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https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index
Unless we construct new “sociotechnical imaginaries,” new understandings of the goals and aspirations digital technologies should aim to achieve, the most surveillance studies and privacy scholars can hope to accomplish is a less unjust version of the technology industry’s own vision for the future.
Except, perhaps, for some tech abolitionists, most privacy and surveillance scholars accept that data-driven technologies will continue to proliferate. The aim is to encourage their development along less unjust trajectories.
Unless we introduce competing visions of a good technological future, the most we can hope for, the most surveillance studies and privacy law can achieve, is to realize Silicon Valley’s vision—minus some of the harm.
Borrowing Sheila Jasanoff’s and Sang-Hyun Kim’s (2009: 120–123) phrase, we need to develop new “sociotechnical imaginaries”—i.e., new “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order,” “feasible futures,” “visions of what is good, desirable, and worth attaining for a political community” with and through technology.
“Legal theorists are uncomfortable discussing the social shaping of subjectivity,” she argues, “Engagement with Surveillance Studies could help legal scholars and policymakers understand the ways in which heightened visibility within social media spaces and the affordances of new architectures for interaction shape emergent subjectivity and collective culture” (Cohen 2014: 92, 96).
“As they become woven into the texture of everyday existence, the devices, techniques, and systems we adopt shed their tool-like qualities to become part of our very humanity,” Winner (1986: 6–12)
That we are active participants does not mean we are willing ones—we follow the grammars of action our digital technologies demand mostly because we are dependent on them.
Winner (1986) argued that the real problem was what he called “technological somnambulism”
Privacy theory focuses not only the harms of surveillance but also on the positive value of privacy—for intimacy (Rachels 1975), autonomy (Roessler 2005), equality (Allen 1988), democracy (Schwartz 1999), innovation (Cohen 2012),….