Towards a digital zemiology

Abstract

Surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) represents an unprecedented shift in modes and asymmetries of power. Operating within and through the digital sphere, this new era of capitalism has drastic implications for our understandings of modern surveillance, corporate power, and social control. The digital, in its diffuse simultaneously online and offline form, represents the spatialisation of control within which the user and the data they produce are commodified and their identities consolidated and dissected into knowable, marketable demographics which, once reassembled, no longer represent the human being once behind them (Hammond, 2016; Brusseau, 2020). The digital represents a new frontier of harm production, as user-generated data is exploited to serve corporate interests and the normalisation of digital surveillance has given way to user apathy and technological reliance, undermining user autonomy and opportunities for resistance, while commodifying not only our identities but the entirety of the human experience. Within this context an opportunity emerges to develop a zemiology informed by the digital context that can confront the deepening harms of technologisation and consider the future of resistance. By interrogating the intersection between developments in digital technology and harm production, this article aims to acknowledge the proliferation of normalised corporate surveillance through a development in capitalism (Zuboff, 2015; 2019), and to outline opportunities for theoretical development presented by the digital context, drawing upon works within zemiology (Pemberton, 2016), surveillance studies (Murakami Wood, 2007; Murakami Wood and Ball, 2013), postphenomenology (Ihde, 1990; Verbeek, 2011; Wood, 2021; 2022), and disconnection studies (Kuntsman and Miyake, 2022), to present an invitation to both a unique theoretical orientation and an emerging field of study: digital zemiology.