Grasping Surveillance

The final chapter, “Grasping Surveillance,” looks to expand on the previous chapters by discussing in greater depth the book’s distinct conception of surveillance technologies in governing the global society. Four themes are developed here—tactility, weakness, emergence, and engagement—that are intended to serve as conceptual counterweights to tendencies that often frame thinking on surveillance—visibility, strength, determinism, and fatalism. To summarize those reflections here, while the tactility of prohesion as a security strategy offers a view of an ominous future that surveillance technologies could usher in, their weakness provides the solace of knowing that political engagement will remain central to whatever outcomes emerge from them. With these lessons in mind, the chapter finishes by considering what courses of action subjects in the surveillance society might meaningfully take to help create more democratic futures.