Facing Surveillance: Personified Surveillance, Algorithmic Injustice, and the Myth of Big Brother in Post-Snowden Popular Culture

Abstract

This article examines an archive of recent films, fiction, and interactive media that use personified representations of surveillance to depict and critique real-world surveillance practices. It shows how these works, like George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), use personification to depict secretive, complex surveillance networks and convey the supposed meaning of those networks to surveilled subjects: someone is watching you. While such representations of surveillance fail to account for the automated, algorithmic nature of modern surveillance practices and technologies, they dominate the perception of surveillance in the popular imaginary. Such representations contribute to a myth of digital surveillance as active and individualized, a Big Brother vision of surveillance that ignores or erases how automated surveillance and algorithmic evaluation of human beings can reinforce and exacerbate structural inequalities.