Satellite surveillance and the orbital unconscious

Abstract

Satellite data are frequently attached to discourses of infallibility, objectivity and omnipresence. Yet the value of satellite data in everyday society largely depends on the strength of our interpretations, interpretations which are easily misled. Satellite images can be fabricated, misread and restricted, yet companies like Google encourage users to see themselves as active agents in a collaborative process of accumulating data, obscuring users’ true relations with satellite technology and giving them a false sense of power and anonymity. In this sense, satellites constitute a new unconscious terrain of perception. For Geert Lovink, we have reached an age where we can ‘read satellites as metaphors, as a new type of technological mirror’ and as ‘an unconscious apparatus’. This article argues that our lack of conscious awareness around the presence, nature and infrastructure of satellites allows them to thrive under the radar as a new species of unconscious surveillance technology.

Introduction

Technology has played an undeniable role in how forms of knowledge are created, captured, disseminated, used, interpreted, controlled, manipulated and archived. In the 21st century, the increased sophistication of satellite surveillance technology has created a powerful and disconcerting shift in the relationship between big-tech companies and the knowing subject. As Shoshanna Zuboff has claimed, we are now living in the age of ‘surveillance capitalism’, in which surveillance is increasingly normalised, relativised and used to control and modify human behaviour for commercial purposes.

Although much has been written on the influence of ubiquitous surveillance systems on privacy and basic human rights, much remains to be understood about the psychological entanglements that have arisen as a result of these increasingly imperceptible systems of monitoring and capturing the world. As Lovink (2005) has argued, satellites constitute a ‘blind spot’ in media theory due to their imperceptibility. Yet it is this imperceptibility that has afforded companies the ability to dictate the rhetorical dimensions of satellite surveillance; from emphasising ‘safety’ and ‘collaboration’ to celebrating new capabilities of discovery, big-tech companies shape and control patterns and ways of knowing when it comes to surveillance. As a result, individuals have come to normalise, rationalise or dismiss the broader infrastructure of surveillance and how it compromises their role as knowing subjects, a system that corresponds to an orbital unconscious.

By orbital unconscious, I refer to the psychological tensions that have emerged as a result of the deceptive practices around satellite surveillance. As companies increasingly rely on more imperceptible forms of surveillance, the everyday individual is encouraged and conditioned to adapt their thinking to the narratives that these companies have propagated, from how satellites operate to what role we ultimately play in the process of surveillance.

Drawing upon the work of Lisa Parks, Geert Lovink, Eyal Weizman and others, this article interrogates the understudied psychological dimension to satellite theory and surveillance culture in order to show how the systems, infrastructure and discourses that have emerged in and around satellites are creating new knowledge landscapes that perpetuate existing inequalities and power structures, distorting users’ true relations with the technologies of surveillance.

This article provides a historical overview of satellite and photographic theory before proceeding with contemporary examples from Google Earth to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which help demonstrate how satellite surveillance has become a way of organising or, more appropriately, re-organising society based on ideas of objectivity, ubiquity, perpetual presence, community and belonging. As companies continue in their frenzied pursuit to ‘know all’ with the aid of technology, everyday citizens, in contrast, become more and more separated from the systems and methods that monitor them.

Vertical ontologies

In recent years, satellite data have proved crucial in revealing changes to the environment, as well as exposing crimes against humanity. Satellite data were used by agencies to prove that Rohingya villages had been decimated in Myanmar, and that forests had been illegally cleared in Amapá, Brazil. And in 2021, satellite images revealed the rapid construction of nuclear-missile silos in China. As a result of these and other revelations, satellite technology has gained a robust reputation for being reliable, accurate and objective.

More than any other form of surveillance technology, satellites have become irretrievably bound up in narratives of technological, scientific and geographic progress, constituting a radical new way of viewing and, moreover, understanding the world. As NASA tweeted in 2022, ‘Our Earth-observing satellites give us a unique view of our planet. Studying Earth from space helps us understand the effects of human-caused climate change, and empowers scientists and decision makers to address climate change with strategies informed by science’.

Similarly, Simon Keogh of the Met Office stated, ‘Satellites have certain advantages in terms of the global picture, the completeness of the dataset, the way that the data is unaffected by human practice on the ground, for example’ (CarbonBrief, 2016). ‘Satellites’, he says, ‘give us this unrivalled global view of what’s happening everywhere’. The rhetoric invoked by Keogh, NASA and other organisations to describe satellites speaks to what Parks (2005) calls the ‘fantasy of global presence in which the world is figured as a realm of access and familiarity’ (p. 26).

Not only are satellites valued for their apparent omnipresence, but also for how they are seen to be a necessary element in connecting nations and individuals. Theorists such as Marshall McLuhan made bold declarations about the potential for satellites to eliminate geographical barriers, perpetuating a quasi-utopian rhetoric around the capabilities of satellite technology. Writing in the wake of the first satellite images of earth, McLuhan viewed satellite technology as an essential factor in creating what he saw as the ‘global village’, in which time and space vanish in favour of ‘a simultaneous happening’ (p. 63) (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967).

McLuhan anticipated a new consciousness in human–technology relations, one based on ideas of instantaneousness, simultaneity and immediacy. Yet ‘such metaphors’, Parks argues, conceal the ways in which satellite broadcasts ‘reassert Western hegemony during a period of spatial flux’ (p. 29).

Nevertheless, McLuhan’s enthusiasm for this new media landscape has been widely shared in the surveillance economy. Like McLuhan, many companies emphasise the instantaneous connection brought about through satellite surveillance. Satellites are not only, in Keogh’s view, able to give us an unprecedented view of the world, but through this omnipresence are seen to facilitate interconnectedness and a sense of belonging by mapping the earth and all of its inhabitants. Much of this emphasis on fostering a sense of community rests on the manner in which satellites are heralded as an objective form of surveillance.

Like traditional photography before it, assumptions are readily made as to the objectivity that satellite data possess. This desire for objectivity became a core feature of 20th-century modernity, anchored by what Schudson (2001) described as ‘the separation of facts and values’ (p. 159).

As a medium, photography was widely appreciated for its promise of objectivity, immune to the technical flaws and artistic freedom of traditional painting. Photography was quickly embraced as a medium that could ‘capture’ a moment, place or person as faithfully as possible. For Walden (2006), fine-art photographers, social-documentary photographers and visual anthropologists differed in their approach to photography, yet all three, nevertheless, saw photography as inescapably objective (p. 1249).

Siegfried Kracauer was a notable detractor of the conventional and assumed link between photography and objectivity. In 1951, Kracauer (2019) argued that, in fact, photography transformed, rather than copied, reality:

As a recording device, the camera was bound to fascinate minds in quest of scientific objectivity. Many held that photographs faithfully copy nature; and, eager for similar achievements, realistic and impressionist painters assumed the guise of self-effacing copyists. But it need scarcely be stressed that in actuality photographs do not copy nature but metamorphose it, by transferring three-dimensional objects to the plane and arbitrarily severing their ties with their surroundings (p. 63).

While Kracauer’s work constituted an early criticism of photography as an objective medium, it wasn’t until the late 20th century, when postmodernists sewed doubt over the notion of objectivity and absolute certainties, that this prevailing myth of objectivity truly began to wane. Yet despite these now-conventional criticisms, photography continues to be seen and used as a reliable method of obtaining facts and evidence. The parallel evolutions of objectivity and photography as pillars of 20th-century discourse set the foundation of satellite data as ‘incontrovertible’ evidence of geopolitical spaces and events. Indeed, with the growth in satellite data and its widespread use among citizens, the footage captured by these enigmatic objects holds sway with those who increasingly rely upon them to demystify the once-obscured view of the planet. In fact, satellite images have become an integral part of the fabric of 21st-century life, informing journalism, travel, environmental humanities and political relationships.

Jones (2015) explains that our age ‘evoke[s] a vertical ontology’ (p. 80). Satellites and drones have been responsible for shifting our mental relationship with landscapes, privileging the omnipresent vertical world over the static, restricted view of the horizontal world. Satellite data now make it possible to view almost all spaces of the earth as if from a pedestal and without being physically present in these locations, radically transforming our perceptions of the earth and our own place within it.

This interest in vertical politics would only gain momentum with the launch of Sputnik in 1957. As Parks (2018) explains, in response to Sputnik, Americans ‘accelerated vertical manoeuvres ranging from nuclear weapons testing to satellite launchings, from aerial espionage to signal intelligence’ (p. 10). Like 9/11, she writes, Sputnik ‘was a vertical event’ which ‘delivered powerful psychic jolts to US leaders’.

Nevertheless, the launch of Sputnik also resolved prevailing anxieties regarding vertical authority and airspace: ‘through the launch of Sputnik, the concept of vertical sovereignty was dismissed and the principle of the free passage of satellites was coined’ (Al-Rodhan, 2012: 192). As of 2022, close to 5000 artificial satellites are orbiting the earth, the majority being owned by the United States. The proliferation of satellites, we’re told, is motivated by the desire to attain the best, clearest and most objective view of the earth to enhance connectivity and knowledge among society. Yet these new ways of seeing, to borrow John Berger’s term, are increasingly bound up in evasive power structures that seek to turn knowledge of the world, and our knowledge of ourselves, into artefacts of control.

From Mercator to Google Maps

Historically, efforts to depict the earth from above have been an arduous and contentious process. Maps of the world have continuously been the subject of criticism relating to biases and blatant inaccuracies that perpetuate imperial attitudes.

The first world map was purportedly drawn up by Anaximander in the 6th-century BC, portraying the earth as cylindrical. The first map to depict the earth as spherical was drawn by Eratosthenes. The Mercator map, developed by Gerardus Mercator in the 16th century, features a number of crucial distortions; objects further from the equator appear inflated in size, making Greenland appear to be the same size as Africa (despite Africa being 14 times larger than Greenland). German historian Arno Peters, one of the most well-known detractors of the Mercator map, noted that the map held a blatantly Eurocentric projection, with the size of Northern European countries presented as larger than those in the Southern Hemisphere. For theorist Rabasa (1993), the Mercator map ‘manifests the main constituents that have defined Europe as a privileged source of meaning for the rest of the world’ (p. 181). These historical maps, he argues, subsist on ‘hierarchical arrangements’ that privilege Europe and position it against ‘the rest of the world’ (p. 188).

As the history of cartography has shown, maps are not just forms of information, but forms of communication. Maps mediate space and facilitate flows of communication between citizens and institutions of power. As Mattelart (1996) explains, the production of mapping canals and roads in 17th-century France revealed a ‘new criteria of knowledge and action’, enabling ‘new modes of regulation and organization of society’ (p. 3). To this end, each new map, each new attempt to view the world, constitutes a way of re-organising society in ways that perpetuate dominant ideologies of seeing and knowing.

In the 20th century, fascination with new ways of seeing the world gained traction. In Italy, the Futurist art movement was galvanised by technological developments which provided extraordinary views of the earth, radically altering society’s relationship with spatial politics. Their lavish depictions of speed and birds-eye views of cities and fascination with war machines upended modernity’s focus on the contemplative inner world of the individual, and replaced it with a new, technological imaginary. Haacke (2011) observes that ‘in response to new developments in technology and metropolitan experience over the course of the long twentieth century, trans-Atlantic writers and artists became increasingly interested in vertical ideas of aspiration and transcendence’ (p. 1). This shift has been variously described as the ‘vertical turn’ in social science.

In 1909, an air show was held in the Italian city of Brescia. Attended by the likes of Franz Kafka and the Italian poet and Futurist artist F.T. Marinetti, the air show intensely inspired the Futurist aesthetic and its radical reconstruction of the earth’s landscape. Marinetti, whose obsession with verticality was already underway in his 1902 collection of poetry The Conquest of the Stars, came away with a newfound admiration for aerial poetics. Three years after attending the air show, and after having flown an airplane himself, Marinetti (1968) enthused,

Increasing weightlessness. An infinite sense of voluptuousness. You descend from the machine with a light and elastic jump. You have removed a weight from your back. You have triumphed over the stickiness of the road. You have triumphed over the law that forces man to crawl. (p. 116)

Like the rest of the Futurist movement, Marinetti expressed a profound distaste for the static, immovable, terrestrial terrain. Their flagrant worship of technology and desire to defy gravitational limits contributed to a vertical ontology that would remain influential in the ensuing decades. Artworks like Tullio Crali’s Upside Down Loop (Death Loop) (1938, Collection of Luce Marinetti, Rome) and Before the Parachute Opens (1939, Guggenheim Museum, New York) established an oeuvre that formed the basis of the Futurists’ reactionary modernism, one predicated on vertical triumph. Yet, while the endeavours of the Futurists to transcend the immobile earthly realm have been admired for their artistic audacity, Haacke reminds us that the vertical ambitions of the Futurists were ultimately motivated by Fascism.

The desire to see the world in its entirety from the privileged position of the sky continued throughout the 20th century as technology became more sophisticated. Consequently, a new rhetoric around satellites and their potential grew. Today, satellite footage is heralded for its ability to provide individuals and companies with a more accurate view of the earth. Like traditional photography before it, satellite footage is once more imbued with discourses of objectivity:

We associate such imagery with an objective view of the world. The map, in these cases, is a photograph of the Earth taken at a particular time and is understood to be an objective view of what the world looked like at that moment. (Farman and Frith, 2017: 143)

As Farman and Frith contend, ‘we also associate these top-down images with objectivity because there isn’t a clear human agent behind these photographs’. This approach perpetuates the prevailing assumption that technologically based depictions of the earth are themselves free of bias, since they are apparently free of human intervention. Haraway (1988) describes such ‘instruments of visualization’ as exacerbating the experience of disembodiment that corresponds to what she calls the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (p. 581).

One such example of this faith in satellite technology comes from Oliver Morton of Wired. For Morton, satellite footage is ‘unencumbered by any accidents of geography or history. From the emptiness of orbit, satellites can provide just that sort of objective knowledge, delivered in neat, commoditized packages’ (Morton, 1997).

Morton’s view attests to the tendency of the Western world to see technology and objectivity as ultimately interchangeable. As Benhke (2013) puts it, ‘the Western gaze presents itself as a “view from nowhere”, the allegedly “objective” vantage point from which the world is mapped and ordered’ (p. 16). From this position, Benhke explains, ‘objectivity and truth become referred and tied to technological solutions and devices, rather than interpretive faculties’.

Google Maps has become what many consider to be the most accurate map of the world to date, compiling satellite data in what Google executive McClendon (2012) declares is their ‘never-ending quest for the perfect map’. McClendon points to Google Maps’ comprehensiveness, accuracy and usability as fulfilling this desire for a perfect map of the earth:

We still have a way to go because the world is constantly changing – with new houses, cities and parks appearing all the time – it’s a never-ending job. But by cross-checking the data we have, we can significantly improve the accuracy of our maps.

These sentiments illustrate the way in which Google sees itself as operating at the frontier of a new surveillance age, with aims to create an unhindered, unobscured view of the earth that will, with enough time and data, demystify stubborn ambiguities that exist beyond their reach. From Google Earth to Google Street View, the aim is to unveil every landscape, object and person, but only for those who control these systems. As Zuboff (2019) puts it,

The presumption is that nothing is beyond Google’s borders. The world is vanquished now, on its knees, and brought to you by Google. (p. 144)

While Google Maps and Google Earth are considered by many to be the most accurate depictions of the earth thanks to satellite data, The Economist (2015) claims that there is ‘no such thing as a perfectly accurate map’. Instead, they argue that ‘all maps distort reality and convey bias, whether deliberately or not’.

Indeed, Jerry Brotton notes that ‘no map is any better or worse than any other map. It’s just about what agenda it pursues’ (Friedman, 2013). Brotton argues that even Google Maps, which prides itself on its pursuit of greater accuracy, cannot fulfil the ideals of objectivity: ‘All maps are always subjective. Even today’s online geospatial applications on all your mobile devices and tablets, be they produced by Google or Apple or whoever, are still to some extent subjective maps’. For Brotton, the problem with Google Maps is that ‘we don’t know what source code Google and other online mapping applications are using’.

Indeed, as Wilken (2019) argues, companies that utilise surveillance technology ‘obscure just how the technologies are implemented so as to protect what is most valuable about these corporate properties’ (p. 345), while also noting that the technical mechanisms in these technologies ‘do not necessarily accord with their actual implementation; these mechanisms can be decidedly mutable and subject to subsequent modification’.

In addition to the lack of transparency over how the technology is used, the relationship between users and companies speaks to another, broader deception at work in these efforts to ‘capture’ the globe in its entirety. If satellite companies are to be believed, the nature of capturing images is a collaborative process. In detailing the objectives behind Google Maps, Brian McClendon noted that both developers and users work together to create the data:

Over the last few years we’ve been building a comprehensive base map of the entire globe—based on public and commercial data, imagery from every level (satellite, aerial and street level) and the collective knowledge of our millions of users.

McClendon writes,

Turns out our users are as passionate about the quality of Google Maps as we are, and they give us great feedback on where we can do better. We make thousands of edits a day based on user feedback.

This disclosure gives the impression of a reciprocal relationship between users and developers. The overall impression is one of transparency and collaboration, with users and developers participating on an equal playing field. This perception is crucial to the functioning of platforms like Google Maps. By viewing and participating with the infrastructure in this way, users gain a false sense of perception that obscures the discrepancies in accessibility and resolution between users and developers. The experience of Google Maps makes the user feel in control and omnipresent, while their true relations with the infrastructure are concealed.

For Rhys Daffyd Jones argues, the experience of vertical ontology ‘brings with it an empowered god-like position that detaches the viewer from a position of the viewed’. In engaging with the satellite images through Google Maps, the sensation of being a subject of surveillance dissolves, and is replaced with the illusory impression of authority over the still-life domain of Google Maps.

Morton and McLendon’s views of objectivity and reciprocity speak to the broader psychological dimensions that directly permit the ubiquity and increasing acceptance of satellite surveillance; rather than viewing themselves as subjects of surveillance, users are conditioned to see themselves as active participants in the process of their own self-monitoring. If maps facilitate new modes of organising society, as Mattelart argues, then Google Maps has radically reorganised society by way of normalising surveillance, separating users from the material conditions that contribute to their own surveillance.

Resolution and ‘ground-truthing’

Programmes like Google Maps and Google Earth give users the impression of a democratic system that allows anybody with a computer to view satellite footage. Schonfeld (2009) reasoned, ‘A decade ago, only a handful of people would have had access to such satellite imagery. Today, anyone can download it for free’. Yet this impression ignores the discrepancies of satellite data resolution available to users and the companies that own these satellites. Eyal Weizman explains that access to higher resolution satellite data is restricted, revealing the extent to which our perceptions around satellite data transparency are misled:

The photographic resolution at which satellite images are made publicly available is degraded, for both privacy and secrecy reasons, to a level that masks the human figure within the square of a single pixel. State agencies have access to the full optical resolution of these photographs, as well as to data from other sensors in them. They can also limit the public availability of certain satellite images by purchasing them and ‘taking them off the shelf’ for a specified amount of time. (p. 98)

For everyday users of satellite apps and platforms, images of humans are distorted, giving the (false) impression of collective anonymity. Melinda Laturi similarly alludes to the limitations of satellite data: ‘satellite images are only as good as their resolution. The smaller the pixel size, the sharper the image. But even high-resolution images need to be validated on the ground to ensure the trustworthiness of the interpretation’. Indeed, Atsuyo Ito writes that in the Cameroon v. Nigeria case – which focused on the maritime frontier between the two nations and the question of sovereignty over the Bakassi Peninsula – there were conflicting interpretations of satellite images. ‘Because of the different opinions on the satellite image, presentation of the images did not clarify the point in dispute and was thus ineffective as evidence’ (p. 143). Famously, former Secretary of State, the late Colin Powell, used satellite photographs as ‘proof’ that Iraq was concealing weapons of mass destruction, a claim which was later refuted.

The transition of satellite footage into the mainstream, coupled with the rise of deepfakes and the ease of creating and disseminating material, means not only that misinterpretation can be rife, but also that fabricated satellite images are increasingly flooding the Internet masquerading as real footage. In 2015, detailed satellite images created by Russian graphic artist Anton Balazh were circulated online and were believed to be legitimate photos released by NASA, before it was revealed to be a playful hoax. More recently, deepfake satellite imagery and deepfake digital maps have been disseminated online, proving problematic for national security and fuelling misinformation. As Vincent (2021) explains, these deepfakes ‘could be used to create hoaxes about wildfires or floods, or to discredit stories based on real satellite imagery’. Vincent points to the Rohingya villages in Myanmar that were destroyed: ‘Think about reports on China’s Uyghur detention camps that gained credence from satellite evidence. As geographic deepfakes become widespread, the Chinese government can claim those images are fake, too’. As with physical maps that distorted details of the earth’s topography, deepfake maps continue to distort perceptions about the world and can be used to bolster political agendas.

Even with real footage, satellites alter and even distort perceptions of time and space, revealing an emerging tension between satellite data, and what is known as ‘ground truth’, in which information is gathered by direct observation at a specific location. While satellite data gives the impression of creating a comprehensive image of the earth in real time, numerous issues undermine the effectiveness of satellite data. Atmospheric distortion, multi-path errors, orbital period and errors of omission and commission require that ground truth be used to validate satellite data.

The periodic nature of satellite orbits, in particular, leads to a fragmented sense of time where satellite data are concerned, relying on irregular intervals. As Weizman writes,

Image satellites take an average of ninety minutes to complete a full orbit around the earth. These satellites can potentially be over the same site only after twenty-four hours because by the time they have completed a full circle the earth has already rotated. (p. 98)

Satellites do not currently offer real-time surveillance, though various companies are anticipating that this feature will be operational in the near future. The intermittent, fragmented nature of satellite data creates an assemblage of images that has created what Weizman describes as ‘forensic time’: ‘Juxtapositions of buildings with ruins, icebergs with water, and tropical forests with monocrop fields present history as a series of radical breaks and catastrophes. Before-and-after photographs are thus the very embodiment of forensic time’ (p. 98).

Satellites thus produce a perception of time that is episodic and sporadic, in contrast to the immediacy of real time as experienced on the ground. For Weizman, the gaps that satellite data produce are filled in by user-generated media at ground level: ‘One of the most important forms of documentation emerging from the battlefields of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere is produced by the people living there and made available on social networks almost immediately’ (p. 98). Weizman writes that ‘citizen-produced images are the complementary technology to satellite imagery’ (p. 98), and that ‘these kinds of videos include testimony, as well, because the people recording them often speak as they record’ (p. 99).

The differences between how satellites and ground-truthing operate illustrate a tension between the terrestrial and the celestial when it comes to obtaining knowledge. Satellite data, with its emphasis on sky-to-ground view, embody Greg Siegel’s notion of the ‘forensic gaze’, wherein images are treated in a detached manner, lacking the real-time context of their existence.

Indeed, in the age of big data, there is the assumption that technologies such as satellites reveal and collect everything there is to be seen. For Crawford, the anxiety of big data not only relates to the fear of how much data we are giving over, but about the lack of context in regard to our data, about the potential for distortion. There is, she says,

the fear that all the data we are shedding every day is too revealing of our intimate selves but may also misrepresent us. Like a fluorescent light in a dark corridor, it can both show too much and not enough. (Crawford, 2014)

Crawford explains that while ‘big data’ are widely assumed to be exhaustive and comprehensive, gaps, inconsistencies and ambiguities in data continue to exist: ‘The bigger the data gets, the more small things can be overlooked. The risk of being seduced by ghost patterns in data increases with the size of the data sets’.

Despite the flaws that Crawford and Weizman have exposed, industries continue to conflate knowledge with data, arguing that any flaw or inconsistency can be eradicated as long as the data sets are improved and made more sophisticated. By relying on data as the benchmark on which our knowledge of the world rests, new standards of interpretation are formed in which knowledge becomes subservient to the data, even if and when the data prove faulty, as in Colin Powell’s case. As these examples attest, data are increasingly analysed and accepted based on how its findings ‘fit’ with certain narratives of perception, to the extent that society is being reorganised to accommodate and reflect the data itself. To this end, rather than actively interpreting data in concert with ground testimony, data are increasingly embedded in society in such a way that events, people and places are increasingly viewed and verified through data.

The orbital unconscious

Although people are aware that satellites operate as a surveillance technology, we do not consider satellites to be on par with CCTV, iPhones or other ubiquitous surveillance technologies which capture and monitor human behaviour. Their distance and relative invisibility – viewable only at night and only from afar – gives the impression that satellites are not earthly objects, but space objects.

Our relationship with satellites is therefore one of unconscious estrangement; there is an awareness that satellites exist, yet their removal from the terrain of everyday experience masks their perpetual presence. They do not exist at the forefront of our minds. In other words, satellites constitute an absent presence. Satellites are perpetually orbiting the globe, and while this fact is known to us, we rarely respond with any corresponding anxiety, nor are we compelled to alter our behaviour because of them. While we are conscious of iPhones and CCTV filming us in plain sight, with studies showing that an awareness of CCTV influences behaviour (Jansen et al., 2018), satellites evade the deeper scrutinies of surveillance culture, since we do not consider them as forming part of the everyday surveillant infrastructure, despite their ubiquity.

For Jansen et al. (2018), the presence of CCTV and other surveillance cameras leads to a reduction in antisocial behaviour: ‘Our results support the popular notion that camera presence decreases undesired behavior’ (p. 9). More significantly, their research found that the specific framing of the camera was a mitigating factor in influencing behaviour: ‘The presence of a camera presented in a non-intimidating, nonauthoritative manner managed to reduce cheating behavior slightly, but not significantly. However, cheating behavior decreased significantly when the camera was presented in an intimidating, authoritative manner’ (p. 9). For Jansen et al., people not only need to be aware of the presence of security cameras and CCTV, but it must be presented in such a way that conveys an imposing presence: ‘it is thus important that camera surveillance is salient, and framed in such a way so that people have the impression that an authority figure is watching, who has the ability to punish deviant behavior’ (p. 3).

In contrast, satellites are neither intimidating nor wholly authoritative. They reside beyond the immediate consciousness of surveillance culture. While satellites share much in common with drones and CCTV, their unreachability or inaccessibility ensures that they remain somewhat inscrutable to an earth-bound society. As Graham (2016) has put it, ‘Once aloft, however, satellites become distant, enigmatic and, quite literally, ‘unearthly’’ (p. 35).

He further argues that we ‘struggle to engage with satellites because they lie so firmly beyond the visceral worlds of everyday experience and visibility’. Indeed, as Lisa Parks (2007) observes, ‘Since they are seemingly so out of reach (both physically and financially), we scarcely imagine them as part of everyday life’ at all’ (pp. 207–208). To this end, satellites can be seen as a radical form of unconscious technology.

For Lovink (2005), satellites can be read as metaphors, ‘as a new type of technological mirror’. He argues that ‘the lack of common awareness seduces us to return to psychoanalytic terms and for instance speak of the satellite as an unconscious apparatus’. In an interview with Lisa Park, Lovink notes that aside from Sputnik and Regan’s Star Wars programme, both of which heightened awareness about the possibility of remote strikes, satellites have been largely invisible to public perception. Yet while satellites constitute a radical form of unconscious surveillance technology, society’s relationship to satellite surveillance is not simply one based on ignorance. In fact, the relationship between users, satellite footage and other location technologies like GPS is more often relativised so as to emphasise the potential for satellites to connect users across the globe.

Elon Musk’s Starlink programme is one such example of the manner in which satellite surveillance is relativised. Launched in 2019, Starlink’s low-orbit satellites (adding up to almost 4000) provide Internet connection to countries around the world. Like Google Earth before it, Starlink is sustained by a self-serving rhetoric, one predicated on connectivity, potentially overshadowing ways in which the technology can be misused. As Kuksa et al. (2023) remind us, while the initiative to broaden Internet access through satellites is commendable, ‘the practicalities of achieving this are far from ethical’ (p. 59). They note that ‘the questions of how these activities will be regulated and by whom, how regulations will be monitored and maintained, and how sanctions will be applied where the regulations have been transgressed remain largely unanswered’.

The emphasis that these companies place on ideas of ‘community’ and ‘connectivity’ can also be seen in the way in which certain users embrace surveillance as a way to ‘find’ themselves online. Since Google Earth and Google Maps have become part of the ubiquitous infrastructure of online experience, many users have sought to ‘find’ themselves on Street View, an apparent rite of passage that has seen surveillance become increasingly normalised. Be Connected, a programme launched on the Australian government’s website aimed at fostering digital literacy, proudly proclaims,d ‘Find yourself on Google Earth!’ As a user goes through the prompts, the website paints Google Earth as a superior platform to the regular, paper atlas, claiming: ‘Google Earth offers so much more’. After explaining how to use the platform, the website claims,

Now that you know how to use some of the features of Google Earth, type your own address into the Search window and see what happens. Don’t forget to check Photos to see images around your home, and Map Styles for additional information about landmarks and places.

This approach is part of a broader shift in surveillance discourse that, rather than obscuring details regarding the process of surveillance, actively encourages users to see themselves as part of their own surveillance. Videos are routinely uploaded to YouTube with titles such as ‘Found Myself on Google Maps’, ‘How to Add Yourself to Google Maps’ and ‘Using Google Maps to Pin Yourself’, while various websites instruct users on how they can find themselves on Google Street View.

Tung-Hui Hu explains this shift in terms of people’s desire to be seen: ‘students have redefined “being watched” as “becoming visible”. For them, actions on the Internet that might traditionally be interpreted as risks to one’s privacy, such as having digital images of oneself uploaded by others, are ways of being recognized’ (Hu, 2015: 130). Hu explains that without such visibility, students feel like ‘nobodies’ (p. 130). These users, he writes, Google themselves to get an idea of how they look to others, partaking in a kind of ‘digital mirror’ without any real knowledge as to how algorithms monitor and collect their data. ‘Military surveillance through a Keyhole satellite is not the same as Googling oneself’, Hu maintains, ‘but there is nonetheless a thread of intimacy that runs through both the satellite trackers looking for recognition from their satellites, and a user looking for recognition online’ (p. 130).

This era of surveillance capitalism goes hand in hand with companies and users relativising the existence of satellites. While companies like Google seek to repackage these surveillance technologies as ‘harmless’, if not ‘fun’, users see these technologies as another method of self-surveillance, another avenue of ‘finding oneself’ in the inscrutable infrastructure of the Internet. Rather than resisting these ubiquitous, subtle forms of surveillance, users actively seek to locate themselves within this digital panorama. As Parks (2001) puts it, users want to see themselves as ‘part of a dynamic geographical interface’ (p. 213).

As forms of surveillance have become increasingly accessible and user-oriented, users desire a sense of ‘belonging’ where the digital map is concerned, reasserting McLuhan’s metaphor of the global village, wherein connections are seamless and barriers eliminated. Such shifts in public consciousness around satellites show how successful these companies have been in re-writing narratives on surveillance, reorienting it away from a loss of privacy and towards a sense of belonging. To this end, contemporary approaches to surveillance are often less about evading detection, and more about validating one’s existence by actively partaking in surveillance itself. By depicting surveillance in this way, companies are able to tap into users’ desire for visibility and operate with greater impunity.

Resistance and forms of ‘counter-seeing’

Any discussion of photography must take into consideration its role as a form of surveillance and control. As Gerry Badger has observed, ‘from its very inception photography has been utilized by governments, or at the behest of governments, to survey, catalogue, and classify’ (p. 450). Photography, he argues, ‘was invented by the two great colonial powers of the 19th century, and from the beginning, much of photography’s “mission” was given over to amassing an almost infinite archive of photographic knowledge’ (p. 450).

Photography is defined by lingering tensions regarding not only the knowledge that it creates, but also the control over the accumulation of visual knowledge. Artists and photographers, including John Gossage and Trevor Paglen, have used their work to speak back to the dominant discourses around photography as a medium of knowledge, and to reclaim a sense of control over how we see ourselves in relation to the world. Their work speaks to the way in which art can be used to challenge systems of authority.

Paglen (2010), in particular, has explored the manner in which the increasing sophistication of technology and photography has contributed to surveillance capitalism: ‘9/11 provided the popular justification for new forms of state photography and for the increasing role of the image in social control, now surpassing anything George Orwell imagined’ (p. 67). Photography, Paglen asserts, ‘has become a relational medium – a meta-network of machines, politics, culture, and ways of collective seeing’ (p. 68). To this end, Paglen observes that photography is now more entangled than ever with systems of control: ‘Photography is becoming more and more inseparable from the workings of state power, corporate interests, and our everyday lives’.

At the same time, Paglen sees photography as a form of resistance and as an act of reclaiming control over celestial landscapes. He uses photography to draw our attention to the covert world of surveillance satellites and drones, what he calls ‘the other night sky’, that is, ‘the sky filled with debris from failed space missions and reconnaissance satellites that go all but unnoticed save for a small cadre of skilled amateurs’ (Hu, 2015: 126). Paglen’s photographs capture government and military satellites and drones that are meant to go unnoticed by the very population that these satellites are used to survey. His work engages with the politics of visuality which constitutes, as Foster (1988) describes, ‘how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the unseeing therein’ (p. ix).

In 2012, Paglen told The New Yorker that his photographs are ‘useless as evidence, for the most part, but at the same time they’re a way of organizing your attention’ (Weiner, 2012). Paglen’s work is a form of reactionary photography that offers a way of ‘counterseeing’ (Hu, 2015: 126), reconfiguring our perceptions of both the night sky and ourselves as subjects of surveillance. Paglen’s work renders visible what is meant to remain invisible, making us conscious of satellites as a form of perpetual surveillance as he reconfigures the observer/observed dichotomy. These photographs, Paglen (2009) explains, are a way of ‘developing a lexicon of the other night sky [as a step] toward reclaiming the violence flowing through it’. Yet, Paglen, nevertheless, reminds us that ‘As I photograph the other night sky, the other night sky photographs back . . .’ (Hu, 2015: 127), highlighting the two-sided nature of his photography while reiterating the antagonistic relationship between photographers and organisations.

While Paglen seeks to render the ‘other night sky’ visible through his art, other attempts of resisting surveillance have emerged in recent years, as everyday individuals speak back to the technologies that monitor them. In their study of surveillance, Ingraham and Rowland discuss the rise in ‘Tableau Vivants’ in Google Street View that allow users to ‘perform imperceptibility’. Performing imperceptibility, they write, calls attention to the elements and lived realities ‘that the operationalized logics of surveillance [. . .] are unable to process’ (p. 217).

As Google Street View rose in popularity, individuals saw a unique opportunity to ‘play with’ Google’s surveillance beyond just ‘finding oneself’, with many cases of people posing or staging pranks for Google Street View. One of the most notable examples is the 2014 case of Dan Thompson and a co-worker who, upon seeing a Google Street car, staged a fake murder for the camera, which was captured and subsequently uploaded to Google Street View. Ingraham and Rowland describe Thompson’s prank as a form of ‘microactivism’ (p. 217) insofar as it challenges forms of surveillance by removing surveillance from its focus on attaining objectivity and instead turning surveillance into an act of performance.

These and other methods of tricking or otherwise playing with the surveillance technology can potentially act as forms of resistance to the dominant narratives of insight and objectivity upon which companies like Google pride themselves. By engaging with these systems of surveillance in such a way, these performances remind users (and, perhaps, the companies themselves) of the inevitable lack of context and firsthand knowledge concerning ubiquitous surveillance and the images that are captured. Google Street View images are intended to be seen as neutral and comprehensive, yet these performances directly undermine this notion by challenging dominant forms of knowing and the continued conflation of photographic ‘evidence’ with objectivity. In this way, these performances function in much the same way as Paglen’s own forms of counter-seeing.

However, despite the potential of these alternative forms of counter-seeing, Ingraham and Rowland, nevertheless, highlight the limits that these performances have as enduring forms of resistance: ‘The question remains, though, of just how effective the GSV tableaux are as modes of resistance [. . .] Such tableaux can be more than ineffective yet still not inspire any large-scale social change’ (p. 222). For Ingraham and Rowland, these tableaux can draw our attention to the inevitable flaws in how surveillance is used to produce or contribute to systems of knowledge, yet they do not sufficiently undermine the logics of surveillance. Or, as Monahan (2015) puts it, such approaches ‘offer narrow forms of resistance that are unlikely to challenge current regimes of visuality’ (p. 173).

These varied forms of counter-seeing and the limits in their approaches reveal the continued tensions that exist in and around forms of resistance. Such attempts to draw our attention to how surveillance misconstrues reality are in and of themselves valuable in how they challenge dominant flows of knowledge. Paglen’s work does this by directing our attention to the sky and expunging satellites of their ‘unearthly’ nature, while Google Street View pranks serve to remind users and companies of the ways in which surveillance footage can be misused or misinterpreted.

Conclusion

Society maintains a complex relationship with satellites and the data they create. Despite the numerous flaws associated with satellite footage and what it can ‘reveal’ about the world, satellites continue to be viewed as a reliable, near-infallible apparatus that grants users a coveted, unhindered view of the world.

Companies have clearly succeeded in normalising satellite surveillance as the desire for anonymity and privacy has gradually been eclipsed by the greater desire to be seen and to be part of this new digital infrastructure. As a new way of seeing, Google Maps and Musk’s Starlink, among other developments, have fundamentally reorganised society by downplaying the broader implications of surveillance, making it less about intrusion and loss of rights, and more predicated on fostering connectivity, objectivity and belonging. Consequently, modes of knowledge are increasingly being separated from those whose data directly enable these new ways of seeing, meaning that our knowledge of the world and ourselves is irretrievably tethered to conglomerates that control how this knowledge is collected, viewed, interpreted, disseminated and stored.

By focusing on what I have called the ‘orbital unconscious’ of the Information age, this article has examined the evolving relationship between big-tech companies, the growing invisibility of surveillance technology and our psychological responses as knowing subjects. While technology continues to be heralded as a democratic tool that offers newer and better views of the world, the role that everyday citizens play in this dynamic continues to be relativised to suit corporate interests.

While photographers like Trevor Paglen emphasise the need to engage with the ‘other night sky’ and to render visible the invisible violence of government surveillance, the widespread acceptance or relativising of surveillance itself, coupled with the satellite’s ethereal, otherworldly nature as an unconscious technology, suggests that satellite surveillance will remain part – albeit an unconscious part – of the essential fabric of 21st-century society.