Data flows: gender, colonization and the limits of surveillance capitalism

Alina Utrata talks to Stefanie Felsberger, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University, about her research on surveillance, data flows and mensuration tracking apps. They discuss how colonization impacted the development of surveillance technologies, why we think (or shouldn’t think) about data as a commodity instead of labor, and how the ownership of knowledge about female bodies has translated into power—from the witch burnings to period apps.

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Articles mentioned in this podcast:

Stefanie Felsberger’s article “Colonial Cables – The Politics of Surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa.”

The woman who tried to hide her pregnancy from Big Data (and failed) and why pregnant women are such a high value target for advertisers. And if want to know more about the Smart Period Cup.

Amazon experimenting with paying some consumers for their data. They’ve also entered the healthcare market.

The US military is buying location data from every day apps, including a Muslim prayer app and Muslim dating site.

More on testing and importing technologies in low rights environments, or how colonization spurred the development of surveillance technologies. For some more contemporary examples, how technologies developed by US military contractors in Yemen were used to disburse G20 protesters in Pittsburgh in 2009.

More on surveillance tech used to target the Black Lives Matter protests here and here. And an ACLU overview on surveillance tech available in the US, as well as who has stingray tracking devices. And on the use of police drones to surveil protestors.

Virginia Eubanks on how marginalized groups are often governments' test subjects (her full book on the subject here or here.) Relatedly, how Baltimore became the US’s lab for developing surveillance tech.

How the UNHCR is collecting iris data from refugees in Jordan.

On Chinese companies role in Africa and the Middle East, watch part II of this documentary.

On the NSO Group and how their tech was linked to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the hacking of Jeff Bezos’s phone.

More academic books and articles:

• Jarrett, Kylie. 2016. Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife. New York and London: Routledge.
• Lupton, Deborah. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press. EPub.
• Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
• Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Fuchs, Christian. 2013. “Theorizing and Analyzing Digital Labor: From Global Value Chains to Modes of Production.” The Political Economy of Communication 2, no. 1: 3–27.
• Kaplan, Martha. 1995. “Panopticon in Poona: An Essay on Foucault and Colonialism.” Cultural Anthropology 10: 85-98.
• Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-land

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