Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 242
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
978-1-5381-2357-7 • Hardback • February 2020 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-5381-2358-4 • Paperback • February 2020 • $38.00 • (£30.00)
978-1-5381-2359-1 • eBook • February 2020 • $36.00 • (£30.00)
Timothy Erik Ström is an independent writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia.
Acknowledgments
Prelude: “You’re in Control”
1 Surveying Surveillance: Overseers, Enclosures, and Colonization
2 The Atom and the Watchtower: Cybernetics, War, and the Reorganization of the World
3 Welcome to the Machine: Google’s Commodification Engines and the Web of Power
4 The Overlords of Automated Debt: China, Usury, and the Financialization of the South
Conclusion: The Limits of Control
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
With a breathtakingly wide brush—both historical and geographical—Tim Ström paints a compelling picture of surveillance as a crucial companion of colonization, capitalism, and war in the modern world. Thankfully, he also offers clues as to how things could be otherwise.
— David Lyon, Queen’s University, Canada
In an important and timely intervention, Timothy Ström has crafted an invaluable conceptual roadmap for understanding the global surveillance economy. This engagingly written and elegantly conceived book locates contemporary surveillance in its broader social contexts with the goal of imagining, against all odds, how these might be different—and better.
— Mark Andrejevic, Monash University
Upgrading critiques of surveillance for the twenty-first century, Tim Ström reveals its governing paradox of absolute control and utter powerlessness. Governmental and corporate surveillance technologies are locked into the logic of a system that cannot function if its bosses are not themselves completely submissive. In meticulous detail, Ström shows how the smallest engineering decision rests on histories of colonialism and perpetuates a global system of injustice and inequality and how globalization, as a system of exploitation and oppression, shapes and is shaped by the software we so often see as helpful and at worst neutral. A wake-up call for citizens, consumers, students, and activists.
— Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne