Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data by Clare Birchall, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Publisher’s website: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/shareveillance

Reviewed by Clare Southerton

Given the largescale normalisation of disclosing personal information through social media and other networked services, established notions of privacy are rapidly changing. In recent years, scholars have sought to interrogate the changing nature of surveillance to account for the participation of social media users in both undertaking surveillance of others and offering their information as part of using these services (Albrechtslund 2008; Leaver 2015; Jansson 2015; Marwick 2012). Clare Birchall’s Shareveillance takes the contemporary social conditions of sharing as its focus, offering a theoretically robust and nuanced examination of surveillance and privacy in the digital age.

Birchall’s introduction, The Disunited States of Sharing, reframes existing debates through the concept of sharing. The term, when used in relation to the digital world, tends to have more associations with the sharing economy; that is with peer-to-peer file sharing, open source software and other practices that allude to the intangibility of digital objects. The term has also come to have connotations associated with social media, the sharing of personal information, as well as ‘oversharing’ (Agger 2015). However, Birchall seeks to excavate the underlying politics of digital sharing and its pervasive contemporary manifestations, which she argues constitute a state of subjectivity called shareveillance. The shareveillant subject is ‘always already sharing’ (14) and is antipoliticized by the neoliberal consumer logics that frame sharing as a choice in exchange for services (15). Birchall notes that the shareveillant subject is antipoliticized rather than depoliticized, refusing any calls in the latter for a return to an agential subject. That is to say that this subject being framed as the choices of a consumer forcloses politics. Birchall emphasises that it is not a question of reorienting the choices of this subject towards different ends, but rather she argues that the question of agency is a limited one for the shareveillant subject, given that sharing can hardly be understood as an ‘act’ but rather as the very conditions of possibility. Here Shareveillance makes a significant challenge to the constitution of the subject in surveillance studies, and indeed departs from many of the interventions that scholarship examining social media data collection has made thus far. For Birchall, the subject is constituted by conditions that demand sharing rather than pre-existing these conditions. As such, she calls for a politics that alters these conditions rather than seeking to engage the agency of subjects formed in these conditions.

The first chapter of Shareveillance, Sharing Digitally, interrogates the entrepreneurial logics that underpin the sharing economy, which she defines as ‘a range of platforms and apps that facilitate the harnessing of surplus time, skills, goods, and capacities’ (18). Birchall identifies the ways sharing has become an underlying structure of Web 2.0, and traces the way the increasing value attached to personal data has contributed to the contemporary digital culture in which there is an imperative to share personal information. These are the conditions of emergence for the shareveillant subject, and Birchall takes up French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s work to theorise these conditions in the second chapter, Distribution of the (Digital) Sensible). She draws on his concept of the “distribution of the sensible”, which refers to a process of subjectivisation that constitutes what is possible, visible and recognisable in a given situation (24). Taking up this concept means examining encounters with data networks by considering the kinds of subjects they make possible, and the distributions of visibility they produce.

In chapter three, Sharing as Protocological Condition, Birchall develops her argument that sharing ‘can be conceived as the constitutive logic of the Internet’ (27). This chapter resists accounts of the origins of the Internet that are reductively utopic or conversely argue its present hierarchies and power asymmetries are inevitable products of its origins. Instead, Birchall contends that the early formations of the internet did not demand the storage of personal information. However, with the early introduction of cookies, foundations were laid for the ‘always already sharing’ capacities of internet practices (29), which are now embedded in the structures formed by profit-driven platforms that dominate the online world. As Birchall goes on to discuss in chapter four, The Sharing Assemblage, the shareveillant subject is constituted by relations of the production and consumption of data that have been normalised online. The shareveillant subject is at once surveillant and surveilled, through the relations of data sharing on social media platforms that involve the observing of what others share and responding to their data through practices such as ‘liking’, which in turn leaves a further trail of analysable and valuable trend data.

Having expertly laid out the conditions in which the shareveillant subject emerges, in chapter five, Shareveillance returns to its project of politicizing sharing by examining government data. The common thread linking social media platform data, government data and Birchall’s other examples is sharing and what she sees as the effects of sharing becoming a “distribution of sensible”, and she seeks to interrogate its effects in different spaces. At times, however, the links between these spaces could be more clearly laid out in the book, as their differences and complexities, at times, do become subsumed to the overall concept of sharing.

Distinguishing between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ data, Birchall offers a nuanced analysis of these categories as contingent and messy, with open and accessible government data too often held up as inherently beneficial. Open data can participate in regimes of shareveillance by contributing to the construction of a subject who feels obliged to share data and antipoliticized with regards to their rights to protect that data from governmental analysis. This chapter also examines the collection of ‘closed’ data, which is inaccessible to the general public, such as the mass state surveillance undertaken by agencies like the NSA and the GCHQ. Birchall cautions that responding to these forms of surveillance by seeking to strengthen privacy is a futile approach, and in doing so critiques much of the response to the Snowden revelations about the extent of mass government surveillance in the United States in 2013 (see for example: Lyon 2014). While Birchall argues privacy is still valuable, she contends it is rarely a politically useful concept because it fails to redistribute the ‘digital sensible’. By this she means that it does not challenge existing subjectivising forces that make the shareveillant subject possible, and that it appeals to the notion of a neoliberal subject that can choose not to share. She states that the ‘concept of privacy imagines a state violating the rights of a fully self-present liberal citizen’ (51) when such a citizen is no longer the unit by which the state surveils the population. More specifically, she argues that a privacy-focused paradigm neglects the way that data-driven surveillance produces subjectivities that are not necessarily constituted as citizens but rather as singularities within a multitude of data. Furthermore, the individualism of the appeal to a ‘right to privacy’ lacks potency in collective politics. On this point, Birchall’s analysis has much to offer scholars in surveillance studies and those concerned with digital culture more broadly. She offers an approach that resists common pitfalls of portraying those who disclose personal information as either foolish or defined by their oppression by powerful companies or governments.

In chapter six, Interrupting Shareveillance: New Cuts, Birchall suggests that interrogating the etymology of the word ‘share’ can offer insights into possibilities for resisting shareveillance. Rethinking sharing as a ‘cutting’, and considering the resonances with Ranciere’s understanding of ‘distribution of the sensible’ as a ‘cutting up of perceptual world’ (63), Birchall argues that different distributive regimes of sharing will alter the conditions of possibility for subjects. She offers a number of examples of existing practices that resist shareveillance that may be fruitful avenues for political action, including hacking and open source software, described as ‘ethical cuts’ (64). These are interesting examples, though they feel a little inadequate in the face of the scale of shareveillance, and seem to somewhat contradict Birchall’s rejection of calls for a return to the agential subject. The distinction could have been more strongly made to demonstrate the contribution of Birchall’s shareveillant subject to these proposed strategies of resistance. However, this chapter also draws on the concept of a ‘right to opacity’, coined by Édouard Glissant, which Birchall reads together with Jacques Derrida’s work on secrecy, to argue against the insidious logic of the value of transparency. Birchall’s analysis of secrecy works generatively here, offering an alternative to the ‘right to privacy’ which is not attached to the individual but rather to the collective. It refuses the ‘shareveillant distribution of the sensible’ (80), that is it challenges the conditions of shareveillance that produce subjects from whom transparency is demanded.

The final chapter of the book, Working with Opacity, further explores the possibilities for resisting shareveillance, using academic publishing as an example. Acknowledging that open access may not be able to deliver radical transformation, Birchall argues for the experimental possibilities of giving reuse capacity to readers in addition to their access to content (e.g. they can edit the material, a format used by Wikipedia). This offers an intervention into ideas of authorship and intellectual property, which Birchall also highlights could provide opacity surrounding authorships that could provide cover to avoid the surveillance of the state. This final chapter is a rich exploration of how we might ‘cut well’, repoliticize sharing and create the conditions for moments of productive secrecy.

Shareveillance finishes with an afterword titled Trumping Surveillance, in which the author reflects on the political context of the book — the Trump administration and continuing ambiguities about surveillance under this new regime. Birchall deftly connects Trump’s post-truth government to the limitations of a transparency-seeking politics, arguing that in such an environment Trump is able to use the performance of being ‘straight talking’ and ‘candid’ to his advantage (93). Indeed, even as leaks that reveal truth counter to official narratives from Trump’s administration he appears unconcerned. Reflecting on guerilla archiving projects that have sprung up seeking to protect publicly available government data, especially that which relates to climate change, from the Trump administration, Birchall argues this open data tactic is only one form of resistance. Shareveillance ends with a reflection on the power of ‘tactical opacity’ in social conditions where targeting specific groups has political currency.

Birchall’s book is a call to reexamine the dynamics of ‘sharing and veillance’ (97), to consider the ways their contemporary arrangement produces a form of subjectivity that is always already sharing personal data, and the power asymmetries that emerge in the distributions of that data. However, Shareveillance also offers possibilities for sharing to operate differently, focusing on forms of resistance that are oriented towards the collective. The book is theoretically complex and sophisticated, as Birchall fleshes out each concept skillfully, but overall the result is surprisingly accessible. She succeeds in bringing together a diverse range of thinkers together with well-chosen examples to examine the problem at hand, though at times, by the necessity of focusing on the theme of sharing, their complexity and differences were somewhat downplayed. Nonetheless, Birchall issues a much-needed challenge to surveillance and media scholars to rethink the very notion of the subject in their work and urges them to attend to the relations that these subjects are constituted in. Shareveillance is an important contribution to surveillance studies that provides a much-needed exploration of the contemporary conditions that demand personal data and important theoretical tools to think about sharing, transparency and secrecy differently.

References

Agger, B (2015) Oversharing: Presentations of self in the internet age, Routledge, New York.

Albrechtslund, A (2008) ‘Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance’, First Monday, vol. 13, no. 3, retrieved June 29, 2016, from <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2142>.

Jansson, A (2015) ‘Interveillance: A new culture of recognition and mediatization’, Media and Communication, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 81–90.

Leaver, T (2015) ‘Born digital? Presence, privacy, and intimate surveillance’, in J Hartley & W Qu (eds), Re-Orientation: Translingual Transcultural Transmedia. Studies in narrative, language, identity, and knowledge, Fudan University Press, Shanghai, pp. 149–160.

Lyon, D (2014) ‘Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, consequences, critique’, Big Data & Society, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 1–13.

Marwick, AE (2012) ‘The public domain: Social surveillance in everyday life’, Surveillance & Society, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 378–393.

Dr Clare Southerton is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Surveillance Studies, in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. Her research interests focus on the way intimacy is formed with digital technologies and she has explored this in a number of empirical contexts including digital devices, surveillance practices, online fan communities, health and sexuality.

Email: cvs@cc.au.dk