User:Inge Hoonte/Surveillant sorting the city

David Lyon, Surveillant sorting in the city

Originally published in Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Open University Press, 2001)
[David Lyon], Lead Researcher at Queens University, Canada. Director of The Surveillance Project

sur·veil·lance [[1]] /sərˈveɪləns, -ˈveɪlyəns/ Show Spelled[ser-vey-luhns, -veyl-yuhns] –noun 1. a watch kept over a person, group, etc., esp. over a suspect, prisoner, or the like: The suspects were under police surveillance. 2. supervision or superintendence.

Origin: 1790–1800; < F, equiv. to surveill ( er ) to watch over ( sur- sur-1 + veiller < L vigilāre to watch; see vigil) + -ance -ance

David Lyon once departed from the more physical, architectural panopticon (Foucault) surveillance model, now mostly interested in social sorting, ID's, citizen monitoring, to take an approach that goes beyond privacy and how this excludes certain groups.

"Surveillance Studies has been Lyon’s major research area for the past 20 years. He brings a sociological perspective to bear on the issues raised by personal data processing in a database-dependent world. His surveillance interests include border and airport controls, social media, organizational routines, video camera surveillance and, especially, citizen registration and identification systems. His concerns include, prominently, the social sorting capacities of contemporary surveillance, along with an exploration of their ethics and politics."

Summary of book: "Takes a post-privacy approach to surveillance with a different look at the relations between technology and society. This book examines the computer-based scrutiny of daily life for citizens as they participate in contemporary societies. It also argues that to understand what is happening we have to go beyond Orwellian cries for more privacy." [2]

Assumes digital surveillance as the norm in cities. In my experience, there's human surveillance, people watching and judging and recording, as well. Not just in cities. The what is so and so doing and with whom and have you heard about the neighbor's affair with the grocer, is more small town surveillance. It's just that with digital monitoring, it's recorded by machines, and watched by people you don't know. It makes it more anonymous and where this used to be uncomfortable and restricting movement, we are now used to it.

Well, it's 2001, so we look at SimCity (est. 1989) as a model for everyday city life. Where there is a lot of freedom and potential to take part in everyday policy making and city development. Lyon calls it "social science fiction". How much does it resemble "the real world?", he wonders, as in everyday life, decisions about city planning are also based on simulations coming from raw data.

Looking at the city and urban planning as a model for society, in Roman and Greek eras. But isn't it the other way around? Society shapes its environment and is in turn shaped by it. Lyon's example of Paris doesn't quite stand up as a model for social safety as a public virtue (or perhaps he isn't presenting it as such) -- do you think these lanterns were placed in the slums? Yes, it was a great thing to give to its citizens but it was also a great way to put Paris on the map as the city of light. It had just been the City of Plague for 200 years until 1670, so of course it wants to be known as the City of Lights just a few years later...

I do agree with Lyon mentioning that with developing cities, onset of urbanism, night time meant darkness and things you can't see, you don't trust, like the devil. This mythology is still very much rooted in western, christian, catholic society that divide life in good and evil, no middle ground. What you can't explain, can't understand, can't touch, has to be bad. He says, "(...) spaces in cities were designed to permit maximum visibility (...) to promote public safety. TO SEE WAS TO ENSURE SOCIAL CONTROL, TO PLAN FOR ORDER." Where cities used to develop organically, by a river crossing, etc, in later times we design them to be straight, efficient, orderly, square... what we perceive as safe. Lyon argues that in the old days, safety and crime prevention came from citizens. He sees it as a productive power, not a negative connotation: Mostly it's used to improve quality of living. Now that surveillance is automated, digitized data-gathering, various sorts of data can be compared and stored, although incidents and events are rarely monitored by themselves, out of context -- it's more a plan for eventuality, in case you need it.

Uses the example of most non-local data traffic by phone going out from large urban areas. Calls this proof of cyberspace being concentrated around conventional urban areas. These data flows are actually used in city planning. Infrastructure enabling data flow has to be planned side by side with historic districts that form heart of tourism. Hereby the idea of a city also changes. It is no longer just the center, but a web that is strung together by economy.

SimCity: build your own city, base it on someone else's design, or existing city. Came with handbooks on how to plan and tips on crime regulation, traffic control etc.

Simcity can be seen as 1. toy to try out urban designs 2. shorthand for simulated city 3. site of surveillance (based on simulation)

Don't really agree with his comparison to Gropius and Bauhaus, which was founded, yes from an idealistic standpoint, but very much to apply design to everyday life and make it accessible. Although they share a quest for standardization and doing things yourself, Gropius' aim wasn't to just try things out in a fun little commune. It was very much applied to the real world and put into practice. Models actually ended up in production lines and were sold and being used.

Quotes Ted Friedman who Compares the act of building in SimCity with Baudrillard postmodern simulacra ideas. In the end, it's a simulation, it's not reality. Also: comparison of city planning to Disneyzation. I believe the correct architectural term is Disneyfication?[3]: "The stripping of a real or historical place/event of its original character in order to repackage it in a sanitized, simplified, and sentimentalized form." Makes a valid point that the extras can be seen as surveillance in disguise. They are there to make you feel safe but they are actually also monitoring you.

Back to city: Surveillance used for simulations to predict what you're gonna do next, so planning can involve pre-emptive action. Foucault investigated influence of surveillance on the prison system (1975 [[4]]), and distinguishes the shift in modern society, after the Society of the Spectacle [Guy Debord, 1967 [[5], between very public forms of torture, and ones that are hidden away behind bars. Debord: "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." Debord emphasizes that this is largely a result of mass media: he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction.

Back to the 2000's > Manuel Castells' 'informational city': informational and data infrastructure implemented in the city, but the power is regulated in a flow, a non-place. Whoah. He's pointing out how "highly skilled knowledge workers" are connected to "unskilled workers (...) who are still required for routine assembly and other tasks." As if they're seconds away from being replaced by a computer? Or just not that relevant to society? Bit weird statement and beside the point.

Flexibility, mobility and speed of data flow enables anticipation of what will happen next, cyber data predicts events that haven't happened in real life yet.

p159 -- mentions that power monitoring is used by govt to expose marijuana gardens with high-power lights, but that they could have a more daily use for citizens to monitor their own power output. Then points out that access to technology is unevenly distributed within population.

FEAR of attack, intrusion, violence, danger, risk. OF EARLIER MENTIONED UNKNOWN DARKNESS. The stranger. The unknown. The lower class? Then goes on to make a point for the opportunity for surveillance practices to protect the minority against racist attacks, as well as strengthening such racism. Lyons: "City planning tries to exclude the very conflicts that it tends to generate. As in Disneyland, "conflict is designed out, and comfort designed in" (Sharon Zukin)

Example p160, Victoria, BC: people pushed onto the street with non-smoking by-law, then pushed off the street with street camping by-law, leaving a hyperreal fake tourist consumption city. Lyon weaves this into making a case for middle class being squeezed out of society, turning to cyber society. Surveillance is not as strictly applied to state and workplace, but diffused into consumer culture. Not just used to exert power, but to analyze and administer population. In this diffused web, state meets commerce. Police records are strung into insurance packages for example.

Example London Underground: monitor crowd flow to detect congestion and spot potential suicide (tend to wait, miss trains, jump). Are the pixels always right?? Can they distinguish between hugging and mugging?

Surveillance and identity classification takes place on three levels, which are connected: 1. citizen > tax, law, insurance, politics 2. worker > regulate productivity, background check 3. consumer > track purchases and transactions > biggest growth in techn. dev.

We're monitored and recorded several times a day, and used to it. SHOULD NOT BE IGNORED AND MARGINALIZED. Opens up space for resistance. Glasgow: Crime doesn't actually go down by installing more cameras, but fear of crime does go down. NYC: Crime dropped when cameras installed in the projects. For someone who wants to go beyond this privacy issue and think about everyday applications of surveillance "for the public good", Lyons sure takes up a lot of examples from police state, governmental monitoring, etc.

Re: traffic surveillance, CAN GOOGLE MAPS (and Google search in general) BE SEEN AS SURVEILLANCE?? Who is it for? Where does this data go?

Oscar Gandy's "panoptic sort": targeted advertising thanks to databases of consumer info. Geodemographic data + census = effective mailing. Also takes place online, suggestions of where you should spend your money based on what you've already bought or browsed over. Cookies keep track of what you do.

Final plea for SimCity... but not necessarily convincing. In the end I don't think he needed the SimCity model, as we've modeled ourselves to simulacra for centuries.

CONCLUSIONS Surveillance to minimize risk, data used to simulate, model and anticipate situations, decisions made based on this simulation. THE MORE YOU'RE CATEGORIZED AND SEGMENTED, THE MORE ASPECTS OF YOU ARE TARGETED. Positive traits: the only one raised by Lyons is that we associate the monitoring systems with safety. Are there more?

Surveillance is dividing the city and excluding certain population to be part of it: Ones with poor credit, certain ethnic background. Roger Burrows: "new apartheid channels homeless and poor away from the air conditioned virtual environments of middle class" >> So it's not the rich excluding the poor, it's the middle class. Threat of THE OTHER is increased in the rich multicultural city environment. Strangers can both flourish relationships and fragment them.

The sorting mechanisms also exclude personal responsibility, feeling, emotion, moral judgement. They create a digital extract of you that you would probably not recognize when bumped into. So everyday life is more and more simulated through this application of digitization, Lyons argues.

But it "doesn't have to be this way." he concludes. His closing argument doesn't really hold up, I feel... In the end, he falls back on people taking responsibility and ownership of each others' safety, committed to this unpaid daily task. And this is supported how??