State Surveillance as Incodification

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Jessa Lingel and Aram Sinnreich, whose interest is in the resistance of incarcerated populations to surveillance processes. How does protest against surveillance work for prisoners?

Jessa begins by highlighting the Foucauldian idea of askesis: a deliberative exercise of the self which also helps shape the norms of community around the practitioner. The way one person does things can thus shape the practices of those around them, and this applies to prison populations as well – hunger strikes are an obvious example of this, and they are especially effective here as state authorities are in charge of providing food.

Similar campaigns have been extended to media consumption as well – there have been suggestions in the popular media of 'digital hunger strikes' that refuse online information consumption, both to explicitly protest NSA surveillance or restrictive Internet laws, and to engage in digital diet or detox activities.

There are also existing online activities by prisoners – an Indonesian prison is famous for the YouTube videos of its prisoners' highly choreographed dance routines, for example; these videos are almost inscrutable for outside viewers and may be seen as a kind of protest. There are also obvious links to flashmobs.

Prisoners themselves tend to have their own alternative communication networks: they develop prison slangs called argots which signify in- and outgroup relationships (which in turn are similar to online l33t speech, for example), tapping codes (which may be known to the guards, but still enable prisoners to communicate directly with each other), textual encryption systems, and smuggling practices that help distribute information. Each of these have physical as well as digital forms.

Incarceration also has an equivalent in a kind of incodification: the surrounding of persons with inescapable layers of code that govern and survey our activities – and this applies both to formal prisoners and to everybody who is subject to state surveillance.