The de-realization of Black bodies in an era of mass digital surveillance: A techno-criminological critique

Abstract

This article describes the ways in which existing methods of dataveillance and big data collection have contributed to the current de-realization of Black bodies. In the present or ultramodern era, de-realization consists of datafication (i.e. digital profiling techniques and life mining strategies) in support of techno-crime control policy. The process of de-realization both de-politicizes Black identities and de-personalizes the lived experience of Blackness. In order to make explicit our thesis, section one proposes a techno-criminological theory of de-realization. The theory explains how the racialized construction of surveillance in the current age is mediated by the algorithmic logic of pre-crime and the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology. In order to situate our overall theorizing, section two explains how Black bodies have historically been the subject of excessive and invasive forms of de-realization. This history includes slavery and visceral forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of branding), as well as political opposition to Civil Rights and volatile forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of suspicion). In the present era, the de-realization of Black bodies consists of the mass digital surveillance of social movements (i.e. bodies of activist social change), including Black Lives Matter (BLM), that are policed through the technologies of information analytics. Section three speculates on the criminological fall-out stemming from present day manifestations of de-realization. This speculation emphasizes how history, theory, and culture are relevant to historicizing the administration of injustice in the ultramodern age of digital reality construction.

Keywords

Black identity critical criminology culture de-realization digital surveillance history injustice techno-crime control theory

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him [or her], and what [the patient] cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. [The patient] is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.

(Freud, 1911/1964: 18)

Introduction: A brief history of de-realization

The phenomenon of de-realization is a matter of historical record. It represents a set of contingent truths borne out by de-realization's cultural artifacts (e.g. Foucault, 1977). De-realization occurs when things, people, and events are experienced as unreal, as other-worldly. When de-realization and its human sequelae chronically persist, then detachment or de-personalization follows (Guralnik and Simeon, 2010). This is the point at which de-realization as de-personalization becomes clinical disorder (Millman et al., 2021). At this juncture, “pathologies of personhood” surface because “the seam between self and world” is ripped (Guralnik and Simeon, 2010: 400, 406). This article draws critical attention to the underlying cultural dynamics of de-realization for Black bodies (of social movement protest) in the current era of mass digital surveillance.

The truths of de-realization tell the story about distinct periods of human relating and of economic exchange, commencing with the period of modernity and extending to late modernity, and then to the period of post-modernity and extending to the ultramodern age (e.g. Beck, 2009; Delanty, 2009; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Importantly for criminology, we might think of each of these historical epochs as revealing and reflecting different provisional truths given the cultural (political-economic) conditions within which crime control policy emerges and from which it takes (and has taken) on form (e.g. Arrigo and Sellers, 2021; Garland, 2002).

The cultural artifacts in question for this article include the reified forms of de-realization that populate the “historical present” (Foucault, 1977: 31). The meaning of this Foucauldian notion was explained by its author in an interview: “I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present” (Kritzman, 1988: 262; see also Garland, 2014). In this article, the question posed is as follows: what productive purposes do the technologies of mass digital surveillance serve in relation to Black identity and the lived experience of Blackness?

Our view of reification is informed by Lukács (1971). He theorized the following about this pre-cognitive process:

[It]stamps its imprint upon the whole [of one’s] consciousness … [The subject’s] qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of [his or her] personality, they are things which [one] can “own” or “dispose of” like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which [one] can bring his [or her] physical and psychic “qualities” into play without [them] being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.

(1971: 100)

The historical present is the period of ultra-modernity. In this era, truth regimes follow from the trade in pre-crime predictive analytics, post-criminology institutional dataveillance, and hyper-securitization risk governance (Arrigo et al., 2020). This is the trade in algorithmically managing human relating (e.g. disruption and disorder, irreverence and dangerousness) as currency, as commodity, in which behavioral choices scraped from unexamined and situated experience are transformed into raw material to harvest This is the point at which the human subject becomes an economic object of digital abstraction to territorialize (i.e. to de-politicize) (Deleuze, 1992) and to monetize (i.e. to de-personalize) (Zuboff, 2019).

Accordingly, the following article analyzes this territoriality, this form of de-realization, in relation to Black identity and lived experience from within the theorizing on techno-crime control and techno-criminology. Specifically, this article describes the ways in which existing methods of surveillance and big data collection have contributed to the current de-realization of Black bodies. These methods encompass all forms of algorithmic surveillance (e.g. data-driven risk assessment, predictive policing, and actuarial justice), implicating all jurisdictions (e.g. the UK, the USA). We acknowledge that there are important jurisdictional differences in the nature and racial implications of algorithm deployment. For example, the widely used risk assessment algorithms are primarily public sector tools in the UK while they are mostly commercialized in the USA. While these differences raise rather distinct political-economic questions, they are tethered to the imperatives of techno-crime control. In the present era, de-realization consists of datafication (i.e. digital profiling techniques and life mining strategies) in support of techno-crime control policy. The process of de-realization both de-politicizes Black identities and de-personalizes the lived experience of Blackness.

In order to make explicit our thesis, section one proposes a techno-criminological theory of de-realization. The theory explains how the racialized construction of surveillance in the ultramodern age is mediated by the algorithmic logic of pre-crime and the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology. In order to anchor our overall theorizing, section two explains how Black bodies have historically been the subject of excessive and invasive forms of de-realization. In part, this history includes slavery and visceral forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of branding), as well as political opposition to Civil Rights and volatile forms of de-realization (e.g. the technologies of suspicion). In the current era, the de-realization of Black bodies consists of the mass digital surveillance of social movements (i.e. bodies of activist social change), including BLM, that are policed through the technologies of information analytics. Section three speculates on the criminological fall-out stemming from present day manifestations of de-realization. This conjecture emphasizes how history, theory, and culture are relevant to historicizing the administration of injustice in the ultramodern age of digital reality construction.

Theorizing techno-crime control, de-realization, and race: Directions from surveillance studies and critical criminology

The term “techno-crime” was added to the criminological lexicon as a way to better conceptualize the acts of cyber-criminality (e.g. Holt and Bossler, 2020; Steinmetz and Nobles, 2018). Techno-crime consists of criminal actions involving the use of computers or other thinking machines (Leman-Langlois, 2013: 3–4). Thus, it is technology itself that functions as an instrument for furthering delinquent conduct or criminal choice-making, and as a human extension of divergent justice practices mediated through digital surveillance routines (Haggerty et al., 2011; see also, Arrigo and Sellers, 2021; Ashworth and Zedner, 2014; Powell et al., 2018). In order to secure the imperatives of governance through order maintenance, techno-crimes are screened and processed by crime control institutions (e.g. the police) that rely on digital management tools, and correspondingly, information-gathering techniques (e.g. Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Lyon, 2001; O’Malley, 2010). In this way, we might think of the systems of justice as reaffirming the priorities of “algorithmic risk governance” (Hannah-Moffat, 2019: 453).

For purposes of this article, our reliance on the term “techno-crime control” refers to the ways in which technology is deployed and used (often pre-reflexively) to determine who is (or those groups that are) under suspicion/uncertainty for risk. These methods consist of statistical computations derived from algorithmic risk assessments and social sorting protocols (Amoore and De Goede, 2005: 158; Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 432). In most instances, these methods are themselves the source of taken-for-granted ontological conventions and epistemological commitments. Moreover, our theorizing on and about techno-crime control emerges from and builds upon existing efforts from within critical and/or radical criminology (e.g. Banks, 2018; Hannah-Moffat, 2019; Pfohl, 2015; Phillips et al., 2020; Ugwudike, 2020, 2021). As such, several assumptions form the basis of our preliminary theorizing.

First, we reject system-reinforcing definitions of techno-crime control. These definitions simply reproduce the relations of capitalist production without fundamentally challenging the political-economic values on which these relations are based (Banks, 2018; Dyer-Witheford, 1999). Instead, we use the term to denote the ways in which state surveillance technologies are excessive and invasive. Their deployment both intrudes upon and undoes the civil liberties of targeted citizen-suspects (Browning and Arrigo, 2020). One case in point is the de-realization of Black identity, de-politicized and de-personalized through the statistical manipulation of Black bodies (Glover, 2008). When this manipulation is “standardized”, then the “digital racialization of risk” prevails (Ugwudike, 2020: 482; see also Magnet and Rodger, 2012; Wang and Tucker, 2017) as industry.

Second, de-realization depends on “methods of datafication” (e.g. dataveillance, data mining, data profiling) (Van Dijck, 2014: 197). These methods are iteratively deployed, generating replications of one's identity and derivatives of lived experience. These “data doubles” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 607) are then used to determine one's level of risk suspicion (Aas, 2006: 153–155; Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 432). Consider, for example, China's Social Credit Score System (Ma, 2018). It utilizes mass surveillance, facial recognition technology, and big data analysis that algorithmically profiles (i.e. socially sorts and ranks) citizens. The sorting and ranking are derived from routine behaviors and social interactions, especially including unlawful conduct or deviant activity as proscribed by the state. China's Social Credit Score System promises to standardize the assessment of the social reputation of citizens (i.e. individual and/or group identity) and the economic standing of businesses (i.e. corporate status) through the assigning of a social credit score. Both of these are measures of risk suspicion (Arrigo et al., 2020).

Third, we accept as iatrogenic that persistent and ubiquitous digital surveillance reconceives human consciousness as conveyed through the discourse of dataism, re-embodies subjectivity as personified in the digital humanity of data doubles, and recalibrates human purpose as manifested in the technologies of institutional and governmental dataveillance. These activities form the “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 605; Thomas, 2020). Put another way, the excesses of and invasions by mass digital surveillance—on identity and lived experience—“de-vitalize” human capital and “finalize” multiple representations of (co)existence (Arrigo and Sellers, 2018: 81–85). These excesses and invasions function to reduce and repress the project of being (evolving, intersectional, multi-dimensional identity), and their maintenance reifies forms of captivity (in shared consciousness, inter-subjectivity, and in manifest expressions of collective power). The normalization of these forms of human relating reproduces “digital harm” (Hannah-Moffat, 2019: 456), including the “colonization of the psyche” (Pfohl, 2015: 101).

Fourth, we question the legitimacy and efficacy of techno-crime control governance and policy writ large. This is especially the case given the ways in which consciousness, subjectivity, and power have all been reassembled (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) in support of prediction analytics (Zedner, 2007) dataveillance truth regimes (Van Dijck, 2014), and hyper-securitization optics (Schuilenburg, 2015; Schuilenburg and Peeters, 2020). These undulating conditions—in which the human project is “in orbit, a continuous network” (Deleuze, 1992: 6)—usher in the era of pre-crime and of post-criminology (Ashworth and Zedner, 2014; McCulloch and Wilson, 2016). This is the post-disciplinary society of control. In the post-disciplinary society of control, “freedom, privacy, and sovereignty are all illusions because people, events, objects, and spaces are all sites of information to be processed and policed through passwords” (Sellers and Arrigo, 2018: 133). In the post-disciplinary society, human risk (e.g. identity) gets translated into algorithms that pre-determine (e.g. catalogue, monitor, profile and predict) “the situation” (Lippens, 2011: 175). The situation is human experience that has yet to be lived. Increasingly, the situation has become the neoliberal site of information processing and human abstraction. The by-products of this neoliberalism include digital forms of governmentality (e.g. pre-crime-control policy). These by-products signify the diffusion of power (e.g. dataveillance), and it is this diffusion that places identity and experience all the more under the reifying restrictions of techno-rationality (e.g. hyper-securitization optics) and the system-reinforcing constraints of cyber-capitalism's “information civilization” (Zuboff, 2015: 75; see also, Dyer-Witheford, 1999).

Fifth, we take as self-evident that the traditional human agent is dis-located and adrift in control society. Indeed, as Deleuze (1992: 6) observed, “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’.” Consequently, mass digital surveillance methods and data collection techniques have brought new meaning to cognitive and social constructs such as privacy, community, and corporeality. Of these constructions, we note that the encoding and encryption of the body is particularly problematic. Digital representations are separated from terrestrial human experience (Dubbeld, 2003: 152). All bodies are algorithmically profiled (i.e. digitally branded through the technology of information analytics). However, these algorithms are contingent upon asymmetrical judgments made through surveillance technologies and social sorting protocols derived from unexamined assumptions about “observers and the observants” (Dubbeld, 2003: 153). For purposes of our techno-criminological theorizing, the de-realization of Black bodies stems from a process of “digital epidermalization” (Browne, 2015: 91). This process occurs when bodies of color are territorialized through techno-crime control surveillance that de-politicizes (redesigns) and de-personalizes (redefines) race algorithmically as risk to govern (Chan, 2008; Glover, 2008; Hannah-Moffat, 2019).

Historical analysis: Black (social) movements and surveillance

Slavery: Surveillance of Black bodies

It is now axiomatic that “Blackness” physicalized has, for centuries, been the site of social control (e.g. commodification, regulation, and demonization), in which Black bodies have been subjected to the surveillance of the state's gazing eye. In the western world, especially the USA, the methods deployed to routinely monitor and manage the movement of Black bodies were linked to the culture of slavery. During this period, surveillance encompassed visceral forms of technology. This technology included the act of branding as a way to identify and record Black bodies similar to the ways in which cargo was listed and tracked (Browne, 2015: 41).

Following the surveillance technology of branding, the application of slave codes was enforced (Toor, 2018: 294). Slave codes were used to police and punish individuals who attempted to achieve freedom (Browne, 2015: 77; Toor, 2018: 294). The slave patrol system operated to enforce compliance and to socially and economically discipline Black bodies (Toor, 2018: 295). Additionally, lantern laws were implemented in cities like New York as a way to permanently illuminate Blacks who wandered the streets after sunset (Browne, 2015: 67–68). Browne (2015: 67–68) refers to this surveillance method as “Black luminosity” in which a lit candle or a torch's flame functioned to establish and maintain panoptic power. The continued illumination of Black bodies through “lantern technology” established constant visibility, generated parochial knowledge, and normalized the ongoing scrutiny of slaves (Browne, 2015: 68). This identification, monitoring, and tracking of Black bodies was bolstered by the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of (1793, 1850), which legally contributed to the surveillance and criminalization of Black movement by White civilians (Beutin, 2017: 11; Franks, 2017: 441–443; Higginbotham, 1978; Peabody and Grinberg, 2007).

Social movements: The surveillance of Black power, civil rights, and citizenship

Arguably, some of the most intrusive and excessive forms of government surveillance applied to Black social groups and activists occurred during the Civil Rights movement, and these surveillance efforts were observed through the implementation of the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), sanctioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (Kinsley, 2020: 19). The Black Nationalist Program (BNP) was reconceived from within the workings of COINTELPRO (Aspervil, 2018: 914; Graham, 2013: 16–17). The FBI's conceptualization of the BNP was not fixed and often included tracking a wider net of organizations. By expanding this surveillance net, organizations that were Black—but did not necessarily align with Black Nationalist ideologies—were included (Aspervil, 2018: 914). Examples of these net-widening groups encompassed “the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (‘SCLC’), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and the Nation of Islam (NOI)” (Graham, 2013: 16–17; Mian, 2020: 65). The FBI's purpose in surveilling these organizations was not only to monitor their routine activities, but to discredit and invalidate members, leaders, and similar organizations, and to neutralize their ability to recruit new associates who might incite violence (Aspervil, 2018: 914; Mian, 2020: 59). For example, in an attempt to terminate the rise of a savior-like figure within the Black community, the FBI utilized methods of surveillance that included physically following Dr Martin Luther King, and they habitually relied on photographic surveillance, blackmail, and wiretapping to trace his movements (Graham, 2013: 16–17; Toor, 2018: 297).

Those who associated with Dr King were also considered to be a danger to national security and worthy of continued surveillance (Graham, 2013: 16–17). Consider the case of Mr Stanley D Levinson. Between 15 and 16 March 1962, agents of the FBI surreptitiously entered the office of Mr Levinson, a known lawyer and associate of Dr King, and illegally wiretapped his phone (Graham, 2013: 16–17). This form of warrantless surveillance calls into question the presumed privacy rights of Black citizens, especially when persons of color actively and legitimately dissent against governmental agencies (Graham, 2013; Toor, 2018). The absence of a warrant reaffirmed the notion that Blackness as an experience represented a continual threat that had to be monitored (Graham, 2013: 16–17; Mian, 2020). In so doing, individuals like Stanley D Levinson became a casualty of the government's intrusive surveillance methods.

Moreover, organizations like the Black Panther Party (BPP) had also become a popular target of the FBI's COINTELPRO program. The selection of the BPP for surveillance stemmed from the organization's ability to unite like-minded dissident groups (Aspervil, 2018: 923). Members of these activist groups experienced similar forms of surveillance through the government's reliance on informants or the use of illegal wiretapping (Mian, 2020: 63–64). In addition to the surveillance of Black social groups, COINTELPRO also permitted the utilization of violence to quell the dissent of Black individuals (Giroux, 2015: 125). Perhaps the most infamous example occurred when the FBI and the Chicago Police Department facilitated the assassination of Fred Hampton (Giroux, 2015: 125, Mian, 2020: 61–62).

Fred Hampton was the leader of the BPP within the Illinois chapter who was suspected by the FBI of forming a partnership with a gang in Chicago known as the Blackstone Rangers. Given this suspicion, a letter was prepared by then FBI Director, J Edgar Hoover. The letter was sent to the Blackstone Rangers leadership as a way to identify Hampton and his intentions to murder their leader, Jeff Fort, and to take over the gang. This information was false and was utilized by the American government to degrade and neutralize Black organizations deemed to be dangerous. During this same time period, Hampton became a victim of governmental surveillance through an informant. Along with the American activist, Mark Clark, Hampton was tragically murdered by the FBI and Chicago Police Department in a predawn raid in December of 1969 while he was asleep in his home (Giroux, 2015: 125; Mian, 2020: 61–62).

A notable effect of utilizing governmental tactics such as the enforcement of the COINTELPRO program was the demonization, neutralization, and suppression of citizenship dissent; specifically, Black power expressed through opposition and protest (Mian, 2020: 55, 65). Categorizing Black dissent as criminal and defining its members as susceptible to violence legitimized efforts by governmental agencies to infringe upon the rights of Black individuals through the deployment of intrusive technologies (Mian, 2020: 55; Toor, 2018). Indeed, as (Mian, 2020: 59) observed, “The FBI's treatment of these African American civil rights activists demonstrate[d]-s the deep entrenchment of covert surveillance operations on African American dissidents in the early twentieth century.” Subsequent investigations were conducted on the illegal actions of the FBI and these inquiries contributed greatly to placing legal restrictions on the unlawful surveillance of domestic affairs (Giroux, 2015: 125). Regrettably however, over time, the policies put in place to provide oversight over governmental agencies and their surveillance methods were relaxed, leading to a new era of mass surveillance of Black bodies and Black lived experience (Aspervil, 2018; Giroux, 2015; Mian, 2020).

Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Black social movements

The birth of the BLM movement occurred after the killing of Trayvon Martin by a Florida esident, George Zimmerman, in February of 2012 (Mian, 2020: 68). Since then, the BLM movement has endeavored to protect Black communities from state violence (Aspervil, 2018: 924). One of the unique qualities of the BLM movement includes its capacity to assemble and unite individuals on an expansive and ubiquitous scale—not only on a state level but on an international level—through the promotion of the movement's values using social media platforms (Mian, 2020: 72). Since the 2014 death of Michael Brown (an African American adolescent who was unjustly shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri by Darren Wilson, a White police officer), the FBI has used Black Identity Extremist (BIE) evaluations to examine those associated with the BLM movement (Mian, 2020: 72; see also Aspervil, 2018: 923).

The FBI created the BIE assessment as a response to rising domestic terror groups fixed on targeting law enforcement officers. BIE organizations are composed of individuals who seek recognition, representation and rights-claiming under the law. They do this,

wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society and some do so in furtherance of establishing a separate [B]lack homeland or autonomous [B]lack social institutions, communities, or governing organizations within the United States.

(Aspervil, 2018: 929–930)

Although social or political ideologies are not clearly defined in this definition, they are not exempt from inclusion either (Aspervil, 2018: 929–930). This lack of specificity subjects a growing number of Black citizen activists who condemn police brutality and who are nonviolent to surveillance classification as possible threats to the United States (Aspervil, 2018: 929–930).

Modernized methods of data collection and surveillance of the BLM movement

Although COINTELPRO was officially dismantled in the 1970s, remnants of its control have become even more problematic through the ultra-modernization of illicit surveillance of Black individuals who speak out against police brutality (Toor, 2018: 298–299). Contrary to the forms of surveillance methods utilized during the Civil Rights movement, ultra-modernized surveillance technologies have become increasingly invasive and excessive, given their heightened militarized format and counter-domestic application (Toor, 2018: 299–300). One way in which this approach has been observed is through the surveillance of social media platforms that use the BLM hashtag. The hashtag, #blacklivesmatter, originated in 2013 when the BLM movement was first conceived (Woods and McVey, 2016: 1). The purpose of the BLM hashtag was to allow protestors and to enable activists the ability to globally organize demonstrations against local acts of police brutality (Woods and McVey, 2016: 1). Use of the BLM hashtag has stimulated collective and facilitated coordinated organizing efforts that would otherwise be compromised or quelled within institutional structures (Kinsley, 2020; Toor, 2018; Woods and McVey, 2016). Concomitantly, social media platforms have become major outlets for BLM members to transmit knowledge, to unify protests, to consolidate power, and to garner the attention of a larger audience (e.g. Aspervil, 2018; Mian, 2020; Woods and McVey, 2016). However, social media sites have also become principal venues for the surveillance of Black activism, experience, and identity (Mian, 2020; Toor, 2018).

Specifically, digital technology termed “social media monitoring software (SMMS)”, has been developed and includes programs such as MediaSonar, XlSocial Discovery, SocioSpyder, and Geofeedia (Toor, 2018: 299–300). These programs have been purchased by state and federal law enforcement agencies as well as military entities to surreptitiously collect, analyze, and monitor the online content of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (Toor, 2018: 299–300; Woods and McVey, 2016). These agencies and entities have surveilled individuals who use the BLM hashtag and similar hashtags including “#PoliceBrutality, #DontShoot, #ItsTimeForChange, and #ImUnarmed” that are perceived to be “a threat to public safety” (Toor, 2018: 299–300; see also Riddle et al., 2020). However, even more problematic is the ability of SMMS users to excessively monitor and track the everyday realities of an individual's life, including one's geographic location, relationship status, group associations, and participation in political movements (Toor, 2018). For instance, after the shooting of Michael Brown, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) identified zones in which conflict might arise through the surveillance and tracking of information found on social media forums such as Twitter and Vine (Kinsley, 2020; Toor, 2018). In addition, through social media sites, vigils were identified in cities after the death of Mr Brown by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the hashtag #NMOS (Riddle et al., 2020).

Furthermore, adding to the surveillance of hashtags on social media outlets, are the partnerships that have formed between governmental agencies and third-party organizations such as “fusion centers” that observe and surveil BLM members (Toor, 2018: 300). Fusion centers are organizations that conduct digital intelligence of domestic affairs through the collection and exportation of data to alternative processing sites or fusion centers (Toor, 2018). Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that BLM activities were surveilled using these centers from the DHS and other law enforcement agencies (Choudhury, 2015; Toor, 2018). The DHS confirmed that beginning in August of 2014 they initiated the collection of information on BLM protestors and their corresponding demonstrations and events. Specifically, in April of 2015 during the march on Washington, DC, BLM participants were monitored and data were collected using Google maps and live tracking technologies (Choudhury, 2015). Findings from the documents revealed that during a period of 36 hours, the FBI flew over 10 surveillance-copters in Baltimore from 29 April to 3 May given the protests that followed in the wake of Freddy Gray Jr’s death (Grinberg, 2019: 297, 294; Wessler, 2015). Corroborating data indicated that at least half of the flights administered surveillance via video technology as well as through other electronic surveillance methods (Grinberg, 2019: 297; Wessler, 2015). In particular, the documents summarized the use of additional surveillance technologies such as “forward-looking infrared (FLIR) Talon multi-sensor camera systems with features like a thermal imager, laser illuminator, optical camera, electron magnification, and multi-target auto-tracking” (Grinberg, 2019: 298). Prior to the surveillance of BLM protestors in Baltimore, records confirmed that the FBI used the same techniques at other BLM rallies, including those in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York in the aftermath of Eric Garner's death (Grinberg, 2019: 301–302; Williams, 2014).

Lastly, biometric technologies, including the use of facial recognition, have been utilized by local and federal governmental agencies to algorithmically brand Black bodies. For example, in 2016, during the protests of Freddie Gray’s killing, real time maps procured by social media logins were used to provide identification of protestors without the use of warrants (Ramjee et al., 2020). Law enforcement agencies were able to identify or match individual faces with driver licenses, photos taken during criminal detainment, or through image-oriented databases (Ramjee et al., 2020). For instance, consider Clearview Artificial Intelligence. This company holds over 3 billion facial recognition images (Ramjee et al., 2020). More than 600 law enforcement agencies have access to the company's algorithmic database. Clearview AI is used as a policing tool following a criminal procedure, and it encompasses the ability to detect matches through publicly available platforms such as social media accounts—platforms that are surveilled without consent (Ramjee et al., 2020). Given the high rate of usage by law enforcement agencies, organizations such as the ACLU have called into question the ethics of such surveillance tactics on Black bodies. Specifically, the ACLU is challenging the legality of such methodologies, arguing that they violate the Illinois Biometric Information Act (BIPA), and threaten civilian safety and security, protected by one's right to maintain privacy and anonymity (Freed, 2020). The current biometric technology of facial recognition goes well beyond the capability of other surveillance methods that have been utilized in the past. More specifically, biometric tools have made it that much easier to identify and surveil Black individuals at protests, political rallies, and elsewhere where lawful dissent occurs (Freed, 2020).

The de-realization of Black bodies in an era of mass digital surveillance: Criminological speculations

In what follows, we highlight the criminological fallout that ensues from the de-realization of Black bodies in the current era of ubiquitous digital surveillance. We refer back to our theoretical assumptions about techno-crime control to both situate and amplify our provisional commentary. The commentary emphasizes how history, theory, and culture are relevant to historicizing the administration of injustice in the ultramodern age of algorithmic reality construction.

Assumption 1: The Problematic Truth about De-realization—we postulated that mass digital surveillance technologies de-realize. More specifically, we asserted that the technologies of information analytics de-politicize Black identity and de-personalize Black lived experience. We further maintained that de-realization intrudes upon and undoes the civil liberties of targeted citizen-suspect groups in ways that are both excessive and invasive.

The problematic truth about de-realization in the historical present differs from previous epochal incarnations of human relating. Cultural conditions (e.g. political-economic currents and intensities) fuel historical periods and these periods both reflect and reveal important contingent truths about crime control. Beyond the realm of branding and outside the remit of suspicion is the rationale of post-criminology. Post-criminology manages the racialized situation (including the space of awaiting social movement politics) asymmetrically. Stated differently, struggle is forecasted and dissent is predicted through the cognitive prism of Whiteness. Within this schema, bureaucratic techno- rationality (e.g. accountability measures, best practices, and efficiency protocols) is emphasized, absent a recognition that Black resistance and lived protest emerge from and are embedded within a multilayered and misbegotten history of de-realization. Reliance on this prism reproduces “doxic experiences” (Peterson, 2017: 251) that are central to the social unconscious (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015). Ominously, the structure of this unconscious “mask[s] the [W]hiteness of mainstream academic activity as race becomes other people’s (research and teaching) business, typically relegated to the periphery of the discipline” (Phillips et al., 2020: 430). This is why Black luminosity functioning as panoptic power is essential to the structuration of the social unconscious; it has always been so.

Assumption 2: The Problematic Truth about Datafication—we theorized that, in the current era, de-realization depends on methods of datafication (e.g. dataveillance, data mining, data profiling). These methods—derived from predictive algorithms—generate bytes of behavioral information that establish a digital imprint of one's identity and of lived experience. These data are then used to determine one's level of risk. The respective technologies of branding and of suspicion were deployed during previous historical periods and also functioned to manage risk (Black slaves and Black Civil Rights) as trade. This truth is altogether lost in algorithmic translation.

The state's routine reliance on and enforcement of digital profiling strategies and life mining practices are used (have been used) to predict the behavioral choices and actions of Black bodies organized in solidarity as a social movement of protest and change. The ongoing deployment of these strategies and practices has been standardized in the case of BLM. This standardization—sourced within mostly unexamined ontological conventions and epistemological commitments—is how risk gets decoded into a racialized algorithm in support of surveillance capitalism's techno-crime control imperatives of pre-crime policy. Routine reliance on SMMS by state and federal law enforcement agencies as well as military entities amply illustrates this political-economic point. This is the moment when dissent, opposition, and resistance—along with the historical residue of slave rebellion and protest politics—get asymmetrically converted into and redefined as prediction equations about “calculated” precaution and “forecasted” preemption. This is how Black luminosity manifests perniciously as techno-crime control trade in the historical present, in the ultramodern age. The tools of this new trade guarantee that Black bodies are illuminated by algorithms. These tools consist of BIE assessments, social media monitoring (in particular, SMMS), biometry, and other dataveillance regimes. But, these regimes are iatrogenic; they de-realize. More pointedly, they displace history and colonize culture by disavowing Blackness and dismissing Black lived experience through the digital imprinting of hashtags, thermal camera imaging, and other information analytic technologies that merely manufacture de-personalized and market de-politicized data doubles.

Assumption 3: The Problematic Truth about Digital Harm—the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology governs bodies of Black resistance and movement politics as calculable human risk to manage. The datafication of Black identity as protest and lived experience as struggle generated through reliance on SMMS de-vitalizes and a-historicizes the legacy of Black de-realization. Datafication assumes that the criminological problem of predicting and staving off opposition and revolt is solved by techno-crime control practices without computing how techno-crime control practices are, in fact, constitutive of Black activism (i.e. BLM outrage, dissent, and discord). In a similar way, the technologies of branding co-shaped the visceral experience of slave resistance and the technologies of suspicion co-shaped the volatile experience of Black Civil Rights protest (e.g. Browne, 2015).

The potential iatrogenic effects of such institutional dataveillance are even more problematic. In short, the excesses of and invasions by mass digital surveillance—on identity and lived experience—“colonize” human (co)existence (Pfohl, 2015: 101) at the level of Black historical consciousness. This is the consciousness of de-realization as endemic to the Black experience of (un)civil society. In the current era, Black protest as a shared space of psychic unrest, as a discursive instance of human interrelatedness, and as an opportunity for expressing collectivist power is racialized algorithmically as human risk to predict and to govern absent a consideration of culture or context. This governance reifies forms of digital harm. It is this harm that currently instantiates de-realization's “pathologies of personhood” (Guralnik and Simeon, 2010: 400).

Assumption 4: The Problematic Truth about Control Society—the unsettling truth about control society is that, increasingly, its chief cultural by-product is the de-realization of the masses. In the ultramodern age of control society, everyone is a citizen-suspect, a would-be offender, or is managed as a potential human threat (e.g. Beck, 2009; O’Malley, 2010). This is why administrative systems of regulation and governance warrant critique, including techno-crime control policy writ large (e.g. Schuilenburg, 2015; Schuilenburg and Peeters, 2020). However, in the case of BLM as a social body for movement activism and protest, the process of de-realization de-politicizes and de-personalizes differently. The regimes of truth that follow from BLM territorialization and monetization reassemble consciousness, subjectivity, and power.

Indeed, the productive purposes that the technologies of mass digital surveillance serve in relation to Black identity and the lived experience of Blackness include the abstraction and repression of Black history. The trade in algorithmically managing BLM relatedness (e.g. disruption and disorder, irreverence and dangerousness) as human currency, as risk commodity, obscures the situated psychic meanings that both anchor and stain the historical present. These meanings extend to the technologies of branding and of suspicion that inform the consciousness of Blackness today. Instead, as in the past, Black bodies become economic objects of (digital) commodification to territorialize (e.g. to demonize, to vilify) and to monetize (i.e. to market, to sell). This is how Black identity and experience get de-politicized and de-personalized within the social consciousness of control society.

Assumption 5: The Problematic Truth about Digital Epidermalization—when the algorithmic trade in digital surveillance racializes Black identity and Black lived experience as human risk to police, then dissent and opposition, objection and resistance, get iteratively computed as pre-crime to control before these phenomena take on pre-cognitive form and are lived as states of human consciousness, inter-subjectivity and power. We take this view to be consistent with Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012, 2015) critique of criminology's disciplinary unconscious. What is challenged here are the “racialized modes of thought” (Phillips et al., 2020: 431) that underpin criminology and the de-realizing effects that this reinforcement exercises non-reflexively against Black bodies within control society. This critique extends to criminology's:

traditions and national particularities, its obligatory problematics, its habits of thought, its shared beliefs and self-evidences, its rituals and consecrations, its constraints as regards publication of findings, all of which combine to determine the nature of criminology's knowledge of race.

(Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015: 39)

The maintenance of this disciplinary unconscious constitutes the productive purpose guaranteed by the technologies of mass digital surveillance, especially when they are deployed expressly to monitor Black identity and the lived experience of Blackness. BLM is one prototypical example. The disciplinary unconscious is the undulating psychic force that sustains a process Browne (2015: 91) termed “digital epidermalization”. This process occurs when bodies of color are territorialized through techno-crime control surveillance that de-politicizes (redesigns) and de-personalizes (redefines) race algorithmically as risk to govern. This “position-taking” governance is how criminology's scholastic unconscious (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015) operates asymmetrically without “self-criticality and self-awareness” (Emirbayer and Desmond, 2012; Phillips et al., 2020: 431). In relation to race and criminology, the scholastic unconscious:

tends towards the elevation of theoretical abstraction into a kind of discrete zone of moral cognitive and aesthetic inquiry taken to be necessarily superior to an interpretation of the lifeworlds of the people who are its subject. It lives in the ivory tower—with the emphasis on “ivory” … free to question everything but itself.

(Phillips et al., 2020: 431–432)

Summary and conclusion

In the ultramodern age of digital reality construction, the technologies of information analytics are utilized in the service of techno-crime control policy. As this article has argued, this is policy based on the reproduction of surveillance data that is racialized algorithmically (e.g. Browning and Arrigo, 2020; Hannah-Moffat, 2019; Ugwudike, 2020, 2021). The everyday effect of this racialization is the de-realization of Black identity and lived experience. To be clear, the Black experience as de-realized is not new. Instead, for people of color, de-realization is an artifact of history. The respective technologies of branding and of government suspicion are visceral and volatile relics of de-realization's personally invasive and politically excessive fall-out.

However, when de-realization occurs in the ultramodern age, then Blackness is de-politicized and de-personalized differently. In the current era, the excessive and invasive manifestations of de-realization function to undo the nature of shared consciousness, the experience of inter-subjectivity and the very expression of insurgent power. As our techno-criminological theorizing explained, the algorithmic logic of pre-crime and the asymmetric rationale of post-criminology mediate and manufacture the racialized construction of surveillance. What this means, then, is that social movements (e.g. BLM as a body of activist social change), are policed through the predictive technologies of information analytics, including their unexamined ontological conventions and epistemological commitments about “prevention and precaution”, “law and security”, “disruption and violence”, and “community and citizenship”. These conventions and commitments represent reified forms of “algorithmic governance” deployed for purposes of “risk prediction in justice systems [that perpetuate] power and control over people's lives” (Ugwudike, 2021: 484). We asserted that, in the ultramodern age, the most excessive and invasive manifestations of algorithmic governance de-realize Black identity and lived experience.

History, theory, and culture have much to teach criminology. Much like Freud warned, we repeat what we do not psychically understand. De-realization is one phenomenon whose criminological biography cannot be ignored or repressed; otherwise, de-realization as clinical condition will suffer persistent misunderstanding. Regrettably, and still, we are administering an injustice. This article drew critical attention to this misapprehension's ill-fated and iatrogenic endurance, noting de-realization's present day human sequelae for Black bodies.

Surely, we can and must do better so that we can become better. The patient's recovery depends upon the emotional labor of becoming. This labor liberates by illuminating the social unconscious and the debilitating structures of domination on which it stands. Without such deep psychological work, radical de-realization is certain to follow, and with it, individual and collective agency, regrettably, will become its casualty.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Bruce Arrigo

Author biographies

Bruce A Arrigo is a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He also holds affiliate appointments in the School of Data Science and the Program in Public Policy.

Olivia Shaw is a doctoral student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.

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