Surveillance potential: Exploring how unbanked social assistance recipients in Toronto, Canada negotiated a mandatory transition from cash to cards

Abstract

This article explores how purportedly benign technologies, such as benefits cards used to distribute welfare funds, can be perceived as a tool for surveillance and social control, particularly in contexts that users experience as punitive. In many countries, poverty governance positions welfare recipients, particularly women of colour, as irresponsible consumers in need of counselling and discipline. As a result, recipients are often subjected to government efforts to constrain and monitor how they spend their money. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Toronto, Canada, this article examines how unbanked welfare recipients navigated the mandatory transition from cheques to benefits cards. Respondents discussed the benefits cards in terms of surveillance potential, a concept that captures their uncertainty about how surveillance was operating. They viewed the cards as an extension of their relationship with caseworkers, which they characterized as adversarial. Respondents were careful about how they used the cards, engaging in everyday resistance that involved curating their financial data to portray a ‘deserving’ welfare recipient. This study demonstrates that in the era of surveillance capitalism, new technologies can have a disciplining effect on marginalized populations, even if that is not the intended function.