Surveillance devices as social control technologies in data capitalism: social networks and smart cities

Abstract

This paper presents surveillance devices from the perspective of Michel Foucault in its two categories: disciplinary and biopolitics. Such concepts are the bases that I use to reflect, from contemporary authors, about the current surveillance techniques inserted in what can be called a new category of device: the technopolitical. Investigations are made through the joint analysis of two contemporary power technologies: social networks - with a focus on Facebook - and smart cities - or ‘smartization’ of cities. Through connections between the concepts presented and the two studies carried out, the role of surveillance and its control mechanisms is reflected within three understandings of the present: data as the new fundamental fuels of the current phase of capitalism; neoliberalism as the predominant ideology in social, labor and urban space relations; and cyberculture, with the gradual dissolution of the boundaries between real and virtual. The paper points out that the technopolitical devices have substantial impacts on the production of subjectivities and citizenship - being conditions for a new urban and contemporary way of living - and proposes possible scenarios for confronting this situation.