Liberal luxury

Decentering Snowden, surveillance and privilege

Bibliographic Data

ID16899219
AuthorsPiro Rexhepi (0000-0001-9691-1842, Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume3
Issue2
Publication date2016-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBig Data & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/2053951716679676
OpenAlexW2557334225
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited2

This paper reflects on the continued potency of veillance theories to traverse beyond the taxonomies of surveillance inside liberal democracies. It provides a commentary on the ability of sousveillance to destabilise and disrupt suer/violence by shifting its focus from the centre to the periphery, where Big Data surveillance is tantamount to sur/violence. In these peripheral political spaces, surveillance is not framed by concerns over privacy, democracy and civil society; rather, it is a matter of life and death, a technique of both biopolitical and thanatopolitical power. I argue that the universalist, and universalizing, debates over surveillance cannot be mapped through the anxieties of privileged middle classes as they would neither transcend nor make possible alternative ways of tackling the intersection of surveillance and violence so long as they are couched in the liberal concerns for democracy. I call this phenomenon “liberal luxury,” whereby debates over surveillance have over-emphasised liberal proclivities at the expense of disengaging those peripheral populations most severely affected by sur/violence

Democracy · Epistemology · Law and economics · Liberal democracy · Phenomenon · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Modern American Literature Studies · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism