Permanent Record

I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realised that the experience of research is exactly opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online. When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn’t immediately present itself. You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons. The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a non-commercial and non-‘productive’ space so often under threat of closure, allows for browsing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information – provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it’s even about – are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgement. Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it’s me who’s being researched.

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatising impact – whose very existence – the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies – and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheet magnitude and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarised police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: ‘Stop resisting.’

I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbours and fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes, allowing themselves to be tracked while browsing in their pantries as efficiently as if they were browsing the Web. It would still be another half decade before the domotics revolution, before ‘virtual assistants’ like Amazon Echo and Google Home were welcomed into the bedroom and placed proudly on nightstands to record and transmit all activity within range, to log all habits and preferences (not to mention fetishes and kinks), which would then be developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash. The data we generate just by living – or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living – would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.