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Saying Something: The Location of Social Movements in the Surveillance Society

Arguing for social movement-based critiques of public surveillance, this article proposes an alternative approach to the established parameters of research on the contemporary surveillance society. As cities become increasingly organized around a logic of insecurity and fear, there has been an eruption of concern and debate about the expansion of urban public surveillance. But most of the research on this subject has paid little attention to the deliberate, collective forms of political critique raised by anti-surveillance activism. Rather, the predominant focus has been on concerns about privacy rights, civil liberties, and the dilemmas of balancing freedom with security. Moreover, the prevailing critical narrative contends that the radical expansion of surveillance has been largely met with consent from the public. Moving beyond such a discourse of consent, this article examines two examples of cultural interventions that seek to contest the growth of public surveillance, not as a problem limited to the violation of privacy rights but as a process that signifies the metastasizing weaponization of everyday life and the authoritarian circulation of fear. I suggest that the significance of contemporary anti-surveillance activism is found in its embeddedness in broader struggles rather than in the opposition to surveillance as an autonomous political aim.