Welcome to the Funopticon
It sometimes feels like a damp, Orwellian blanket has been draped over American life in the anxious years since 9/11. During this period of almost constant war and painful economic upheaval, ordinary Americans have witnessed the rapid expansion of a mysterious infrastructure of national security, the stunning proliferation of drones and CCTV cameras in public spaces, and Big Data’s creeping omniscience about our innermost desires. Surveillance, it would seem, is an inherently serious business.
Yet surveillance has another register, a lighter side that can be seen with wonderful clarity in a commercial that Coca-Cola released in 2012. A bold celebration of CCTV as a tool of global grooviness, it was quickly enshrined as an “ad worth sharing” by the influential nonprofit known as TED as part of their “initiative to recognize and reward innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising.”1 What was worth sharing, according to TED, was the way in which “security cameras around the world capture some of the lowest moments in human behavior—but they also capture some of the most beautiful.”2
I agree that the spot is worth sharing, but not for the same reason. At first glance, the commercial seems like nothing more than a well-produced collection of the usual surveillance tropes: urban chaos, traffic accidents, random street hustles, all seen through the flat and impersonal gaze of CCTV. Yet even from the first frames, these otherwise ordinary security cameras seem weirdly alive with curiosity and feeling. Moving like gentle, thoughtful cyborgs out of the WALL-E universe, the cameras capture not the customary terrors and traumas of the nightly news, but unexpectedly harmless, even joyful moments of public life: “people stealing . . . kisses,” “attacks of friendship and kindness,” “friendly gangs,” and “peaceful warriors,” as the on-screen text explains during a montage of actual CCTV videos with surprisingly happy endings. The upbeat music of Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit” is the only sound we hear for the duration of the commercial, which presents itself with the smug superiority of a public service ad. Interestingly, we don’t hear the first verse of the song—“There’s so much that we need to share”—perhaps because it could remind sensitive viewers that we live in a post-Snowden age in which data “sharing” is quietly compulsory. Instead, we hear Supertramp’s joyous refrain of “Give a little bit of your love to me,” while we see sweet and playful scenes playing out on screen. After a minute and a half of small triumphs, most of them seemingly in the Middle East or on the Indian subcontinent, the final title declares, “Let’s look at the world a little differently,” while dozens of CCTV-camera images transform themselves into the familiar shape of a Coke bottle. It’s a startling association—the surveillance camera as happy, trusting, and humane—and it elicited some online guffaws alongside the praise of the TED brigade. Not long after the commercial’s release, an anonymous parody appeared on Vimeo under the title “Real ‘Security Cameras.’” Featuring a series of gruesome murders and beatings caught on video, with some of the horrific Columbine footage thrown in for good measure, all set to the same Supertramp song that Coke employed, the video hints at the hollowness of the original. Whoever posted this little-seen parody (perhaps its unnamed producer?) added this useful advice in their description of the video: “Welcome to the real world, bitches.”3
This cynical, unnamed satirist is onto something: the seductiveness of what we might call “playful surveillance,” a seemingly lighter mode of engagement with the tools and practices of surveillance culture that is becoming increasingly widespread, from Disneyland to our own backyards.4 Although the enchantments, possibilities, and pleasures are real enough, we might still wonder about the implications of surveillance cameras hidden within children’s toys, bird feeders, and consumer drones; the glorification of the surveillance aesthetic in film, television, and videogames; the fusion of gaming and surveillance technologies and techniques; the social-media apps that help us find friends if we share our data with unseen marketers; and many other surveillance products that blur the line between entertainment and something less savory. As surveillance and entertainment become increasingly intertwined, it seems that we are entering a new moment in which everyone’s watching, everyone’s playing, everyone’s enchanted with seeing and being seen, sorting and being sorted. Here I am. There you are. Isn’t this fun?
Welcome to the “Funopticon,” a new metaphor that I want to suggest for the increasingly playful surveillance culture of the twenty-first century. Even as surveillance wraps itself around our bodies in ways that might strike some people as humiliating and exploitative, it is doing something else as well: it is operating in a way that doesn’t always feel oppressive or heavy, but rather feels like pleasure, convenience, choice, and community. In other words, personal debasement increasingly exists in a dialectic with new modes of enchantment, connection, and entertainment that challenge the grim logic of the Panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham proposed for penal reform more than two centuries ago.5 Of course, I’m not the first to chip away at the gray façade of the Panopticon.6 More than a decade ago, literary scholar Vincent Pecora joined what was then a small number of social scientists interested in tracing the underappreciated pleasures of surveillance culture. Looking at the rise of social media, which asks us to share intimate details of our lives with friends and strangers, Pecora suggested that “the possibility arises that, for a growing number of people in contemporary Western society, surveillance has become less a regulative mechanism of authority (either feared as tyrannous or welcomed as protection) than a populist path to self-affirmation and a ready-made source of insight into the current norms of group behavior.”7
But even now, what has not been fully understood is how much pleasure is driving the expansion of surveillance in our daily lives—and how this playful surveillance creates a paradoxical space in which the cold mechanisms of control, monitoring, and social sorting are increasingly experienced as entertainment and pleasure, with billions of dollars at stake. While governments are willing to operate in this playful mode of information-gathering, the Funopticon is primarily the product of corporations looking to expand markets, create demand, and harvest consumer data to an unprecedented degree. It is also where ordinary people find themselves encouraged to play along with surveillance technology and practices, and most are happy to oblige in the name of convenience, connection, or simple fun. Yet we might ask: What are the hidden costs of
entertaining ourselves with surveillance tools and techniques? In helping to market surveillance, sometimes quite literally, as something pleasant and entertaining, the Funopticon might serve a pedagogical function by teaching us how to think and feel about surveillance in ways that conform to the expectations of corporate Big Data and the NSA alike, not to mention those who sell its wares. As the Funopticon softens and normalizes surveillance, converting a source of fear and anxiety into a fountain of pleasure, it may encourage the raucous carnivalization of surveillance for reasons both hopeful and grim. In other words, the fun is real—but so are the trade-offs.
Ultimately, the Funopticon may provide a useful metaphor for life in what Nigel Thrift has dubbed “the security-entertainment complex.”8 Moving beyond the contours of the traditional military-industrial complex, it is, as economic geographer Ash Amin puts it, a new system that trades on “extreme sports, video games, theatrical citizenship, virtual war simulations, consumer spectacle, speculative behavior, and other forms of energetic ways of being in the world that involve extreme emotions.” It is “engineering the gladiatorial consumer habituated to the idea of the future as permanently risky but also apprehended through enthusiastic forms of dwelling.”9 I think we are now being invited to “dwell enthusiastically” in a strange new place where surveillance becomes entertainment and entertainment becomes surveillance in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. Before giving some representative examples of playful surveillance in action, intended to illuminate the Funopticon in its many forms, I want to explore the limitations of the existing paradigms for understanding surveillance and the possibilities in a new metaphor that emphasizes pleasure and participation. Finally, I will end with a discussion of David Fincher’s 1997 film The Game, in which we see that the playfulness of the Funopticon is a complex pleasure indeed.
Dark Masters
Nothing looms larger over our understanding of surveillance than the somber faces of three European intellectuals whose lives span almost 250 years: Jeremy Bentham, George Orwell, and Michel Foucault. Their insights, metaphors, and even moods endure to the present day in both popular and academic conversations about surveillance, so much so that it is almost impossible to speak about the subject without reference to Big Brother or the Panopticon. Yet in the pages ahead I want to point to the historical particularity of these three wise men of surveillance studies; the ways in which they lived in a world whose specifications are quite different from those of our own; and the ways in which we might expand our sense of surveillance to incorporate fun, pleasure, and laughter, seldom a part of their dour visions of control, while still being aware of how many of the underlying mechanisms of the Panopticon or 1984 might remain in place. Although we need these three writers to remain in the conversation about surveillance and its implications in the twenty-first century, we also need new ways to account for the love, joy, pleasure, and warmth in our seemingly cold systems of social sorting and networking, and how those positive feelings are created, experienced, and even exploited. Doing so requires us to shift the tone of surveillance studies and to push beyond the grim contours of our foundational metaphors, beginning with Bentham’s famous Panopticon.
Few worthies of the Enlightenment get a worse rap than Jeremy Bentham, the early-nineteenth-century reformer best known for his controversial designs for English penitentiaries. Eager to create a more humane alternative to the shackling of convicts in pre-Dickensian hellholes, Bentham tried to imagine a scheme in which mental constraints would replace physical ones. By locating a nearly invisible warden at the center of a specially designed circular prison, Bentham proposed “a new mode of obtaining power, power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”10 Because prisoners would never know when they were being watched in this so-called Panopticon, they would have to assume that they were under constant surveillance and act accordingly. Although the design was not widely implemented in English penitentiaries, the concept of the Panopticon has become fundamental to surveillance studies in the age of all-seeing drones, omnivorous dataveillance, and the sort of NSA activities to which Edward Snowden has alerted the world. Yet scholars have long pointed to blind spots in the Panopticon model in its original formulation or, as I’ll discuss later, in Michel Foucault’s expansion of the concept in the 1970s. For instance, in an excellent article about class and gender in the surveillance of young people in northern English schools, two scholars have noted that “totalizing visions of ‘panoptic’ power also tell us very little about how people situated in different ‘social positions’ respond to monitoring by ‘new surveillance’ technologies.”11 With such limitations in mind, the sociologist David Lyon has complained that the “mere mention of the Panopticon elicits exacerbated groans” among surveillance scholars who feel overwhelmed by its ubiquity.12
For this reason, scholars have been moving toward a less totalizing model that takes pleasure, care, and desire into account. Following in the footsteps of sociologist Gary Marx, two European scholars, Anders Albrechtslund and Lynsey Dubbeld, published a brief but provocative article in 2005 in which they described the need for researchers to imagine surveillance “not just as positively protective, but even as a comical, playful, amusing, enjoyable practice.”13 Lyon has also been opening up surveillance studies to such ways of thinking throughout his long and influential career. As he put it in one lecture, surveillance culture is more than the sinister stuff that often comes to mind—it’s also a “fun” activity that we experience in the “routines of everyday life,” often with a guileless belief that “we have nothing to hide.”14 For these reasons and many more, surveillance scholars have been picking at obsolete paradigms for more than a decade, looking for ways to account for the brighter shades of surveillance experience.15
If the old paradigms seem a bit long in the tooth, it is not surprising. After all, Bentham, along with the equally influential Orwell and Foucault, are dead white men who never saw the twenty-first century’s soft despotism in its full glory. They never saw the narcotic effect of electronic media on teenagers with iPhones and Xboxes and Facebook accounts, and never witnessed the real diversity of human experience in a way that wasn’t inescapably bound up in their own privilege—racial, gender, colonial, or otherwise. What could the three wise men of surveillance studies know about the potential pleasures of social sorting in the age of social media and ubiquitous CCTV? What could they know about surveillance-based video games and blockbuster movies that celebrate the power of drones and other spy gadgetry? What could they know about miniature wearable health monitors that beam our vitals into the Cloud in the name of longevity, or granny-cams that help us take care of our aging loved ones? Not much, though we can’t fault them for not living long enough. After all, Bentham made a valiant taxidermic grab for immortality in the halls of University College London, where his somewhat ragged corpse remains on display for the benefit of students and assorted visitors.
Corpse or no corpse, Bentham might have faded from view if not for Michel Foucault, who revived the Panopticon with a combination of theoretical genius and theatrical flair in the mid-1970s. His great insight in Discipline and Punish (1975) was that, beginning sometime in the nineteenth century, the power of the sovereign underwent a profound shift whose nature is fundamental to the inner workings of modern society—and the workings of surveillance as a technology of social control. Where once a criminal was beaten in a public spectacle that would wreak vengeance on his person and shock bystanders into submission (e.g., poor Robert-François Damiens, the failed regicide in 1750s Paris), by the nineteenth century we had entered a more insidious regime of internalized punishment that wore away minds and souls in ways that are disturbingly familiar. Using Bentham’s Panopticon as his central metaphor, Foucault argued that overt brutality was no longer needed because we had learned to see ourselves through the gaze of an unseen “warden.” The subsequent portrait of surveillance that emerges in Foucault’s work and that of his followers is of a joyless regime of self-monitoring in which our authentic selves (if such a thing can be imagined) wither away, supplanted by institutionally prescribed visions of the normal, healthy, and sane. Despite the brilliance and originality of Foucault’s analysis, it brought with it an emotional limitation that made it better suited to moments of anxiety and obligation than of laughter and communion. Heavy with Gallic gloom and post-1960s frustration, Foucault painted a gray and totalizing vision straight out of science fiction—not to mention a particular historical moment in modern France. As his biographer James Miller has suggested, Foucault was a privileged revolutionary whose vision of an all-controlling Panopticon was shaped by his experiences during the student revolts of 1968. A product of that chaotic and frustrating moment for the European left, Discipline and Punish has woven a melancholy spell over academic and journalistic discussions of surveillance ever since its publication in 1975.16 As the book became a founding document of surveillance studies in sociology and allied fields—if not one of the most influential works of scholarship ever published—Foucault had an intellectual as well as a tonal impact on most academic conversations about surveillance, shifting the mood toward the somber, heavy, gray, and dark in ways that have both deepened and narrowed our understanding of the phenomenon.
Such emotional narrowing runs through much of Discipline and Punish. His chapter on the Panopticon begins with a typically dramatic scene in which a plague-infested seventeenth-century town tries to contain the disease through the utmost vigilance: “The gaze is alert everywhere,” he writes darkly, as “inspection functions ceaselessly” throughout a village stricken with fear.17 As he does with his earlier example of Damiens the regicide, Foucault is spinning an artful fable of oppression, a dramatic allegory in which the “penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of life” is made vivid and memorable far beyond the scholarly norm. In an extreme case of a forgotten old village overcome with a deadly infestation, Foucault finds a dramatic expression of a modern disciplinary society then just emerging. Lepers, plagues, madness, prisons—his examples are often vivid, dramatic, and extreme, even a touch melodramatic. Nowhere is this more evident than in his ultimate evocation of our own oppression in a newly fleshed-out metaphor of the Panopticon. More than Bentham’s penological innovation, it is now a generalizable condition of internalized surveillance, a “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assumes the automatic functioning of power.”18 This is the “generalizable model” for “defining power relations in terms of the everyday life” that Foucault proposes for contexts far beyond anything Bentham imagined for certain prisoners. Like characters in The Matrix or some other dystopian sci-fi tale, Foucault’s children are subjected to a “permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance” in a “cruel, ingenious cage.”19 We are all in the prison, whether we know it or not—that was the implication of his work.
The drama and force of his case against benign modernity is unmistakable. Rhetorically and emotionally, Discipline and Punish electrifies its readers due in no small measure to its author’s handling of striking visual metaphors. One might question, however, as few have paused to do, whether some readers are seduced by Foucault’s images more than his ideas. In other words, does his dramatic artistry overwhelm one’s historical or sociological imagination? Though some later historians have rolled their eyes at his occasionally haphazard methods and penchant for exaggeration, he’s not wrong about surveillance: he’s just monochromatic in ways that we need to reconsider.20
Yet I understand why he was seduced by the Panopticon—and why it has weighed so heavily on our understanding of surveillance. In the back of the 1791 edition that I examined in the British Library, a reader can find two enormous foldout illustrations of the Panopticon that Bentham envisioned. So vividly is his model rendered, in word and image, that it is extraordinarily tempting to fall into its embrace, to be seduced by its contours, and to imagine it as a constant companion in the “matrix” of twenty-first-century securitization, which is far different from the conditions that produced Bentham or Foucault. Something so striking is difficult to leave behind, which has also been the blessing and the curse of the novelist George Orwell for surveillance studies: his monolithic vision of surveillance in 1984 has had an enduring, and sometimes distorting, influence on our understanding of the subject.
Because of Orwell’s power as a novelist with a gift for striking visual images, 1984 rightfully became one of the central novels of the twentieth century, sometimes blocking out the sun, conceptually speaking. Indeed, it has sometimes proven difficult for scholars to imagine surveillance without Big Brother’s brushy mustache popping into view, pulling the emotional register toward the heavy and grim. As a consequence, 1984 looms so large that it is sometimes difficult to think an original thought about surveillance without its outsized influence pressing on us. Yet his great book was very much the product of living in the unique time and place of Europe in the 1940s, in which the fate of the world was seemingly being decided in the battle between fascism, communism, and democracy. As if that wasn’t enough to raise the stakes for Orwell’s literary production, the author was also struggling with a precipitous decline in health that led to his early death in 1949, not long after the publication of his bleak novel. While the novel retains its universal relevance in many ways and is no doubt one of the crowning glories of twentieth-century Anglophone literature, I worry that it is getting in the way of seeing the lighter side of surveillance that is emerging in the twenty-first century. We’re simply in a very different spot than was the protagonist Winston Smith, in many ways (or so we like to imagine). For instance, when Winston conspires to meet his lover in Victory Square, he must take great pains to conceal his true purposes from the telescreens around the base of Oliver Cromwell’s statue. Now we bring our own telescreens wherever we go: iPads, smartphones, digital cameras, and the rest of the accouterments of electronic connectivity. Big Brother is still at work, of course, but now a million smiling Little Brothers share the burden of surveillance. What Orwell imagined as misery—to live in a “place where there is no darkness”—has become a goal that we are eager to achieve through social media and other forms of participatory surveillance.
These writers made the functioning of surveillance into something simple to visualize, emotionally arresting, and dramatically powerful. Their metaphors set the stage on which we now act in ways that are useful and inspirational—but also distracting and distorting at times. What Orwell, Bentham, and Foucault couldn’t foresee are the pleasant and banal qualities of contemporary surveillance culture, which often seems far removed from the threatening and oppressive culture that their work suggested. What we need, I suspect, is an updating of their models to account for this strange new turn of events toward the entertaining and glib.
A recent novel from the United Kingdom provides a useful revision of the old surveillance paradigms. Jenni Fagan’s Panopticon suggests that securitization will arrive with a whisper, not a bang. The implication of her book is that melodramatic metaphors might obscure the incremental nature of the real changes currently under way, dulling our awareness of the slow slide into something undesirable. Liberties are seeping away drop by drop, not drained all at once. Fagan, a young Scottish writer, has created a fierce fifteen-year-old protagonist, Anais Hendricks, a troubled “client” sentenced to a residential care facility called “the Panopticon.” Violent, orphaned, drug-addled, and abused, Anais may feel tortured, but the facility is not heinous—her social worker is less Nurse Ratched than harried grad student collecting data for a social work PhD. Indeed, what we see in this surveillance-themed novel is a world that doesn’t look like The Matrix or some other sci-fi dungeon of gloom. Orwell’s Room 101 is nowhere in sight. The new and improved Panopticon is less obviously authoritarian, less overtly oppressive. The implication is fascinating: the world won’t get a radical makeover when surveillance becomes omnipresent, woven deep into our buildings and bodies, but instead it will look reassuringly familiar to us. The new Panopticon will have Wi-Fi, cappuccino, and vegetarian options. It will utilize the language of choice, freedom, and pleasure. It will speak casually about freedom and dignity. It will make us laugh and feel connected, with a lightness of spirit that seems, at least on its bright, shiny surface, very far from the world of Bentham, Orwell, and Foucault. It will make surveillance seem cool.
Softening Surveillance
The entertaining side of surveillance culture should not come as a surprise. Hollywood films love to celebrate the seductive glamour of surveillance systems, as well as the valiant attempts to thwart them. Popular videogames present CCTV as an exciting part of the action hero’s arsenal, so much so that editorials fulminate about games that make us “too comfortable with the modern surveillance state.”21 Facebook and other popular social media are infused with the logic of surveillance culture, which creates systems for endless monitoring, sorting, and archiving of other people’s behavior, not to mention our own, that we use to share funny videos and keep ourselves in the loop with friends, family, and former lovers.22 Even traditional news programs now serve up endless CCTV footage as low-cost infotainment, often with the implicit suggestion that something hilariously or horribly real is going to happen: a child disappears; a bomb goes off; a celebrity melts down. With its implied promise of unmediated observation, CCTV footage is often presented, quite cynically, as the ultimate documentary pleasure in an era of insatiable reality hunger, a moment in which the most magical words are “Live—Caught on Camera!” To cite just one example: the ubiquitous Russian dashcam footage of traffic accidents, which has garnered a huge online audience for its jaunty presentation of death and destruction. Even mundane CCTV footage has found a new entertainment niche: popular apps now invite us to peep via ordinary security video feeds from around the world—parking lots in Japan, restaurants in France, beaches in Florida. One app promises “10,000 real time CCTV surveillance cameras,” along with the ability to customize our “cam collection” and even vote for “favorite cams.” Another app lets us shake our phone to change the CCTV feed whenever we become bored, a common occurrence with cameras so often trained on desolate roads and closed shops from Taiwan to Finland.23
And as they say in the infomercial business: But wait . . . there’s more! If we grow bored with watching anonymous CCTV, we can purchase our own cameras for purely recreational purposes. The online auction site eBay provides a buyers’ guide, titled “Cool Surveillance Gadgets That Make Fun and Unique Gifts for Kids.” One section (“Fun with Surveillance Gadgets”) suggests that “properly placed surveillance gadgets might even help find Bigfoot or the truth about UFOs.”24 Of course, eBay is hardly the only vendor of such devices: most any medium-sized city will have a brick-and-mortar spy shop that specializes in hidden microphones, night-vision goggles, and other “cool spy gadgets,” including “CCTV novelty gifts” such as “bird feeders that take bird watching to a whole new level.” Of course, the Internet remains the best place to purchase gear for recreational surveillance. For a few hundred dollars, anyone can deploy a small UAV and create “stunning drone videos” that attract thousands of viewers.25 “I love flying in the mountains and zooming down mountainsides,” one amateur drone photographer explains. “It allows me to experience all the thrills of flight in spectacular locations with my body never leaving the ground.”26 We can also use Periscope or other popular apps to live-stream from our smartphones to the world, where millions of people are surprisingly interested in watching a lot of nothing in the lives of random strangers, all in the name of aimless voyeuristic pleasure.
Even when surveillance technology is being used for its original purpose, it is often imbued with a new spirit of whimsy and fun. A Wired magazine article (“DISNEY MEETS ORWELL WITH THESE SUPER CUTE SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS”) discussed charmingly designed but fully functional monitoring devices.27 (Such security cameras might have special appeal to those who grew up watching the Disney Junior cable network: one episode featured tiny roving ladybugs with spy cameras atop their heads, adding to the “cutification” of surveillance technology.)28 Even the TV set is shifting its function within our living rooms. Perhaps not surprisingly, as surveillance and entertainment become interwoven, a new-generation television is more than an appliance for watching Dancing with the Stars; it’s also a remote-sensing device that tracks our viewing habits better than the NSA. Not long ago, Samsung released a smart TV that uses facial-recognition software to confirm our identity, detect our movements, and even record what we are saying—all of which is automatically shared with marketers and other interested companies. Hidden in Samsung’s 50-page privacy statement is a notice that “if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”29 In a similar vein, gaming hardware is being repurposed for the security industry, along with the associated skill set of the gamer. Using Kinect, a hands-free motion-control system developed for gamers, today’s security professional can zoom their CCTV cameras with the same hand gestures they learned for an Xbox bowling simulator.30 Meanwhile, other companies are literally turning gaming consoles into home surveillance systems: a gamer who leaves home can even get automated texts when motion is detected somewhere near their beloved Xbox.
The interpenetration of entertainment and surveillance practices is also happening in commercial settings devoted to recreation. To ensure a controlled good time, biometrics have started to appear in the physical spaces of entertainment, from Disneyland’s pioneering use of finger scans to identify ticket-holders, to a Spanish comedy club’s use of facial recognition to calculate a patron’s total number of chuckles, which allows them to charge more for each additional laugh during a given performance.31 (No word on whether customers get a discount for mirthless glowering.)
Playful surveillance also has a central role within a complex phenomenon known as gamification, a buzzword that corporations use to describe the “playful” acquisition of marketing data. With its stated goals of increasing brand loyalty and “customer engagement,” corporate gamification is actually financial surveillance on an epic scale—after all, its primary purpose is to find out more about us, usually more than we would be willing to divulge were it not for the three-card Monte of marketing surveys masquerading as free games on a phone or laptop. Big Data doesn’t have a complete stranglehold on the gamification of surveillance and gamification can work for privacy advocates in some contexts; Camover, for instance, is a German game in which players score points for disabling real-life security cameras. But such acts of gamified resistance strike me as ultimately marginal pursuits on the edge of surveillance culture.32
In all the examples above, corporations are the driving force behind the fusion of surveillance and entertainment, but the US government wants private citizens to “play” with surveillance as well. In 2005, the NSA launched a website filled with wacky cartoon characters designed to put the “fun” into the process of “learning” about its activities.33 The agency even invests in in-house games to help its analysts become more comfortable with new spy software; the more an analyst “plays” with a new system, the more points she can earn toward an unspecified prize.34 In other contexts, NSA analysts have gotten into trouble for being too interested in so-called loveint (intel about one’s love life), which involves the misuse of NSA systems to scope out former romantic partners.35 The same is true of bored male TSA workers, for whom securitization breeds gross forms of sexual objectification, down to the development of code words for attractive women approaching the full-body scanners.36 Something is wrong in the creepy basement of the Funopticon, where some twisted pleasures are emerging from the dark fusion of security and entertainment.
The libidinal energies in surveillance culture are hiding everywhere in plain sight, often in problematic ways. For instance, it is difficult for women to escape high-tech ogling and other forms of “perveillance” that provide a sadistic form of pleasure for some male CCTV operators. In the 1990s, researchers found that security cameras were used more often for ogling than for actual security, by a 5-to-1 margin.37 Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino was fined $80,000 because its employees had used CCTV cameras to ogle women in 2000 and 2001.38 A few years later, a CCTV operator in Belfast, Ireland, was convicted of using public cameras to watch a particular young woman over an eight-month period entirely for “sexual gratification.”39 And as surveillance becomes pornified, actual porn looks more like surveillance. Geographer David Bell describes an emerging “surveillance aesthetic” that is proliferating in visual media in general but especially in porn, “where the technologies of surveillance structure the narrative, the action and most importantly the ‘look’ of porn.”40 In some ways this is an unsurprising outcome of surveillance culture. “The surveillance state is intrinsically omnipresent,” architecture professor Dana Cuff has written. “There is no escape except perhaps to exhibitionism.”41 No doubt, surveillance is sometimes sexy, perhaps even liberatingly so. Bell has even written about “eroticization as a way of resisting or hijacking surveillance,” but it sounds like something that would work better in the realm of performance art than real life.42
Not everything in this new wave of playful surveillance is as light and liberating as it might appear. In addition to being a zone for genuine pleasure and connection, the Funopticon is also a place where the securitarian impulse can find a new market, a way of domesticating the tools and techniques of the war on terror by turning them into ostensible playthings, and a way of engaging us in a potentially dark game that I explore later in this chapter. Certainly, we should wonder if we give away more of ourselves in moments of fun than in moments of fear—that through pleasure, laughter, and desire, we are turning over the keys to our inner kingdom to strangers with long memories and endless data storage. What we glimpse on Snapchat, what we watch on YouPorn, what we read on Kindle, what we post on Facebook, and what we tweet to our followers reveal a great deal about who we are (or who we want to be), but we are often having too much fun to notice how much we are revealing—or how much we are being altered. Sociologist Ariane Ellerbrok has claimed that biometric video-gaming “sets the stage for pleasurable identification with practices of state surveillance.”43 She writes that TV shows, games, and even spy-store gizmos invite the user to fetishize biometrics and other surveillance gadgetry, encouraging us “to suspend critical judgment regarding the social role of biometrics, placing questions of ‘why’ and ‘for whom’ on the back burner to the more enjoyable question of ‘how.’” Her fear, it seems, is that we might end up like the young readers of Dick Tracy comics in the 1940s, enthralled by the gadgets of spycraft but blind to the ethical considerations surrounding their use. I think this is plausible, but I would go further in highlighting the dangers of playful surveillance in general. By presenting the tools and techniques of surveillance culture as nonthreatening forms of entertainment, the Funopticon serves a crucial pedagogical function: it teaches one how to think and even feel about surveillance in ways that conform to the expectations of Big Data and the NSA alike. Like Winston Smith, people are learning that it is not enough to obey Big Brother: we must also love him—and laugh at his jokes.
The Dark Pleasures of The Game
The film character Nicholas Van Orton is a man for our times. A depressed billionaire with monogrammed shirts and nervous underlings, Nicholas can’t even enjoy his forty-eighth birthday party at an exclusive private club—he just sits in annoyance while the servants sing “Happy Birthday” to him. Friendless, heartless, and haunted like a twenty-first-century Scrooge, Nicholas is hardly present—instead, he keeps flashing back to a horrific scene from his childhood: his father’s suicidal jump off the rooftop of their San Francisco mansion. Forty years later, unable to shake the pain of seeing and being seen, Nicholas begins a long journey toward his own rooftop suicide—as well as a surprising resurrection from an artfully simulated death. In the midst of his “game,” whose real nature I will describe shortly, he learns to appreciate the pain of exposure as well as its surprising pleasures. Ultimately, he discovers the re-enchantment that had been drained from his life of joyless accumulation and privileged seclusion at the pinnacle of capitalism. Rather than hiding from the sharp edge of visibility, Nicholas learns to play with it in a way that restores his will to live—and even to love. What he learns, in an underappreciated film from 1997 titled The Game, is how to live inside the Funopticon.
Often lost in the buzz about Fight Club and Seven, better-known films from the same director that bookended it in the 1990s, The Game remains the least appreciated and most interesting movie from David Fincher, who went on to compile a celebrated but uneven body of work that includes Zodiac, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Whatever the limitations of Fincher’s work may be, The Game remains fascinating for reasons I want to explore here, hoping to illustrate the ways in which playful surveillance might be experienced in greater detail. With superb performances from Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, and others, The Game is a perverse parable of enlightenment in the age of electronic surveillance, a pulpy yet elegant look at paranoia and privilege, and a morose thriller about depression, isolation, and redemption. Aesthetically, tonally, and psychologically, it is a masterpiece in almost every frame, thanks to Harris Savides’s bravura cinematography and Howard Shore’s evocative score, as well as seamless performances, direction, and production design. As the commentator David Sirota wrote in Salon:
The Game is the enduring classic, standing out not only for its abiding story, but also for its dim ray of hope during these seeming end times. Amid its darkness, Fincher’s film proffers an alluring solution: Human connection, it suggests, will inherently evoke enlightenment and morality, even among those previously insulated in a lawyer-protected cocoon of luxury sedans, mahogany-paneled offices and cutthroat financial transactions.44
The engine of this enlightenment, I believe, is the roller-coaster experience of playful surveillance that keeps The Game rushing forward. As my reading of this film will suggest, life in the Funopticon is joyful and thrilling, filled with twists and turns, tension and release, and a bracing sense of unpredictability and possibility. In some sense it is a noir life, providing a jolt of excitement to our quotidian existence and a way of charging the landscape with a new layer of meaning, a new network of possibility that feels exciting and hopeful. Such is the parable of Nicholas Van Orton.
As the expressions of sour displeasure on his face make clear, the experience of playful surveillance does not begin well for Nicholas (portrayed by Michael Douglas). In the first moments of the film, he sees his life thrown into disarray by a birthday present from his younger brother Connie (Sean Penn). The present is a mysterious “game” that is tailored to each customer to provide “whatever is missing,” an elaborate process that is orchestrated by a secretive company known as Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Once the customized game begins, somewhat against his will, Nicholas is tracked, tricked, tormented, poisoned, seduced, kidnapped, and bankrupted by CRS agents who know his every move, hear his every word, and unearth his every secret through various forms of surveillance and subterfuge. Neither anguished pleas nor legal threats can stop their creative assault on Nicholas’s highly developed sense of security and control. Although he is a man who has invested heavily in security in every sense of the word, CRS drops him into a game that makes him feel naked, insecure, and existentially exposed.
The real carnival of visibility begins, appropriately enough, with a clown—a creepy, nearly life-size mannequin that Nicholas finds in his circular driveway on the eve of his joyless forty-eighth birthday. Bringing it into the sumptuous den inside his gated mansion, he discovers that hidden in its eye socket is a surveillance camera that allows CRS to spy on him, something that becomes apparent when his television starts addressing him personally. “There’s a tiny camera looking at you right now,” a newscaster explains through a hijacked television signal, ostensibly to introduce him to an experience that has been specially designed for Nicholas in ways he cannot yet fathom. “That’s impossible,” Nicholas scoffs to the figure on the TV, played by the real-life journalist Daniel Schorr, who in turn replies, “You’re right, impossible. You’re having a conversation with your television.” For the first time in the film, Nicholas seems not merely annoyed or depressed but truly rattled—he is not accustomed to being exposed to the light of day, as it were, a fact that CRS exploits to destabilize him further. “You want to know how a camera got into your home?” the newscaster taunts him, making one of many references to the invasiveness of surveillance throughout the film. The answer, of course, is worse than the question: Nicholas is to blame. Although CRS planted the clown in the exact spot where Nicholas’s father died on the driveway, Nicholas himself has created the real opening for surveillance in his life: he dragged the thing inside his home out of curiosity, just as he had divulged his full psychological profile to CRS when he first received his present.
As is already evident in the clown scene that serves as his introduction to the “game,” Nicholas is not so sure about playing. With the “NVO” monogram on his shirt vaguely suggesting “no video,” Nicholas seems increasingly reluctant to continue his uncontrolled descent into anarchical exposure, but once the game begins he has little choice. Increasingly against his will, he is pulled out of his wood-paneled isolation into a state of nakedness in which his body, his business, and his assets are all exposed to the world—or seemingly exposed, since that is a key word in this neo-Hitchcockian thriller in which nothing is what it appears.
The question of visibility—of what is really being seen—lurks at the heart of The Game. When he meets a waitress who might be working for CRS, she nods at cameras hidden inside a smoke detector and whispers, “They’re watching. Not here. They can see.” Later, as the game becomes stranger and even criminal in nature, he receives blackmail photos depicting a cocaine-fueled tryst that he cannot recall, leaving him dazed and wondering: Who has taken these? Who has seen them? Are they real? No longer sequestered behind the walls of private clubs and blacked-out limos, Nicholas is constantly looking over his shoulder, trying to make sense of his sudden visibility and vulnerability. “You’re afraid someone is going to see!” his brother shouts at him in a tense exchange about the real nature of the “game.” Even the Bible is brought to bear on this theme when a fellow CRS client, who turns out to be a CRS agent, describes the power of illumination with a religious allusion: “John 9:25,” he intones with a messianic stare, before spelling out the quotation to Nicholas: “Where once I was blind, now I can see.” Not even halfway into The Game, the film is beginning to suggest that surveillance can wound and overwhelm us. But there’s something else at play: surveillance can add magic and mystery in addition to predictability and control. This is the dual nature of the strange and costly gift that Nicholas receives from his brother, who, we learn at the end, is hoping to jolt his brother’s humanity back to life.
Despite its unusual premise, The Game mines some familiar terrain, for those with an interest in film history. To find naked blackmail photos of yourself that you don’t remember; to have unfamiliar people know your name; to hear they are watching—these unnerving elements of the game are straight out of the classic paranoid thrillers of the 1970s and 1980s: The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, and Blow Out. Similarly, the classics of postwar film noir were stocked with allusions to surveillance: private dicks rummaging through garbage cans for telltale signs, tough dames peeking through venetian blinds, crooked cops on a stakeout with coffee in one hand and binoculars in the other. Although Fincher plays up these generic expectations with his customary panache, ultimately The Game transcends them to reach an unexpected point with interesting implications for surveillance studies. By the end of the film, our battered protagonist finds himself reaching a rapturous point of re-enchantment and rebirth, almost literally. By the time a mischievous Jefferson Airplane riff ushers in the closing credits, Nicholas has been buried alive in a Mexican cemetery and tricked into jumping from the roof of a skyscraper, only to be “reborn” as someone who can see, love, and connect—and to do so, significantly, through the machinery of playful surveillance. He is so transformed by the experience that he is eager to dive deeper into the Funopticon, even to the point of joining the CRS team as it heads out to play its surveillance games with its next unsuspecting client. Having endured the various stages of what one critic has called “perverse exposure therapy,” in which the walls of his corporate castle have been knocked down, Nicholas has learned to experience visibility, insecurity, and unpredictability not simply as trauma but as salvation.45
In this manner, The Game suggests that surveillance is something more than a grim agent of control and oppression that produces disenchantment, Max Weber’s great term for the alienated manner in which modern people find themselves rationalized almost to death, either in soul or body, to fit the needs of state and capital. As one of Weber’s best critics puts it, disenchantment is the condition of living in a bureaucratic world in which “everything becomes understandable and tameable, even if not, for the moment, understood and tamed.” As science, capitalism, and state bureaucracies grabbed the reins of power in modern Europe, a new emphasis on order, illumination, and predictability snuffed out the premodern wilds of enchantment that had long dominated human experience.46 Surveillance had an important role in this historical transformation. After all, it reduces our bodies to data points for bureaucratic purposes, rationalizes our behavior for state and corporate needs, and seems to put us in Weber’s infamous “iron cage” of social control with ever-greater precision.47 At least in theory, it brings order to the streets, efficiency to the idle, illumination to the dark—and leaves little room for awe, wonder, and laughter.
But what if surveillance is experienced as oppressive and fun? What if people find both pleasure and pain in it? What if it provides disenchantment as well as re-enchantment? Such both/and propositions are nothing new to the scholars working to update Weber’s insights. For instance, the sociologist Richard Jenkins has encouraged Weberians to push beyond the dyad of enchantment and disenchantment to imagine ways in which something hopeful can reemerge even in the most rationalized modern spaces. Fascinatingly, he suggests that sterile modernity carries within it the seeds of its own liberation: “formal-rational logics and processes can themselves be (re)enchanted from within, or become the vehicles of (re)enchantment.”48 With this in mind, even someone who shares the skeptical views of Edward Snowden might ponder the upside of surveillance culture and wonder if a technological system designed to capture our buying habits and to assess our terroristic potential, to control our borders and to monitor our parking lots, might serve more humane and hopeful purposes. We might even wonder if something unaccountably beautiful lurks inside the networks, sensors, archives, and apps of the Funopticon. What if surveillance not only maps a place for control and predictability but also enlivens that place, charging it with social energy and the potential for new connections between friends, collaborators, lovers? What if it schools us in the pleasures of seeing and being seen, the satisfaction of leaving a trace in a vast network of data collection and social sorting in ways that are nurturing and joyful? Then, perhaps, we might discover a strange kind of surveillance enchantment in this mysterious system of sorting and knowing that is almost God-like in its omniscience about our lives. Suddenly, surveillance systems might seem like something other than an iron cage—they could be imagined as a beautiful connective tissue that brings us together in new and exciting ways (an apparent fact that social media has already begun to exploit). Feeling lost in front of a screen or alone on a street, we could always remember that surveillance is there to catch us in an endless web of social potential—it always pulls us in, always marks our presence, always offers its peculiar embrace. Whether it takes the form of a CCTV camera, a Facebook page, or a Visa statement, surveillance is the one place where we know that our lives will register and resonate, the one place where we can say with utter certainty: We made a mark. We were here. We mattered. Just check the file.
Unless, of course, there’s a twist. Could playful surveillance be a cynical form of “disenchanted enchantment,” a bogus return to magic and awe that uses pleasure, excitement, and joy against us?49 As Richard Jenkins puts it, “Domination is often, perhaps even always, underwritten by at least a modicum of enchantment, charisma is utterly enchanted, and power has always cast its own spell.”50 Perhaps this is the ultimate secret of the Funopticon (and perhaps The Game as well): it lets you think you’ve won, that you’ve found a pleasurable way out, that you’ve transcended your fears of being watched, tracked, and archived, when in reality you’ve been ensnared more artfully than you could ever imagine. Even more worrisome is the fact that we’re far more vulnerable than Nicholas Van Orton, who ultimately is in control of his surveillance experience. After all, his brother is paying for it, his friends and associates are playing along, and CRS wants a satisfied client, even if it torments him on the way to profound customer satisfaction. What we see in The Game is, in fact, a very privileged exchange among plutocrats, an outlandish executive service rendered to the high-end dead souls of late capitalism whose lives are increasingly distant from those of ordinary Americans. Of course, not many people have the luxury of engaging such a service. Even if we are able to find real pleasure and amusement in the Funopticon, we will never have the level of control and customization that someone like Nicholas Van Orton can afford, nor will we ever have the satisfying denouement in which Facebook, Google, and the NSA pull back the curtain on their operations and explain that it was all lovingly designed for our well-being. More likely, we will remain unconscious pawns in someone else’s lucrative “game,” whether it’s Big Data or national security, and, like eager young tourists at Disneyland, we’ll come to know the bright surfaces and considerable enticements of the Funopticon, but almost nothing of its deeper purpose or meaning—unless, that is, we seek out a path of playful resistance.
In a book written in 1973 but not published until almost forty years later, the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre looked with disdain at the rationalized spaces of postwar Europe, seeing not the order and progress of a mature civilization but rather a “destructive and reductive capability” that needed to be “curtailed” with the best means at our disposal: an “economy of enjoyment.”51 In his quasi-utopian vision of radical playfulness, Lefebvre describes how ordinary citizens might rework the spaces that surround them, regarding them in new ways that are liberating and subversive. Interestingly, the theorist (and fellow Frenchman) Michel de Certeau came to a similar conclusion around the same time. Writing in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), de Certeau hinted at the pleasures in little games of concealment, such as when we disguise the fact that we are penning a love letter at work without the boss’s permission. Well before the era of Big Data and ubiquitous CCTV, de Certeau advised us to “make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.”52
Lefebvre and de Certeau were on to something about the subversive implications of playing with surveillance. After all, most surveillance technologies are not inherently oppressive; the suffering stems from their use, which is often oppressive and asymmetrical in nature. Looking at how geocachers “creatively misuse” the serious business of GPS and other tracking technologies, Jason Farman has argued that playful reworkings of surveillance technologies are valuable “acts of resistance to the dominant modes of spatial production.”53 Similarly, McKenzie Wark has claimed that the playful use of GPS turns “the whole surface of the earth into a board game.”54 Other scholars have celebrated the spirit of the “playable city” that artists have instilled in Bristol, in the United Kingdom, hoping to bring a new spirit of lively participation to the mundane experience of commuting.55 And when people circulate urban legends about missing persons found by Google Earth’s satellite on mysterious islands that seem straight out of the TV fantasy drama Lost, the machinery of surveillance begins to seem almost magical in its capabilities.
Likewise, joyful opposition to surveillance culture is often a delight to behold. Artists have been known to “bedazzle” security cameras with gaudy rhinestones or adorn them with shiny party hats.56 One even came up with the CCTV-thwarting cosmetic called CV Dazzle, which one wearer described as “joyful” as well as apocalyptic in feel (although it made him look like a part-time Juggalo).57 Or consider the playful resistance of the Surveillance Camera Players, with their public performances of Shakespeare directed toward CCTV operators, or the artist-activist playing chess with a CCTV operator in a subway station by holding up a sign (“Your Move”) before providing a number to call to make the play.58 Or the creepy pleasures of Spacewurm, the artist who stealth-recorded cell phone conversations in the 1990s and turned them into poignant little dramas on the pages of a book.59 Or the British kids who enjoy video sniffing, which is “like going on safari to look for wireless CCTV signals,” according to one British artist who self-describes as an avid “sniffer.” “Groups of kids typically walk down a street watching as a signal becomes stronger,” he says, “and then it becomes an art to judge from your surroundings what sort of buildings are being surveyed.”60 These are joyful hackers sticking it to the man: they romp with their mates. Roll their eyes at Big Brother. Laugh at the Matrix.61 It’s one of the great feelings of our era: the feeling of freedom and subversive possibility that one gets when being on top of surveillance, not underneath it.
Of course, a cynic might not be impressed by playful resistance. After all, what looks like joyful participation might be little more than a decorator’s touch being applied to the grey old interior of the Panopticon, a chance for prisoners to add some color and whimsy within their cells—not to bust open their walls and escape to a better place. The playful, rather than being something that helps us change the nature of surveillance and the ways we experience it, might be simply another way, often an insidiously pleasurable one, for surveillance to expand into our private lives without a hint of protest. The Funopticon may even be training us to blithely internalize its logic, to gawk and strut in the glare of nonstop publicity as our highest aspiration, and to never stop performing for the pleasure of others who never stop performing for us. If this is the case, we should consider ourselves checkmated on the issue of privacy: we’ve given up personal autonomy and freedom in the name of connectivity, pleasure, and convenience.
But the despair that this might cause can mask a failure of imagination, at least when it comes to the quickly shifting landscape of surveillance culture and what might be in store in years ahead. For this reason, we can be cautiously hopeful about the subversive pleasures of the Funopticon and where it might lead. After all, whenever ordinary people are laughing, connecting, creating, and talking more intimately—as these playful forms of surveillance often encourage us to do—new forms of freedom, new kinds of community, and new modes of resistance are within reach.