TechnoSecuritySociety: Catastrophic Futures, Pre-emptive Security & Mass Surveillance

Abstract

In the age of technoscience, science and technology have indiscriminately fused. The dominant narrative is no longer the one of knowledge and progress but rather of application and innovation. This transformation needs to be taken into account when studying security and surveillance architectures in contemporary (post-)democracies. In this chapter, we propose to understand TechnoSecurity as Culture and invite scholars of techno-science to bring their knowledge and skills to the study of security and surveillance architectures. TechnoSecurity is highly technology-oriented and driven by the Post-Newtonian rationality that is genuine to contemporary technoscience culture. The crucial epistemological and ontological difference between modern forms of security and contemporary TechnosScurity is, that contemporary security practices seek to premediate any possible future event, even highly unlikely ones, in the fear that they might turn catastrophic. We argue that to understand TechnoSecurity, it is not sufficient to study specific security technologies in isolation, but we need to situate contemporary security discourses and practices in the context of technosciences at large.