In July 2018, the United States government formally pressed charges against Maria Valeryevna Butina for operating as an unregistered foreign agent operating in the service of the Russian state, a term that the news media quickly collapsed into the more provocative and instantly recognizable designation of “Russian spy.” Coupled with the revelation that the Russian government had covertly exerted pressure on US public opinion leading up to the 2016 election, stories such as this stoked new fears about surveillance and public monitoring, namely their capacity to be used in the service of shaping and manipulating public opinion.[1]
Focusing on things like Russian troll farms and the theft of polling data, the public discourse surrounding surveillance and data manipulation has increasingly emphasized their threat to the imagined integrity of governing bodies since 2016. We increasingly worry about our hyper-connected lives and the degree to which those lives produce digital footprints that can be examined and manipulated. We worry that we are being surveilled for political projects that are more complicated and insidious than the targeted advertising and data collection that we have taken a much more blasé response towards.
One of the most common versions of this fear lies in the figure of the agent provocateur, an undercover agent placed within a space, intent on fomenting some degree of chaos or illegality. In the months leading up to the 2016 election (and, as evidence suggests, is still occurring leading up to the 2020 election), the vision of this kind of espionage shifted greatly. Rather than imagining the agent provocateur as an individual or small group of individual infiltrating organizations (such as Maria Butina’s involvement with the National Rifle Association), we came to imagine the figure of the agent provocateur as a collection of millions of online personas, carefully constructed to look like real human beings entering into online spaces to sow discord and dissent.[2] This further enflames dissension, as individuals are then conditioned to worry that anyone they are interacting with might be bots or foreign assets. This creates an uneasy climate wherein accusations of dissent or disagreement stemming from “Russian propagandists” gain traction and currency.
The digital space becomes one in which both the presence of foreign intelligence assets and the fear of those assets create a feedback loop, one that serves the same function that we imagine was performed by Cold War spies attempting to destabilize public opinion. Furthermore, we imagine this as a project of disinformation,[3] exploiting the public’s inability to distinguish fact from fiction, in order to craft politically advantageous popular narratives for the benefit of foreign states. Thus, this mode of surveillance, I argue, invokes two different anxieties surrounding our relationship to other members of the body politic. First, we don’t know which voices can be trusted. And second, we become worried that other people will be less discerning in their trust than is necessary.
I’ve spoken on Shakespeare’s relationship with powerful people fomenting popular discontent before, and the degree to which it unnerved early modern playwrights. While Shakespeare rarely directly addresses the concerns of foreign conspiracies against England,[4] his works do frequently comment upon the ways in which social manipulation and disinformation threaten the body politic. The populace, as it is imagined by Shakespeare, Marlowe and their contemporaries, is fickle and dangerous if properly manipulated. Julius Caesar, 2 Henry IV, and Coriolanus all communicate a pervasive fear that the crowd can be mobilized to violence or, at the very least, to act against its own interest if sufficiently skilled rhetoricians are able to shape and manipulate public sentiment. Coriolanus must combat disinformation and dissemination of rumor and scandal. Meanwhile, 2 Henry IV’s Jack Cade benefits from an infrastructure of convenient lies to bolster his own political ambition (which the people are more than happy to believe when it suits them).
In these plays, there is a fear concerning the possibility that granting authority to the populace will encourage bad actors to create and stoke public anxieties in service of nefarious ends. Our present historical moment seems to be invoking similar fears as it pertains to electoral politics. There is a worry that we, like Shakespeare, take a dim view to the capacity of public opinion to resist disinformation (what we now imagine as Cold War-style black-ops campaigns) and, like Shakespeare, we have an impulse to continue to project a dim view of this power onto the populace, as we look to explain away the motions of the body politic.
While these plays may not provide us answers in how to combat the anxieties that contemporary surveillance and espionage practices provoke in our daily lives, we can use them as a site to understand how these fears are shaped and exploited. We witness in the drama of the period a society reacting to increased social surveillance and the pervasive fear that states could manipulate political instability in order to generate unrest and chaos. It is in moments such as this that we explore how individuals relate to the sense of their own private spaces, what information they make visible to the world, and how they relate to other members of the body politic. While the anxieties will certainly persist, to even begin to address them we must consider the long history of these worries and contemplate how others have responded the encroachment of surveillance.
[1] Using espionage and covert action to manipulate public opinion and rig elections is hardly a new concept, as evidenced by the United States’ long and brutal history of meddling in elections during the Cold War.
[2] This was not the only project by which disinformation campaigns or projects of public manipulation operated within the last few years, as legitimate sources of “fake news,” for instance also served this role.
[3] As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, disinformation is itself a loan word from Russian, dezinformatsiya, referring to a specific kind of KGB black-ops.
[4] These conspiracies were a very real threat. The primary job of the developing English intelligence apparatus was ostensibly to protect England from Catholic plots to replace Queen Elizabeth I.
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.