how the present convergence of surveillance/capitalism coincides with popular critical and theoretical themes in surveillance studies, particularly that of sousveillance. Accordingly, this piece will first analyze how surveillance capitalism has molded the political behaviors and imaginations of activists. After acknowledging the theoretically and politically fraught implications of fighting surveillance with even more surveillance—especially given the complexities of digital capitalism’s endless desire to produce data—we conclude by exploring some of the political possibilities that lie at the margins of sousveillance capitalism (in particular, the extra-epistemological political value of sousveillance).