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Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression
The Department of Justice sought information on all who visited the DisruptJ20.org website for Donald Trump's inauguration.
Undercover agents infiltrate BlackLivesMatter protests. Police routinely command bystanders to stop filming them by falsely claiming it is a crime. Agricultural states such as Iowa, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming enact laws that criminalize the filming of factory farm cruelty while allowing other-than-human animal suffering to continue unabated. Dissent and poverty are increasingly criminalized by the state as precarity grows. Abolishing Surveillance offers the first in-depth study of how various communities and activist organizations are resisting such efforts by integrating digital media activism into their actions against state surveillance and repression and for a better world. The book focuses on a wide array of movements within the United States such as Latinx copwatching groups in New York City, Muslim and Arab American communities in Minneapolis, undercover animal rights activists, and countersummit protesters to explore the ways in which government surveillance and repression impacts them and, more importantly, their different but related online and offline tactics and strategies employed for self-determination and liberation. Digital media production becomes a core element in such organizing as cell phones and other forms of handheld technology become more ubiquitous. Yet such uses of technology can only be successfully employed when built upon strong grassroots organizing that has always been essential for social movements to take root. Neither idealizing nor disparaging the digital media activism explored within its pages, Abolishing Surveillance analyzes the successes and failures that accompany each case study. The book explores the historically shifting terrain since the 1980s to the present of how historically disenfranchised communities, activist organizations, and repressive state institutions battle over the uses of digital technology and media-making practices as civil liberties, community autonomy, and the very lives of people and other-than-human animals hang in the balance.
Undercover agents infiltrate BlackLivesMatter protests. Police routinely command bystanders to stop filming them by falsely claiming it is a crime. Agricultural states such as Iowa, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming enact laws that criminalize the filming of factory farm cruelty while allowing other-than-human animal suffering to continue unabated. Dissent and poverty are increasingly criminalized by the state as precarity grows. Abolishing Surveillance offers the first in-depth study of how various communities and activist organizations are resisting such efforts by integrating digital media activism into their actions against state surveillance and repression and for a better world. The book focuses on a wide array of movements within the United States such as Latinx copwatching groups in New York City, Muslim and Arab American communities in Minneapolis, undercover animal rights activists, and countersummit protesters to explore the ways in which government surveillance and repression impacts them and, more importantly, their different but related online and offline tactics and strategies employed for self-determination and liberation. Digital media production becomes a core element in such organizing as cell phones and other forms of handheld technology become more ubiquitous. Yet such uses of technology can only be successfully employed when built upon strong grassroots organizing that has always been essential for social movements to take root. Neither idealizing nor disparaging the digital media activism explored within its pages, Abolishing Surveillance analyzes the successes and failures that accompany each case study. The book explores the historically shifting terrain since the 1980s to the present of how historically disenfranchised communities, activist organizations, and repressive state institutions battle over the uses of digital technology and media-making practices as civil liberties, community autonomy, and the very lives of people and other-than-human animals hang in the balance.
336 pages, Paperback
Published September 5, 2023
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111 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 8, 2024
About the book:
Extremely insightful in multiple different ways, with four distinct chapters (descriptions of chapters taken from book)
1. Animal Rights, Undercover Video, and Struggles over Visibility
2. State Repression, Video Activism, and Counter-summit Protesting
3. Copwatching, Countersurveillance, and Community Organizing
4. Visibility, Representation, and Media Making in the Age of Islamophobia
From an overall perspective, each of the chapters not only contain (1) a brief history of the movements, but also provides (2) an in-depth analysis of the media throughout the history of movements and the different organizations.
Robe does an excellent job at researching and highlighting prominent pieces of media to analyze as well as provide a bit of their own perspective after discussing with leaders within the respective movements.
My thoughts:
As I read the text, it was largely valuable to just take a simple 5 minutes of looking into the movements from a holistic perspective. Of course, also watching the media that Robe analyzes is something I also did from time to time, and found them very insightful. It opened my eyes especially to the various ways that the government agencies push informants into activist organizations to not only provide a primary goal of retrieving information into the people within the organizations, but also to force surveillance upon themselves and in general cause massive disruption within the org. The additional general media analysis was very insightful as well, detailing how certain transitions affect a viewer. For example, he analyzes a particular aspect of the film, A Stray (2016), where it "employs close-ups of Somali American faces to emphasize the individuality and distinctness of each character, contrasting the ways in which US popular culture often casts Muslim Americans as a uniform threat."
Conclusion:
This light review only highlights very brief parts of the book, however it is FILLED with golden analysis over media and I would highly encourage anyone to read it, re-read it, and take note on it. There's so much information packed and so much that one would need to fully unpack this book.
Extremely insightful in multiple different ways, with four distinct chapters (descriptions of chapters taken from book)
1. Animal Rights, Undercover Video, and Struggles over Visibility
2. State Repression, Video Activism, and Counter-summit Protesting
3. Copwatching, Countersurveillance, and Community Organizing
4. Visibility, Representation, and Media Making in the Age of Islamophobia
From an overall perspective, each of the chapters not only contain (1) a brief history of the movements, but also provides (2) an in-depth analysis of the media throughout the history of movements and the different organizations.
Robe does an excellent job at researching and highlighting prominent pieces of media to analyze as well as provide a bit of their own perspective after discussing with leaders within the respective movements.
My thoughts:
As I read the text, it was largely valuable to just take a simple 5 minutes of looking into the movements from a holistic perspective. Of course, also watching the media that Robe analyzes is something I also did from time to time, and found them very insightful. It opened my eyes especially to the various ways that the government agencies push informants into activist organizations to not only provide a primary goal of retrieving information into the people within the organizations, but also to force surveillance upon themselves and in general cause massive disruption within the org. The additional general media analysis was very insightful as well, detailing how certain transitions affect a viewer. For example, he analyzes a particular aspect of the film, A Stray (2016), where it "employs close-ups of Somali American faces to emphasize the individuality and distinctness of each character, contrasting the ways in which US popular culture often casts Muslim Americans as a uniform threat."
Conclusion:
This light review only highlights very brief parts of the book, however it is FILLED with golden analysis over media and I would highly encourage anyone to read it, re-read it, and take note on it. There's so much information packed and so much that one would need to fully unpack this book.
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December 15, 2025I do think this was moreso about counter-surveillance of using videos and footage against the state or organizations, rather than the ways that we as everyday citizens are being monitored. I thought I would be reading the latter, but I wasn’t mad at the book’s actual contents. It illustrates how organizers and activists have used surveillance against bigger organizations or the state, but also how just having video is a bit antiquated, and you need more than photo evidence of corruption and injustice these days. Overall, an insightful read, and I’d read from the author again.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews