Meta-Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure

Abstract

This article revisits the concept of the "digital enclosure" in the context of recent developments in augmented and virtual reality. It develops the notion of the "recession of the social" to consider how the platforming of a growing range of activities envisioned by the metaverse enables the governance of virtual environments in ways that foster the suppression and misrecognition of irreducible forms of societal interdependence. In so doing, it develops some additional concepts including that of "granular biopower," which relies on the personalized and targeted modulation of shared space. It also considers the implications of an emerging "AI divide" between those who wield automated decision systems and those who are subject to tliem.

Headnote

Abstract

This article revisits the concept of the "digital enclosure" in the context of recent developments in augmented and virtual reality. It develops the notion of the "recession of the social" to consider how the platforming of a growing range of activities envisioned by the metaverse enables the governance of virtual environments in ways that foster the suppression and misrecognition of irreducible forms of societal interdependence. In so doing, it develops some additional concepts including that of "granular biopower," which relies on the personalized and targeted modulation of shared space. It also considers the implications of an emerging "AI divide" between those who wield automated decision systems and those who are subject to tliem.

Introduction

The Delta terminal in Detroit's Metropolitan Airport features an automated flight information board that recognizes travelers and displays personalized information to them. The board relies on a combination of smart cameras and innovative directional pixels to direct personalized information to multiple people at a time. Travelers have the option to register their face and travel details for the system when they check in. As they stand in front of the board, a smart camera identifies their faces and directionally displays their flight information. According to the company that designed the system, which it has dubbed "parallel reality," the board can display unique information to one hundred different people simultaneously (Erb 2022). Focused on a relatively trivial problem-the challenge posed by trying to find one's flight details on a display that is constantly updating-the "parallel reality" technology provides an example of how interactive systems can customize our experience of shared space.

Delta's customized display transposes the familiar operations of the online surveillance economy into physical space-enacting one of the goals of augmented reality, although without relying on user devices (other than their faces). The promise of "parallel reality" is, in other words, to disaggregate and customize the experience of shared space in real time. For the purposes of this contribution to the journal's anniversary issue, I invoke the fortuitously named "parallel reality" moniker to reflect on the ongoing relevance of the concept of digital enclosure (Andrejevic 2003). This is a concept I was exploring when Surveillance & Society made its debut two decades ago. The goal of this article, then, is to update and rethink the notion of enclosure and its relation to surveillance against the background of impending forms of augmented and virtual reality.

Perhaps the most salient recent development is the ongoing attempt to make mediation coextensive with the process of digital enclosure. As Mark Hansen (2012: 70) puts it, "No longer a delimited temporal object that we engage with focally through an interface such as a screen, media become an environment that we experience simply by being and acting in space and time-which is to say, without in most cases explicitly being aware of it, without taking it as the intentional object or target of our time consciousness." The fantasy of total mediation is, in other words, the disappearance of the medium via its ubiquity. The prospect of total immersion is one in which we do not do things "on" the platform but "in" the enclosure. Rethinking the concept of enclosure in relation to the explicitly spatial deployments of augmented and virtual reality leads to the consideration of inter-related logics this article describes in terms of the "recession of the social." This term refers to the offloading of decisions and activities irreducibly caught up in social relations of interdependence onto automated systems, where these relations can be suppressed or misrecognized. After exploring the relationship between the "recession of the social" and the process of enclosure, the article draws on the work of Michel Foucault (2003, 2007) to consider the individualization of environmental forms of governance. In so doing, it considers the implications of an emerging "AI divide" between those who wield automated decision systems and those who are subjected to them.

Revisiting the Digital Enclosure

The language of platforms is, in essence, that of industry-and it consequently conserves an economic and ideological framing of the technology. Platforms support us, we do things "on" them-we might even consider the ways in which they enable us to perform and exhibit ourselves (as in the recent rhetoric of deplatforming). In other words, what this framing does not quite get at is the logic of spatial capture that is integral to the online surveillance economy-and that lies at the heart of the claustrophobic commercial model of Meta's version of virtual reality. Given the decidedly three-dimensional character of the metaverse, it might be useful to supplement the language of the platform with that of the enclosure. In its presentation and publicity, the metaverse-whether Meta's version, or other virtual reality systems-is framed in threedimensional spatial terms as a "space" to be entered into-to inhabit.

What remains striking about the drive to enclose is not so much its novelty as its persistence in the face of a history of failure. As Ethan Zuckerman (2021) observed in an article for The Atlantic, "I made a Metaverse 27 years ago.... It was terrible then and it's terrible now." One of the things we can infer from this history of technological failure is which endeavors are likely to recur insistently precisely because they align so strongly with the imperative of the commercial internet to subject the entirety of the social world to digital capture. Google Glass will keep returning in one form or another-alongside repeated incarnations of virtual reality. The development of wearable and ubiquitous computing go hand-in-hand. Both seek to capture the space of social action and interaction.

The term "enclosure" is indebted to an analysis of the historical and ongoing process of "primitive accumulation" (Marx 2004; see also Luxemburg 2015) whereby productive resources are subjected to private capture, ownership, and control. Typically, this capture takes place outside the realm of capitalist exchange through the force or threat of violence. There is an irreducibly spatial component to the term, which refers, originally, to the privatization of formerly shared or common lands. The term can misleadingly suggest that this form of accumulation is simply a precursor to capitalism. But as De Angelis (2001), drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg (2015), argues, privatization is an ongoing and continuous process. Luxemburg (2015) focused on processes of colonial resource capture, but, in the context of the capture of digital data, we might update this by considering the forms of "endo-colonization" (Virilio and Lotringer 1998) that Couldry and Mejias (2019) describe in their work on data colonialism. The site of these contemporary forms of data enclosure and capture is, as writers working in the tradition of autonomous Marxism have noted, the social realm in its entirety (Terranova 2000).

The metaverse provides one answer to the question of how to "enclose" the space of the social. Thus, the process of digital enclosure has both a physical and a virtual dimension. As in the classical formulation of land enclosure, the process refers, at least initially, to logics of separation (of people from one another and of people from their data) via intermediation. This is why the context of "remote" work, communication, and sociality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic was so readily embraced by the promoters of the metaverse. In contemporary terms, digital enclosure refers to the technologies and processes whereby activities, information, and communications are enfolded into interactive digital environments that double as monitoring systems.

Recent years have seen increasingly aggressive forms of "enclosure creep" in the name of convenience, efficiency, and access. Search engines, for example, enfold information-seeking behavior that might previously have taken place beyond the reach of data capture (using library card catalogues and indexes, for example) into interactive contexts where they generate digital traces. The same can be said of professional forms of communication, transportation, co-authoring, reading (on e-readers), and more. Social media platforms do something similar for a range of communicative activities, including those previously impossible without an online platform. Smart spaces achieve something similar thanks to their permeation by sensors (Andrejevic and Burdon 2015). Augmented reality and virtual reality envision the overlapping of physical and electromagnetic forms of enclosure: physical spaces are redoubled in the form of virtual enclosures that have their own borders and check-points.

The logic of separation associated with digital enclosure relies on the fact that "frictionless" forms of interaction at a distance are achieved through interposition of a commercially mediated infrastructure. The process of separation here is not quite as straightforward as, for example, in the case of land enclosure because of the replicable character of digital data. When we are separated from our social interactions by the fact that these come to rely on systems we do not own, we nevertheless simultaneously retain a sense that these (tweets, posts, emails, etc.) are "our own" even as they are subject to the forms of capture, modulation, and processing that remain opaque. Once separated from us, of course, the content of our interactions, along with the metadata captured by the platform, form the basis of the online surveillance economy. This part of the story has become grindingly familiar, and is often approached through the lens of privacy (Cohen 2013), or, in some political economic accounts, in terms of exploitation and manipulation (Fuchs 2014).

The Recession of the Social

In the current context, however, it would be useful to supplement these approaches with one that focuses on what might be described as "the recession of the social." This formulation is inspired by Thomas Haskell's (1977) account of the rise of professional social science in the nineteenth century. He attributes the emergence of the field as, in part, a response to "the recession of causation," which he attributed to the growing societal interdependence resulting from industrial technologies of transport and communication (Haskell 1977: 39). According to Haskell (1977: 40), the acceleration of the movement of both goods and information meant that "society's components... began to influence one another more frequently, more intensely, and in more varied ways." Causal influences became opaque and difficult to decipher-creating space for the rise of a specialist profession devoted to their clarification. At the same time-although this is not Haskell's (1977) focus-the recession of causation contributed to the abstraction of commodities from the complex web of relations that contributed to their production, endowing them with a mysterious autonomy (an update to Marx's [2004] description of commodity fetishism).

In the current context, we might trace an analogous recession: something along the lines of the recession of the social, at the very moment, of course, when we are bombarded with the apparently relentless sociality underwritten by commercial interactive media.

What might it mean to refer to a "recession" of the social in such contexts? The answer to this question helps address the apparent paradox of, on one hand, the always-on connectivity enabled by apps running on portable networked devices and, on the other hand, a sense of the reconfigured or distanced character of this sociality (as expressed, for example, by Sherry Turkle 2017). In many respects, we are more relentlessly communicative than ever before, but recession refers to the opacity that underlies the systems upon which this sociality relies. Spatial separation is a pre-requisite for many forms of digitally mediated communication: their convenience manifests precisely insofar as they do not rely on the proximity of synchronicity of face-to-face communication. The oddly isolating character of VR headsets emphasizes this point. This tendency is echoed by the backgrounding of "banal" or quotidian forms of sociality associated with the frictionless convenience of digital enclosures: the online mall, the cashierless store, the banking app, the government service app, and so on.

These reconfigurations of sociality, however, are not the primary focus of the recession of the social. Rather, the concept highlights the backgrounding of the social relations, decisions, and labor that enable the convenience and "frictionlessness" of digital enclosures. The "disappearance" of mediation is a sensory illusion of VR that obfuscates the construction of social relations taking place "behind the scenes." In the "enclosure economy," the intercession of digital mediation enables centralized forms of modulation to operate in the background. The prospect raised by the development of virtual and augmented reality is that an expanding spectrum of sensory reality will become subject to background modulation. The dystopian possibilities are as endless as the commercial ones. As Wired magazine tech guru Kevin Kelly (2019) put it in his paean to augmented reality: "On this platform, all things and places will be machine-readable, subject to the power of algorithms. Whoever dominates this grand third platform will become among the wealthiest and most powerful people and companies in history." The claustrophobia of a comprehensive and seamless digital enclosure is paralleled by a suspicion of Matrix-style paranoia: How are the masters of the enclosure reconfiguring the environment? More pointedly, how would we know?

The point of such observations is not simply that the mediatization of the metaverse relies on social actions and decisions that take place behind the scenes, but that the surveillance economy, fixated on personalization, suppresses the recognition of underlying forms of interdependence. The version of incoherent autonomy it promulgates is an artifact of the surveillance-based advertising model itself, which simultaneously celebrates the figure of the sovereign consumer while selling the promise of more effective manipulation.

The recession of the social, then, refers not simply to the commercial mediation of social interaction in the name of convenience, and not solely to the capture (and alienation) of the pattern of our communicative social fabric, but also to the commercially driven masking and misrecognition of irreducible forms of interdependence. As McQuillan (2022: 74) puts it, "By ignoring our interdependencies and sharpening our differences, AI becomes the automation of former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher's mantra that 'there is no such thing as society.'"

In Haskell's (1977) formulation, the "recession of causation" created an opening for the rise of systematic approaches for analyzing increasingly complex and distanced forms of interdependence. Something similar takes place in response to the recession of the social: there is a critical focus upon, for example, unearthing the social relations that shape the production of algorithms: commercial imperatives, the diversity of design teams, the social biases that characterize training data, and so on. However-and this point seems to be crucial-the context for addressing these issues is, in turn, impacted by the very information environment under examination, which features a prominent skepticism toward evidence and entrenched expertise (Burrows 2018). The formation of expertise and its institutional reproduction both rely on the networks of social interdependence that are backgrounded by commercial media's relentless reinforcement of the sovereign consumer-the product of the privileging of hyper-specification in the online surveillance economy. The almost inevitable paranoia that results from the foregrounding of the incoherent figure of absolute autonomy (threatened by any hint of societal interdependence) further underwrites the mobilization of surveillance as a substitute for social trust.

For the purposes of this article, the recession of (the recognition of) social interdependence is not the familiar, contested issue of the relationship between social media and loneliness or alienation. The salient point about separation has to do with the process whereby distinctly social processes, such as decision making and information curation, are offloaded onto automated systems where their social dimension becomes opaque, masked by the machine. This process is by no means unique to the metaverse, which simply extends and expands upon its logic. The implications of the wholesale enclosure are therefore familiar, but extended and amplified. They include, but are not limited to: increasingly granular forms of environmental modulation; the further disaggregation of shared experience; and an exacerbation of what might be described as the AI divide.

Towards an AI Divide

The capture of social interactions by malleable digital enclosures enables increasingly granular forms of biopolitical governance. Foucault's (2003: 43) lectures on biopolitics frame a distinction between forms of governance that operate directly on the body and those that operate at the level of the population. The former, exercised upon the individual, he describes as an "anatamo-politics" (Foucault 2003: 43). This form of governance manifests in the regulation of bodily movements and dispositions (see, for example, Foucault 2007: 248-249). At the populational level, by contrast, the focus is on overall statistical regularities: fertility, morbidity, and mortality rates, establishing standards and baselines for identifying irregularities and maximizing outcomes (Foucault 2003: 43). Intervention in the biopolitical register thus takes place at the environmental and regulatory level. As Foucault (2003: 249) puts it, "Both technologies are obviously technologies of the body, but one is a technology in which the body is individualized as an organism endowed with capacities, while the other is a technology in which bodies are replaced by general biological processes."

Augmented and virtual reality reconfigure this relationship by customising and individualising environmental-level intervention, enabling it to take place at the individual level. This shift relies on the ability to personalize physical and virtual space in real time, as in the case, for example, of the customized flight information board at the Delta terminal in Detroit. People inhabiting the same physical or virtual spaces can find themselves subjected to different, customized forms of environmental modulation- messaging, advertising, even available affordances. It is not hard to imagine a metaverse in which those with different levels of paid access might have more powerful tools or greater capacity to customize and control the space they share with other participants. To the extent that these forms of governance operate via the customization of the lived environment, they can be calibrated at the individual level via the malleability of virtual and augmented spaces.

This control is exacerbated by what might be described as the "AI divide" between those who control and manage automated systems and those who are subjected to their machinations. Consider the example of YieldStar, an automated system that draws on detailed data about local and regional rental markets to maximize recommended rent increases for landlords (Vogell 2022). The algorithm's developers reportedly described the tool as a means for sidestepping the sense of "empathy" that might prevent profit maximization. According to representatives of the company that produces the software, managers are free to reject its recommendations but end up accepting them ninety percent of the time (Vogell 2022).

The broader point here is that the huge amounts of data generated by the generalized enclosure of social life would render all decisions, by necessity, automated ones. The subtraction of empathy (via the agency of the algorithm) provides another symptom of the suppression of irreducible forms of interdependence. Providing accountability and transparency for such decisions would require sophisticated systems operating on the behalf of citizens and consumers-but this would mean the equitable distribution of tremendous resources in terms of data access and processing power. It might be useful, for example, for renters to have sophisticated systems enabling them to determine how to "beat" the landlords' algorithms through concerted action, but the weight of the financial resources is on the side of the property owners (and the airlines, the retail outlets, and so on).

Granular decision making at the level of individual users goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing disaggregation of both shared space and cultural artifacts. Vestiges of mass production remain in the cultural realm in the forms of mass audience texts: TV shows, music, novels, and so on. However, the correlate of economic customization is that of cultural disaggregation. It is no coincidence that the latest initiatives in virtual reality are paralleled by breakthroughs in generative AI for text, images, and music. Only the automation of cultural production can keep pace with the customization of culture (and messaging) at the individual level. Companies like Endel, for example, offer to deliver customized "soundscapes" based on ambient conditions (weather, for example) and user feedback (heartrate and other biometric mood indicators) (Kamps 2022). Mark Zuckerberg persistently describes the metaverse as a space for social sharing, but it is also one that enables the individualization of formerly shared experience. Everyone, for example might have their individual soundscape playing in the background. Nor is there any guarantee that the denizens of the metaverse are necessarily seeing the same surrounding space. Imagine, for example, customized Zoom backgrounds but in 3D. If there is shared work taking place, there would have to be some shared objects, but these could also be customized in particular ways (perhaps with different tags for individual users). The broader point is that the vision of sociality on offer, when filtered through the infrastructure of the enclosure, is increasingly disaggregated-potentially reinforcing political and economic fragmentation, thereby undermining resources for the formation of common interests and goods.

As of this writing, Zuckerberg's vision for the metaverse seems to be faltering. Nonetheless, the underlying goal of enclosing a growing realm of social and professional life remains at the forefront of the online surveillance economy. We can anticipate that the litany of failures will not thwart this imperative, given the commercial system we have created for supporting much of our online activity. Perhaps the tech industry will run into a limit to the enclosure process, but until it does, we are likely to see the ongoing process of social recession parallel that of platform mediation. The danger is that as it recedes it carries with it the foundations for collective action: a recognition of the underlying forms of interdependence crucial to the functioning of any society, and indispensable for civic life.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the ongoing work of the editors and academic community that support Surveillance & Society, a journal that has played a crucial role in his career as both source and outlet. He receives support from the Australian Research Council (CE200100005 and DP200100189).

Sidebar

Andrejevic, Mark. 2022. Meta-Surveillance In the Digital Enclosure. Surveillance & Society 20 (4): 390-396.

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