The Rise of Surveillance Bureaucracy

The evolution of surveillance capitalism, this impacts both the citizen and the worker and creates a new tension.

Image by Julius H. from Pixabay

You probably have a vision in your head of endless stretches of grey cubicles, stolid and unremarkable office buildings and pale minions toiling away endlessly entering data and filling out long forms, painfully ensuring everything that need be ticked is correctly ticked. You probably think of bureaucracy synonymously with government. You may think too, of surveillance in terms of cameras everywhere. That’s just a small part of it. Business is very bureaucratic too, always has been.

So what is surveillance bureaucracy and why should we take note? What are the implications and how do we deal with it?

In short, surveillance bureaucracy is the use of a number of digital technologies, from sensors, to tags we wear, cameras in buildings and inside vehicles, productivity monitoring software (like keystroke monitoring) to online forms, time sheets, apps on our mobile devices to the myriad policies, rules and regulations that surround these digital technologies. It is using surveillance technologies to improve efficiency and compliance. It is scary. But there is hope.

The rise of surveillance bureaucracy wasn’t something planned. There was, and is, no deliberate and elaborate scheme to get where we are and may well be going in the short term. That’s the wistful daftness of conspiracy theorists. Instead, it is much the same as how we arrived at surveillance capitalism as Dr. Shoshana Zuboff has so eloquently defined it. They kind of happened in lockstep, in a messy, haphazard way.

While a Medium post is not really the ideal space to go into detail, I’ll try to summarise it here. More detail will be in my forthcoming book, Digital Sapiens. Bureaucracy features heavily as an aspect of modern culture around the world.

One of several things that make up culture such as kinship, arts and religion, is also how we organise our various societies. Bureaucracy was a technology that arose from the early start of the Industrial Era nearly 300 years ago. But it’s not the first time. Prior to Western European capitalism, the Egyptians, well over 2,500 years ago, ran a complex and highly efficient bureaucracy. So did many Andean cultures such as the Olmec and Aztec. Here, I will focus on more bureaucracy as it relates to our current age.

If you’ve worked for a large corporation, especially a multi-national, you will understand how bureaucratic they can be. Government as a bureaucratic system we all understand. Government seeks efficiency through controlling costs and regulation public services and goods. Business uses bureaucracy to run efficiently as possible, but the end game is not the delivery of goods and services anymore, it is profitability and shareholder value. Good capitalism has gone awry.

Government bureaucratic surveillance ha been often quite well intended, but not considered the unintended consequences. One prime example is the trucking industry in America and now Canada through what are called ELDs (Electronic Logging Devices.) These are hardwired into truck engines. They monitor driving hours, routes and so on and use GPS. The intent was to stop drivers from getting exhausted and being exploited by employers. It is not working. If this topic interests you in particular, Dr. Karen Levy of Cornell University has written an interesting book on the topic titled “Data Driven, Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance.”

As with most technologies that people feel enslaved by, people have found workarounds. They’re gaming the system, changing log-in protocols and messing with the device software. Sometimes, even outright smashing the devices. Incidents of crashes and driver deaths have increased since ELDs were introduced.

In industry, with more people working from home, companies have installed keystroke monitoring software and other applications that measure numbers of emails sent, or track what apps are used when during the day. Some factories use cameras and software to track employee safety, that is good. But it can just as easily track productivity and be used against workers. Needless to say, these surveilled workers either quit or find workarounds.

I’m trying to keep this article short, while conveying an idea to think about. Both governments and business have scaffolded a number of additional surveillance tools on top of initial ones, without really thinking about the larger consequences of what they are doing and what will happen.

These sorts of things, as with much of today’s digital technology often accumulate in this way. Bureaucracies, government and industry, begin by employing one form of surveillance in what is intended to help. But all technologies have the duality of good and bad. We don’t like to think about bad things, which is good. But in todays complex world, we should be. Especially at a time when industry is working hard to keep wages as low as possible while looking for technologies to take the place of workers. It is an uncomfortable paradigm.

It is in many ways, dystopian. But it doesn’t have to and likely won’t be. We are only just beginning to see the compounded effects of these digital surveillance technologies on society, much as we are just becoming more aware of their effect of surveillance capitalism on our sociocultural systems. They are being challenged. Mostly by non-profit organisations, some of whom are getting traction. Unions should be, but are largely well behind even governments in understanding the impacts of digital technologies on their members. They need to catch up.

I don’t think we’ll end up in some dystopian future, just as we won’t end up in a utopian future either. Both are unattainable. In the meantime, it could get messy, complicated and end up with a lot of legal challenges. For years technology companies have sold us on the idea that more data means better decisions. This has proven false.

As legal challenges mount and both unions and other organisations put pressure on lawmakers, eventually, we will figure out ways to consider the implications of privacy, the rights of humans and their data and frameworks to consider the appropriate use of these technologies. At least in democracies. Not nearly so in autocracies.