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Galloway examines Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, acknowledging her work's public reach while critiquing its theoretical framework. He argues that "surveillance" is an inadequate concept for describing contemporary digital power structures.
The core argument draws from Philip Agre's 1994 essay "Surveillance and Capture." Galloway explains that Agre differentiated between two models of power:
Surveillance model: secretive, territorial, state-affiliated, visual, and centralized.
Capture model: interventionist, philosophical, structural, linguistic, and decentralized.
Galloway contends that Zuboff's surveillance-based analysis mischaracterizes how digital corporations like Google and Facebook actually operate. He argues these systems are fundamentally linguistic and decentralized rather than visual and centralized.
Regarding visual metaphors, Galloway proposes the "reverse panopticon" concept, contrasting Bentham's centralized guard tower with Francois Willeme's distributed multi-lens camera studio from the 1860s. He suggests computational observation works through "multiplicity of parallel observations" rather than centralized oversight, and notes that "we're all the guards now."
His conclusion: Agre's capture framework provides superior theoretical tools for understanding digital power than Zuboff's surveillance model.