Racial surveillance is rooted in capitalism

Initial criticisms of the thinking that I have presented in this article include the fact that surveillance capitalism tracks and controls all individuals who are essentially required to make use of surveillance capitalist technologies in the modern world. The operations of surveillance capitalism that declare humans as free raw material for the purposes of data extraction, prediction and sales essentially turn all bodies into property. My contention is not that surveillance capitalism only targets specific groupings of people or only presents potential damage for some. Indeed, Zuboff (2019: 8) essentially argues that if we thought that our "voices, personalities, emotions" could not be possessed in capitalist terms, the era of surveillance capitalism has made it so for all individuals subjected to the digital communication technologies that we have become dependent on. Rather, my contention is that surveillance capitalism draws on a history of colonial exploitation and its concomitant racialised ways of seeing the world. As mentioned above, today, the legacy of colonialism continues and is maintained through various institutions, ideologies, and everyday social practices. The question that arises and that precedes the argument that surveillance capitalism is connected to a racialised way of seeing the world can be formulated as follows: where or how can we detect in surveillance capitalist operations the residue and traces of the colonial project? This question can be answered in a number of ways and the arguments above in no way provides a thorough theoretical account. Rather, my focus above was on drawing some connections and tracing some of the logics at play in surveillance capitalism vis-ä-vis colonial expressions. Firstly, Birhane's (2020) reasoning around the algorithmic colonisation of Africa highlights the colonial logic present in the expansion of surveillance capitalism into new territories. The continent is seen as inevitably in line to receive technological "solutions", and, as such, Birhane locates this rhetoric within the colonial matrices of power. The author invokes conquest patterns that depend on imposing new facts and claims to legitimate knowledge. With regards to Google's vast economic power and expansion, Zuboff (2019: 338) notes that "Google imposed the logic of conquest, defining human experience as free for the taking, available to be rendered as data and claimed as surveillance assets". Secondly, although surveillance capitalism penetrates deeply throughout society, its penetration is differential. Some groups of people are negatively racialised by its operations, reifying boundaries along racial lines and as such reifying practices of white world-making. We, therefore, have to ask about the implications regarding surveillance capitalism's enabling of new forms of racist habituation and subjugation. Browne (2015) draws attention not only to differential penetration, but also to the fact that the historical formation of surveillance is not outside the historical formation of racial oppression. According to Browne (2015: 8), racialised surveillance is "of course... not the entire story of surveillance", however, her analysis leads us to ask about the historical and central role of surveillance practices in the creation of racial hierarchy. Third, Mirzoeff's understanding of racial surveillance capitalism insists on the racialised nature of capitalism. Robinson's insight regarding the fact that capitalism is inextricably linked with the histories of racist expropriation, alone, necessitates an understanding of the constitutive genealogies of surveillance capitalism. Further, surveillance capitalism employs the logic of turning bodies into raw material free for the taking, turning bodies into objects, transubstantiating life into value, into data. The logic of rendering life as property, to turn bodies into objects that value can be extracted from, is not new. Rather, this strategy accompanied European colonial expression that sought to expand the project of white world-making. Fanon's (1967: 109) description of the experience of epidermalisation is worth noting here. This reasoning points to the white hegemonic gaze as constructing the black body into "an object in the midst of other objects". Under the matrices of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff (2019: 12) notes: The body is simply a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable "it". These methods reduce individuals to the lowest common denominator of sameness - an organism among organisms -despite all the vital ways in which we are not the same . In this new regime, objectification is the moral milieu in which our lives unfold . [Surveillance capitalism] poaches our behaviour for surplus and leaves behind all the meaning lodged in our bodies, our brains, and our beating hearts [...] (2019: 337). Although there are important contextual differences here in the sense that Fanon points to the imposition of race in black life, while Zuboff's analysis interrogates the extent of data extraction throughout modern society, I read Zuboff's paragraphs in relation to Fanon's formulation of epidermalisation as both pointing to a process of objectification in which bodies become legible as property. As mentioned above, I understand the notion of white world-making to mean ways of feeling, thinking, and seeing that reproduce whiteness and as intimately tied to the project of global coloniality. My interests, therefore, lie in the logics that make possible strategies of conquest declarations rooted in colonial matrices of power, the turning of bodies into objects, and racialised surveillance. These logics point to interweaved histories that set the structural conditions within which surveillance capitalism could and can continue to occur. To say that surveillance capitalism is part of the project of white world-making is to say that it draws on an episteme constructed through interlocking forces of oppression, including racial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and conquest. Locating surveillance capitalism within the project of white world-making in no way attempts to ascribe new or different qualities to it. Rather, tracing some of the longer histories and oppressive knowledge structures in the workings of surveillance capitalism might help us to disentangle the logics and conditions that allow it to thrive.