“Millions of false eyes”: Responding to Surveillance

Surveillance culture doesn’t crop up overnight. It is the result of social and political processes, which humans creatively adapt to and undermine. Last week, I looked at the ways in which early modern audiences and playwrights reacted to the increasing sense that their government was using spies to monitor their actions in and around the theater. Their plays explored how the threat of spying destabilized important social relationships such as those of the family and the domestic marriage. This week, I want to discuss how we may be witnessing a similar shift in how we relate to cultures of surveillance. I also want to ask how sixteenth-century plays about spy anxiety might help us better understand our own anxieties about government surveillance. While our relationship to surveilling bodies has changed, we remain invested in asking how we can reclaim our sense of ease at the promise of private spaces once again being truly private spaces.

Today, increased emphasis on brute-force SIGINT surveillance seems to have replaced the image of the human spy in our imaginations. No longer is global espionage being imagined as a cloak-and-dagger game drawn from the pages of a James Bond novel. Rather, surveillance has become yet another aspect of our lives defined by autonomous algorithms and computing practices: the vision of mass government surveillance by agencies such as the NSA or, more “benignly,” the consumer-focused collection of mass data trends scraped from our collective internet metadata. We are no longer focused on thinking through the ways in which spying targets us as individuals. Instead, it reduces us to a set of demographically divided masses, which can be reduced to data points on a spreadsheet, making our activities easier to track and predict.

Here, we no longer envision surveillance as being targeted; instead we have come to understand that the project of spying is to monitor hundreds of millions of people at once and piece together “useful” intelligence from this project. This shifts the way that we tend to perceive the anxiety of being spied upon. Hamlet, Beatrice and their ilk on the early modern stage imaged the figure of the spy behind the stage arras, carefully listening in upon their conversations. We, however are burdened with the image of a passive machine unthinkingly recording and collecting our activity. Even in its most seemingly innocent form, conjuring up ideas of Amazon and Google “listening”[1] in on our activity to find ways to better monetize our footprint on their websites, we come to understand this as a feeling of invasive burden.

We increasingly value modes of securing our digital footprint, with VPN and other services that purport to increase our ability to operate on the internet without the threat of our data’s being collected or our files’ being stolen. An entire industry has cropped up around the promise that there exists a way to temporarily “beat” the pervasive cloud of surveilling programs that monitor our daily lives. Technological problems require technological solutions, and we are beginning to see a mainstreaming of both the worry of data collection and of products attempting to assuage this fear. While Shakespeare and his contemporaries could not have accessed the technological knowledge to envision the massive collection of metadata, they were witnessing both the scope and intensity of intelligence practices shifting around them. Just as we have witnessed the ways in which entities collect data on civilians slowly shifting, so too can we see shifts, and reactions to these shifts, in the plays of the early modern period. 

For early-modern playwrights, the answer to reclaiming privacy was often located in a similar project of personal dissimulation: attempting to mask our true actions and intentions from those who might be spying upon us by concealing them in a performance or another project (like a VPN). Hamlet’s performance of madness is a reaction to the knowledge that he is being observed by individuals in positions of power; it takes as its base assumption that the only truly private space is one’s own mind.[2] Likewise, the feigned “bed tricks” of Middleton’s Beatrice and Shakespeare’s Isabella suggest that trickery and dissimulation could be turned against the clandestine agents who attempt to enter into our private lives and spaces. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not defeatists in their answers to questions of mass surveillance. They understood that the nature of their relationship to public space had changed, and they imagined differing modes of interacting with their worlds in order to counteract the anxieties provoked by surveillance. 

In a similar way, we too have come to understand that our relationship to surveillance and tracking has changed and we are slowly attempting to ask the questions of how we can remain connected to our increasingly digital social and political landscape in a time where questions of privacy and data security are at the forefront of many of our most pressing conversations. However, this speaks only to our relationship with what we view as the “benign” model of mass surveillance, the kind that treats our data as a valuable, but unthreatening commodity. In our current political climate, which I intend to discuss next week, the fear that our data is being gathered and manipulated provokes a far greater anxiety than the possibility that our Facebook feeds are being trawled to better service targeted advertisers.

[1] It should be noted that even the language of treating this as an act of listening demonstrates the degree to which we still link contemporary data surveillance to older traditions of spying as an act of listening — itself an interesting term, given that “to spy” is most often used as a synonym for seeing.

[2] Hamlet still imagines a world in which trust can be possible, but that trust is fleeting and temporary.  He aligns himself with Horatio, believing his friend to be a trustworthy co-conspirator, but he also dooms Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for their too trusting allegiance to the monarch.

Header image CC by 2.0 from POP, cropped.

Evan Hixon is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.