Volume 23, Number 4, 2025 Global Futures of Digital Confinement Guest-edited by Ulla D. Berg, Carolina Sánchez Boe and Darren Byler

EN:

This article considers recent developments in population level watchlists that emerge from racialized economies. By demonstrating how they develop over time and in relation to population sorting technologies, it argues that these tools are increasingly used to include and control racialized groups in the same digitally enclosed space as protected citizens. This structured process stems from automation-assisted surveillance systems built by corporate state contractors such as BI Incorporated, HikVision, and Twentsche Kabel Holding Security Solutions. Building on the scholarship on the social life of surveillance and social sorting, it argues that automation assisted sorting of populations—asylum seekers in the US, Uyghurs in China, and Palestinians in Israeli controlled spaces—into categories of broadly defined color-coded threats produces population levels of control that deeply inhibit the autonomy of categorized individuals. Since threat production technology produces forms of automated racialization, by turning faces and behaviors into objects of data collection and analysis that are correlated to threat perception, it results in forms of subordinated inclusion that appear permanently foreclosed.

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This article examines the “prison platform” as a novel technology of digital confinement. The focus is how United States multinational Honeywell established a prison platform in Australia and New Zealand, neighboring settler colonies where the Indigenous peoples never ceded sovereignty, and prison systems continue to be stamped by deeply entrenched patterns of Indigenous hyperincarceration. While studies of digital colonialism have tended to focus on how Global North actors exploit data relations in the Global South, we examine Honeywell building its prison platform across the “North-in-South” divide in Australia and New Zealand, states that are located geographically in the South but have large settler majorities and close ties to the North. We argue that Honeywell exploits the power relations of Indigenous confinement in the settler colony to advance a novel form of tech-facilitated prison privatization. The analysis reveals three key dynamics of prison platforming: the private sector capture of prison infrastructure formally governed by settler state agencies (infrastructural capture), the commercial logic of continual platform expansion through the integration of new data-extracting technologies (extractive integration), and the leveraging of control over infrastructure to entrench power over competitors in commercial markets for prison technology (market gatekeeping). The paper extends research into platform power by shifting focus from online commerce and communications to the built environment of the prison, and spotlights a convergence between cutting-edge digital technology and much older practices of settler colonial social control.

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This article explores how the entangled circulation of data, capital, and discourse generates regimes of im/mobility for migrant populations. It does so by examining how the UK’s Asylum Support Enablement (ASPEN) card—a technology used to disburse Home Office funds to asylum seekers—captures and circulates its users’ transactions in ways that constrain some forms of movement while coercing others. In doing so, this article traces how long-standing discourses of foreign bodies as a threat to the social order intersect with new technologies that enable the constant monitoring of where and when such bodies move. Following a “regimes of im/mobility” approach, this article draws attention to the specific relationships of power that enable some people to move within and across borders while containing or constraining others. It thus nuances the presumed universalism of “surveillance capitalism” by examining the contradictory logics that emerge when data extractive technologies are brought into the border-industrial complex. Furthermore, it seeks to trouble the taxonomic distinction between “monitoring” and “surveillance” by considering how technologies that are ostensibly designed to protect their users can have equally violent effects as those explicitly designed to confine and penalise.

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The expanding criminalization of political participation and dissent in the United States, especially in connection to non-citizens, warrants the use of creative experiments through which we can reorient how we apprehend, depict, and/or document marginalized groups. Drawing on my involvement in a campaign advanced by a Massachusetts immigrant rights collective and ethnographic research on the biometric industry, I interrogate how to creatively engage dilemmas of visibility and recognition experienced by illegalized groups engaged in dissenting practices. I examine the potential of AI-generated anonymization as a refusal of recognition politics. How might the use of computational anonymization disrupt how we apprehend images of the illegalized? In what ways can such anonymization techniques be complementary to anti-carceral imaginaries? And what kinds of compromises, if any, can we consent to when pursuing such “creative-critical” experiments in connection to surveilled and criminalized groups (Alvarez, Dattatreyan, and Shankar 2021)? This creative experiment, grounded on liberatory abolitionist commitments, argues for the productive potential of computational anonymization as a temporary and imperfect experiment in fugitivity and refusal. Conceived as a channel for sensory accompaniment, it aspires to motivate a shift in journalistic, ethnographic, and other documentation practices engaging the struggles of illegalized and otherwise criminalized groups.

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Drawing on collaborative research with asylum seekers under digital surveillance in Austin, Texas, this photo essay discusses the experiences of—and resistance to—electronic monitoring through GPS monitors strapped on ankles or wrists and through the facial recognition app SmartLINK, which are deployed on migrants and asylum seekers by GEO Group, one of the world’s largest prison corporations for the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The toolkits developed throughout the Digital Detention collaborative project constitute forms of collective counter-surveillance that make the consequences of this public/private partnership on migrants’ lives part of a larger conversation that contributes to making the economic logics of this kind of surveillance visible in the larger community that asylum seekers are both part of and excluded from.

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Recent years have seen a hardening of repressive and surveillance measures against protest and contentious activities in Western societies. Although these measures are not socially neutral and primarily target marginalized populations, they are now increasingly targeting environmental activists and the latest wave of resistance practices that denounce the capitalist contradictions at the heart of liberal democracies. In this piece, we bring together insights and discussions from a roundtable on the criminalization of environmental activism (October 19, 2023, Brussels) as well as empirical insights from the French, UK, and Belgian context where a “role-reversal” between environmental activism and criminality can be observed. Our roundtable text discusses and documents the types of legal, political, and discursive practices that are being deployed by Western states to delegitimize and criminalize environmental contestation—e.g., through state surveillance practices, new legal instruments, court procedures, and the rise of the “eco-terrorist” discourse—while also reflecting on the simultaneity of environmental activism criminalization with a broader authoritarian tendency and increasing legitimation of far-right practices and ideologies.

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The “surveillant assemblage” and its attendant notion of the “data double” have held a central place within surveillance theory for nearly a quarter of a century. Haggerty and Ericson proposed the concept as a way to push back against prevailing, and limited, surveillance theory rooted in Foucauldian panopticism and Orwellian notions of “big brother.” Yet, in an informational and technological landscape that has changed significantly since 2000, and continues to change rapidly, it seems vital to ask whether a concept like the surveillant assemblage continues to have meaningful application to surveillance today. In this Dialogue, we bring together surveillance scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to look at how the “surveillant assemblage” has contributed to surveillance scholarship and informed our thinking about surveillance in society. The Dialogue includes six interventions from scholars who apply, extend, refashion, and critique the surveillant assemblage, as well as a closing response from Kevin Haggerty—the first time he has chosen to directly revisit the idea of the surveillant assemblage. In his response, Haggerty outlines a proposal for shifting our attention to understanding surveillance as a process of “surveillantization.”

EN:

This essay engages with Haggerty and Ericson's concept of the "data double" to examine how contemporary surveillance practices have produced increasingly powerful yet fundamentally flawed representations of individuals. While the surveillant assemblage remains central to modern life, today's data doubles are characterized by a paradox: they wield immense decision-making power in determining access to housing, employment, credit, and healthcare, yet are too often built on inaccurate, incomplete, and inaccessible information. Three U.S. case studies frame the contemporary data double as financial risk through big data credit scoring, as housing and employment applicant, and as vulnerable subject in health and welfare systems. These cases demonstrate how prioritization of data volume over precision has created "artificially unintelligent data doubles"—a systematically distorted abstraction that serves institutional profit and control rather than accurate representation. Opacity in these systems makes challenging one’s data double practically impossible, creating profound stratification as individuals face two untenable options: accept inaccurate representations that deny them opportunities, or actively construct manipulated data doubles designed to pass algorithmic screenings.

EN:

It has been twenty-five years since Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) seminal article on the “surveillant assemblage” was published and since then reshaped surveillance studies, offering a conceptual framework that moved beyond Orwellian and Foucauldian metaphors towards the rhizomatic, hybrid qualities of emerging surveillance systems. Their theory remains profoundly influential. Yet the surveillance landscape has since undergone an ontological disruption, here exemplified by the proliferation of live facial recognition (LFR) in policing. These systems do not merely reassemble individuals into “data doubles” but operate through algorithmic approximation, assessing probabilistic resemblance rather than identity. The aim of our dialogue paper is to revisit the analytical core of the surveillant assemblage in light of this shift. Earlier regimes of surveillance were anchored in representation, constructing digital proxies that rendered individuals visible across institutional domains. By contrast, contemporary AI-driven infrastructures increasingly act through opaque probabilistic models that collapse recognition, suspicion, and intervention into automated inference. This shift is not only technical, but ontological, epistemological and political, reshaping how knowledge, risk, and personhood are enacted. By exposing the shift from representation to approximation, and from data doubles to biometric resemblance, we advance critical debates on the surveillant assemblage. If surveillance now approximates rather than recognises, predicts rather than represents, then what is at stake is nothing less than democratic accountability itself. Must we not, then, fundamentally rethink the very foundations of surveillance in the age of algorithmic governance?

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This intervention rethinks Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) concept of the surveillant assemblage by situating it within the settler colonial conditions of Palestine. Through this engagement, it suggests a critical reassessment and theoretical refinement of the surveillant assemblage concept. While Haggerty and Ericson’s formulation marked a significant shift in surveillance studies—emphasizing multiplicity, decentralization, and virtuality—it remains rooted in political formations within the Global North, overemphasizes technological capacities, and insufficiently attendant to complexities of politics and power relations. Through recounting a critical analytical narrative on the workings of the Israeli surveillant assemblage in Palestine, the intervention re-evaluates three key aspects of the concept. First, by foregrounding coloniality as a central analytic, it thinks anew the virtuality of bodies within broader virtual-actual processes of racialization of bodies as well as territories. Second, it unsettles technological fixity and moves beyond statist and corporate control by reinstituting civilianized actors and everyday colonial encounters. Third, it problematizes the underlying prediction of a smooth convergence and expansion of surveillance technologies through centering frictions, tensions, and competitions. Accordingly, the intervention offers a preliminary revisiting of the surveillant assemblage in a way that augments its analytical capacity while rendering it politically generative.

EN:

While much of the world focuses on artificial intelligence, quantum technologies are emerging into the technological landscape with promises to revolutionize computing, communications, and measurement, rewriting the ways that we deal with and conceptualize surveillance, privacy, and security. To avoid a future in which powerful quantum technologies shape social practices and surveillance in problematic ways, we need to begin engaging with quantum now - both as a science and its technological manifestations - to appropriately respond. While quantum discourses can be highly technical and daunting, the surveillant assemblage bridges the gap between the familiar and the future of a quantum enabled surveillance because in many ways, the surveillant assemblage is already rooted in foundations of quantum science. From this premise, we delve deeper into the surveillant assemblage’s quantum connections to argue that while quantum technologies will disrupt surveillance practices as we know it, the surveillant assemblage helps prepare for our increasingly quantum enabled surveillance futures because it attunes us to the quantum world through its provisions of 1) language and principles; 2) metaphor, and 3) technological pasts and futures.

EN:

The surveillant assemblage enjoyed a good run in surveillance studies, where it served as a leading metaphor to guide 25 years of research. The time has come to find new metaphors to shape surveillance theorizing for the 21st century. This commentary considers surveillance culture as an alternative to the surveillant assemblage.

EN:

It has been over a quarter of a century since I wrote The Surveillant Assemblage with my colleague Richard Ericson. In it, we advance a theoretical model for understanding key aspects of surveillance, aiming to move beyond portraying it as a form of totalitarian “Big Brother” or Foucauldian panopticism. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and others, we detailed how surveillance operates by integrating heterogeneous practices and technologies, contributing to the production, combination, and movement of data flows. Among other dynamics, we accentuated fluidity and processes of emergence, integration, and the proliferation of data doubles. Scholars in fields as different as media studies, criminology, anthropology, critical race studies, data science, gender studies, architecture, law, and sociology have applied the model or debated its relevance to a wide range of empirical settings. But no model is fully comprehensive, and developments in surveillance now move rapidly. As such, it has been invigorating to revisit this article and rethink how to adequately theorize surveillance. My comments here set out to do three things. First, I use this opportunity to briefly introduce the notion of “surveillantization,” which I see as a valuable way to conceive of some of the “big picture” developments and trajectories in surveillance. Second, I return to the surveillant assemblage to offer a few thoughts on the commentators’ essays in this forum. The concluding section is a coda that provides background on writing the original surveillant assemblage article. It offers a glimpse into one small part of the early history of surveillance studies.