After Surveillance. Digital Intermediaries of Trust, Confidence, and Security

Conference with two keynotes by Nicole Starosielski, UC Berkeley and Nick Couldry, LSE

Surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, data colonialism. Over the past decade, scholars have coined a spate of new terms that attempt to periodize our present. But what if data extraction capitalism as we know it has already peaked? What if its seemingly powerful and robust digital platforms, logistical infrastructures, and market dominance do not herald a new era, but rather a transitional period marked by security breaches, precarious business models, waste of energy, and loss of trust? What if we think of our current situation as repercussions of the long 20th century and its Western modes of logistics, distribution, and audience research, but one that is slowly fading away? What comes next as they give way to new global digital fabrics that operate on their own terms? How does society’s reliance on digital media and networks translate into new, distributed forms of accountability and trust? And what are the theoretical implications of approaching today’s global digital society as unstable, crisis-ridden, and transitional?

“After Surveillance” explores the growing importance of digital intermediaries and mediation processes at a moment when they are becoming the new organizational realities of society. The conference brings together new comparative and global approaches to theorizing digital intermediaries in their own terms as ways of creating, maintaining, and disrupting coherence and trust. This perspective connects to a rich interdisciplinary field in media studies, infrastructure studies, and social theory. Concepts such as logistical media (Hockenberry et al. 2021; Peters 2015), digital media distribution (McDonald et al. 2021), (media) infrastructures (Parks & Starosielski 2015; Larkin 2008, Edwards 2002), maintenance (Graham & Thrift 2007), cultures of risk, trust and security (Goerzen and Coleman, 2022; Bodó 2021; Galison 2010; MacKenzie 2001), or coproduction (Jasanoff 2004) offer ways of understanding digital intermediaries as media that organize and mediate (Beyes et al. 2022; Hoof & Boell 2019) while also emphasizing the ephemerality of such entanglements.

In this regard, “After Surveillance” focuses on the basic socio-material structures that underpin and shape how digital entanglements are organized, how they are kept trustworthy and secure-or not. It pays attention to how digital technologies are refracted, deployed, mediated by, and mediate existing social forms and practices. Specifically, the conference will explore: intermediaries of trust-building and securitization; geographies and discourses of digital (mis)trust; socio-material imbrications of digital technology in pre-existing institutions and relations; new conceptual frameworks for describing current developments and processes; new proposals for historicizing, naming, and periodizing the present. The focus on digital intermediaries offers new ways of analyzing and understanding how institutions, infrastructures, discourses, standards, technologies, business practices, and networks give way to new global geographies, and how digital entanglements are kept entangled, but also how this gives rise to fundamental threads that shape the conditions of our lives.

The conference is jointly funded and organized by Goethe University Frankfurt and Harvard University and will take place on December 16-17 in Frankfurt.

More on the event on its website aftersurveillance.info

Organizers
Harvard University, ConTrust and Normative Orders