This book offers a lively, accessible, and informative introduction to surveillance through the lens of globalization, and globalization through the lens of surveillance. The story that unfolds is wide-ranging, taking a thoroughly multidimensional and transdisciplinary approach that brings clarity to a complex subject. Drawing a long historical arc, and freely crisscrossing the Global North/South and subjective/material divides, Timothy Erik Str?m convincingly shows how surveillance and capitalism are inextricably linked, illustrating this through in-depth studies on colonial land surveys, the military-industrial complex, Google, and Chinas Social Credit System. Drawing on a wealth of empirical examples and theoretically informed reflections, his book is an accessible example of engaged scholarship that provides a provocative and critical examination of the uneven and contradictory meanings and consequences of surveillance and globalization.Timothy Erik Str?m is an independent writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia.
With a breathtakingly wide brushboth historical and geographicalTim Str?m paints a compelling picture of surveillance as a crucial companion of colonization, capitalism, and war in the modern world. Thankfully, he also offers clues as to how things could be otherwise. David Lyon, Queen's University, Canada
In an important and timely intervention, Timothy Str?m has crafted an invaluable conceptual roadmap for understanding the global surveillance economy. This engagingly written and elegantly conceived book locates contemporary surveillance in its broader social contexts with the goal of imagining, against all odds, how these might be differentand better. Mark Andrejevic, Monash University
Upgrading critiques of surveillance for the twenty-first century, Tim Str?m reveals its governing paradox of absolute control and utter powerlessness. Governmental and corporate surveillance technologies are locked into the logic lă"