Surveillance, Drones, and Robots

This course analyzes the long history of surveillance and its import in the present. We will follow three essential tendencies in the development of surveillance: development, technics, and opacity. This is therefore not a course exclusively about being under surveillance, although this will be a crucial component, as it grasps only one of these three tendencies.

Our study of development asks: does surveillance start with surveillance technology and how does it transform over time? Our study of technics asks: is surveillance equivalent to the presence or absence of surveillance technology, of drones and robots? The legacy of technics and the development of technique brings us to a present juncture where we also must ask: is all data extraction surveillance? And our study of opacity asks: what happens when we are surveilled not as bodies, but as Trevor Paglen notes, “volumes and vectors”? What happens when we take various measures to avoid surveillance? Others, too, do not avoid surveillance but specifically feed it misinformation.

By studying the long arc of surveillance, and in therefore holding these three tendencies together – how surveillance develops, how surveillance becomes synonymous with the presence of certain machines, and finally what, if anything, is truly surveilled – we will leave this course with a rich understanding not only of surveillance machines but of surveillance as such. Students have an opportunity to work within the many methodologies of media studies, political economy, and critical theory.