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He’s Watching You foregrounds the materiality and cunning politics of surveillance capitalism. The collage depicts a modified Mark Zuckerberg floating within layered original photographs of the pipes at one of the internet’s transatlantic entry points that carry fiber optic cables into the United States.

Surveillance capitalists have long cloaked the political consequences of their work in shows of golly-gosh innocence. They have similarly obscured the materiality of surveillance capitalism in a fog of deceptive euphemism (recall, for instance, uses of the terms “engagement,” “privacy,” “share,” “cloud,” “connect,” “A/B test,” “friend,” “digital breadcrumb,” “anonymize,” “user,” “smart,” “speaker,” and “personalize.”) With He’s Watching You, socio confronts both disingenuous innocence and insidious euphemism. The digital collage invites viewers to reflect upon the continuous surveillance systems that look back at us from beyond our screens. Contra the all-too-familiar lullaby of Silicon Valley “innovator”-worship, it depicts visually the unceasing artifice and ruthless guile which undergird the systems of individualized mass behavior alteration that increasingly enmesh us.

He’s Watching You takes its title from an iconic World War II era propaganda poster, which warned Americans to beware of spies.

Note: This work is published on page six of the present issue (#159) of Adbusters, a Canada-based activist magazine, and in promotional materials for the same. Those interested in purchasing this work should only do so with the understanding that it does not confer retroactive or future rights to Adbusters revenue associated with the appearance of this image in the magazine or its associated promotional material.

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The Most Difficult builds upon distorted images of a derelict basement stairway whose rotted structure is surrounded by walls of exposed concrete. Onto this background is layered a haunting historic photograph of lighthearted camaraderie among staff members of the Auschwitz extermination camp.

The Most Difficult is both provocation and meditation. The collage challenges the reassuring narrative that those who take part in monstrosities are themselves inhuman monsters–that is, that they are fundamentally distinct from ourselves.

Scholars inform us that approximately half the violent deaths of the twentieth century occurred over the seven years 1938-1945.[1] The present is also a period of intense violence. As of March, 2022, twenty-one mass murders are currently underway.[2] The Most Difficult is a meditation on the question of how to live during periods of concentrated killing.

Notes:

[1] 70 to 85 million are estimated to have been killed in WWII. (Source: Leaving World War II Behind. N.p.: David Swanson, 2020.) Over the twentieth century, roughly twice that number of lives (167-175 million) were violently cut short. (Source: Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st C. Touchstone: Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 1995.) Other estimates suggest a twentieth century total in excess of 200 million. (Source:  Necrometrics: Estimated Totals for the Entire 20th Century.)

[2] These include state-led mass killings in Burma/Myanmar, Ethiopia, Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria, as well as non-state-led mass killings ongoing in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria. The figure of 21 mass-killings is reached because two state-led mass killings are currently ongoing in Burma/Myanmar and two state-led mass killings are currently ongoing in Sudan. See The Early Warning Project, a joint initiative of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. (Source: Early Warning Project, Center for the Prevention of Genocide. Retrieved March 12, 2022.)

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Negative Liberty considers the twentieth century development of techniques of mass prediction and modification, aka behavior engineering. Constituent images mark a series of canonical shifts over the course of this history. These include, among others, the development of mass surveillant architectures, the first recognition of the power of variable ratio reward schedules to sustain human behavior, the birth of social network analysis, the application of rational-bureaucratic management techniques to track and typologize human populations, the proliferation of mechanisms by which to target and monitor communication efficacy, the advent of computer-based mass simulation techniques, their first application to democratic elections, and the synthesis of all of the foregoing into continuous, multi-channel, and individualized surveillance + messaging processes.

Pictured at center is former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. While remembered for his role in the Vietnam War, McNamara believed fervently in the potential of computer-based simulations to control and predict human mass behavior. Charged with the annual allocation of approximately 10% of US gross domestic product from 1961-1968, McNamara reoriented technical and social scientific research agendas nationwide, setting in motion multidisciplinary efforts that would birth not only the internet, but a range of invention and insight fundamental to the behavior engineering systems that constitute contemporary surveillance capitalism.

The collage title is drawn from “Two Concepts of Liberty,” by 20th C political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, which served as the foundational philosophical justification for the actions of Western bloc from its publication in 1958 until the end of the Cold War. Negative liberty refers to freedom from interference by other people.

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Rollr Coastr merges images of an airport escalator and a sexual encounter, evoking the mutual mediation between human physical intimacies and contemporary technical forms.

The collage is redolent of a digital candy store fever dream, with linear and pixelated imagery stylized in the gumdrop hues of a retro-futuristic color palette. For socio, the image of the staircase is a potent symbol, invoking human-technical intersections that transform both. In pursuit of an aspiration, the pursuer must often engage with paradox. That is, the pursuer must confront, enact, and/or embody contradiction. In the process, both the pursuer and their world are transformed, sometimes unexpectedly and even irrevocably. Staircases symbolically embody such intersections, where ascent is made possible by juxtaposing in series forms that are simultaneously tensile and compressive, perpendicular and complementary. The staircase in Rollr Coastr is an airport escalator–electronic, mechanically automated, and transitory.

Thematically, the collage is resolutely ambiguous, consistent with digital mediations, which enable, undermine, and otherwise heterogeneously alter the experience and imagination of human sexuality. Some viewers may interpret Rollr Coastr in light of dating apps, online pornography, or other subtypes of digital intimacy. For others, the collage may speak to inherently connective human needs, which both drive the development of sociotechnical information systems, and often overwrite their ostensibly rational, platonic, or utopian objectives.

A visual amalgam of anomic, mediated disembodiment and effulgent, delicious electro-fusion, Rollr Coastr evokes both reflection and titillation, inviting the viewer to tarry within the trouble-rich paradox of digital intimacy.

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Opposite Equals Advance contemplates the contradictions inherent in the quest for digital life extension. The collage includes the binary digits, and features the quotation: “Unlike analog data, which typically suffers some loss of quality each time it is copied or transmitted, digital data can, in theory, be propagated indefinitely.”

Informatizing the biobody promises aspirants a means of transcending analog mortality. Yet digitization is always seductive. Real and obvious gains coexist with more obscure losses–of all that is not readily quantified, measured, captured, recorded in standardized format, and maintained. The history of modernity is chockablock with such seductions, where apparent power is gained at the under-considered cost of the difficult-to-quantize.

Opposite Equals Advance combines images of the artist’s own wounded hand with those of a subterranean stairway, egress from the basement of a former box factory. Imagery of staircases feature prominently in the artist’s work, symbolically embodying both human aspirations to elevation and the tensions and inequalities inherent to that quest.

Pairing wounded digits with high modern linearities, the collage contemplates the paradox of the digitized biobody, which both achieves damage immunity and inflicts self-harm. Many strive towards the ultimate breakthrough innovation: to achieve escape velocity from analog mortality. Yet in so doing, we recapitulate patterns so ancient and familiar their enduring mythologies suffuse everyday language: Icarus complex, Faustian bargain, Achilles heel, Pyrrhic victory.

Opposite Equals Advance takes its title from section three of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which reads, in part: “Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.”

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