From The Handmaid's Tale to Facebook's secrets:

best books on surveillance

Kavenna, Joanna

ProQuest document link

FULL TEXT
Joanna Kavenna selects her favourite books that reveal how we are scrutinised –including a history of black slavery
and classics by Atwood and Orwell
With immaculate irony, Facebook announced its new cryptocurrency, hoping to bring the financial transactions of its
2.4 billion users on to its platform, in the year that marks 70 years since the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four . The digital revolution has dramatically altered the way we live and how we are observed, nudged and
guided. But who owns all this knowledge and what do they want it for? Why is this interventionist reality watching us
so intently, if it only wants to be our friend?
Knowledge is power –a phrase supposedly coined by Francis Bacon in 1597. Two centuries later, Jeremy Bentham
advanced the concept of the panopticon : a prison where “by blinds and other contrivances” a single guard would be
concealed, having “the most perfect view of every cell”. In reality the guard couldn’t watch everyone all the time, but
in his Panopticon Writings Bentham argued the mere possibility of surveillance was enough to alter a prisoner’s
behaviour and therefore ensure “power of mind over mind”. Bentham thought this was a great idea; Michel Foucault
begged to differ, suggesting in Discipline and Punish that knowledge linked to power not only assumes the authority
of “the truth” but has the power to make itself true.
In Dark Matters , Simone Browne notes that Bentham developed his ideas while travelling on a boat carrying slaves
“under the hatches”. A history of the panopticon, she argues, must incorporate 18th-century designs for slave ships,
in which a central vantage point permitted a view of all the slaves onboard. The schematic for one such ship (the
Brooks, which was built in 1781) depicts “tiny black figures set to represent the enslaved drawn like so many cartoon
figures”, Browne writes. Under the panopticon, unique mortals are diminished into a mass, seen through a one-way
mirror.
The Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We was banned by the Soviet censorship board in 1921, appearing
in an English translation three years later. He describes a future society in which all the buildings are made of glass
so –like the panopticon –everyone can be seen at all times. Orwell reviewed We in 1946, three years before echoing
Bentham in his own novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four : “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being
watched at any given moment. You had to live …in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.”
Bentham’s vision is also explored in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale , in which inhabitants are
monitored by the Eyes –the secret police of Gilead. There can be no privacy, no meaningful intimate relations, when
your friends or lovers may be Eyes as well.
In our current era, the watchers are more than human, as Shoshana Zuboff examines in The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism . A vast network of helpful devices observes our lives and converts them into data, which is used to target
us with adverts or predict how we will vote. Yet prediction is an uncertain art. Our friendly global tech companies are
less like soothsayers than magicians, urging us towards a particular card while convincing us it is the one we have
freely chosen. The idea that our hidden, private selves are known may be unpleasant, as Peter Pomerantsev puts it
in This Is Not Propaganda , but it is more disconcerting to imagine “that ‘they’ know something about me which I
hadn’t realised myself, that I’m not who I think I am”. Time to read Dorian Lynskey’s cultural biography of Nineteen

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 1 of 3

Eighty-Four , The Ministry of Truth , and to defriend Siri.
•Zed by Joanna Kavenna is published by Faber.

DETAILS

Subject: Surveillance; Books

People: Atwood, Margaret (1939- ); Lynskey, Dorian; Foucault, Michel; Pomerantsev, Peter;
Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832); Browne, Simone; Zuboff, Shoshana; Orwell, George
(Eric Blair) (1903-1950)

Company / organization: Name: Facebook Inc; NAICS: 518210, 519130

Publication title: The Guardian; London (UK)

First page: 38

Publication year: 2019

Publication date: Sep 4, 2019

Section: Books

Publisher: Guardian News &Media Limited

Place of publication: London (UK)

Country of publication: United Kingdom, London (UK)

Publication subject: Literary And Political Reviews, General Interest Periodicals--Great Britain

ISSN: 02613077

Source type: Newspaper

Language of publication: English

Document type: Commentary

ProQuest document ID: 2284292595

Document URL: http://ezproxy.sunway.edu.my/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/hand

maids-tale-facebooks-secrets-best-books-on/docview/2284292595/se-
2?accountid=147680

Copyright: Copyright Guardian News &Media Limited Sep 4, 2019

Last updated: 2020-04-16

Database: ProQuest Central

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 2 of 3

Database copyright  2023 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.

Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuest

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 3 of 3