Monitored: Business and Surveillance in a Time of Big Data

by Peter Bloom

Our contemporary age is confronted by a profound on the one hand, our lives as workers, consumers and citizens have become ever more monitored by new technologies. On the other, big business and finance become increasingly less regulated and controllable.

What does this technocratic ideology and surveillance-heavy culture reveal about the deeper reality of modern society? Monitored investigates the history and implications of this modern accountability paradox. Peter Bloom reveals pervasive monitoring practices which mask how at its heart, the elite remains socially and ethically out of control.

Challenging their exploitive 'accounting power', Bloom demands that the systems that administer our lives are oriented to social liberation and new ways of being in the world.

256 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2019

Reviews

[Frank Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the basic assumptions (we are increasingly surveilled for purposes not our own, those benefitting from the kind of control flowing from that surveillance are not as transparent as we are) are plausible, constant repetition of those points and heavy footnoting aren't really enough to make this convincing. I do have a fairly high tolerance for abstraction and neologisms, but some concrete examples would be welcome. This is particularly true for the thesis that those wielding power through big data are less accountable - again, plausible but in need of some concrete examples or even some explication of the techniques for "hiding" that data. Don't corporate executives also use fitness tracker apps and thus "contribute" to the data mining which benefits them and corporate power more generally?

[Rachel H · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found his language unnecessarily awkward to read and felt he missed the point. There is so much else more important and interesting to say about surveillance and big data than the points he makes. I just didn't get it.

[Daniel M20 Blackburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some very interesting and important points. Would recommend this for anyone that has a real interest in their data.