Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy

Chapter author: Winifred Poster

Page author: Kit

Summary
In this chapter, Winifred R. Poster discusses how consumers and digital users “surveil [others] for their sounds (accents, ways of speaking), for images (facial features, color), for names and biohistories, and for physical locations and movements” through job matching and hiring websites / peer-to-peer matching platforms, incidents in the “gig” economy, transnational call centers, and digital assistants (134). Poster argues that they “are not only watching from their positions, but in ways that support existing power structures of race. This means that watching from below can reinforce dominant hierarchies as much as watching from above” (135-6). Through a multi-surveillance framing, Poster discusses how a user/consumer can be watching a group while also being watched by a different group (135).

Poster split this chapter into multiple parts, each focusing on a different site for surveillance. She focuses on:


 * 1) Job hiring/matching websites and peer-to-peer matching sites
 * 2) She finds that these sites are spaces where surveillance of “obvious and nonobvious markings of race, gender, or class" occurs, including overt features like providing your ethnicity, as well as, subtextual cues such as names (141). Additionally she found that users on peer-to-peer matching platforms also surveil the body through images.
 * 3) “Gig economy” / Housing & Transportation:
 * 4) Poster discusses how users/consumers additionally use geography for surveillance, stating that “the movement of bodies in geographic space offline is linked to unequal behaviors online” (145). She states that “the takeaway is that the racial surveillance of names and photos is often layered with, and mapped onto, that of landscapes, properties, homes, and so on” (148).
 * 5) Call centers:
 * 6) In these spaces, she discussed how communication and sound become markers of race for discrimination. Poster also discusses this reflects tensions of “outsourcing, globalization, and nationalism” (148). It is not just customers discriminating against accents, but companies performing “national identity management” by making employees sound American, giving them American names, teaching them small talk so they sound like they are located in the states, and learning a script (151).
 * 7) Digital Assistants:
 * 8) Through a discussion on digital/virtual assistants, Poster states that they “achieve the fantasy of a postracial society, where the reality of an ethnically diverse society is obscured by the idea of whiteness as neutral, or else race as ambiguous” (156). Further, these assistants show “how the future of racial embodiment in digital service is not just in what the bots sound like or even look like--it is in how they interact with consumers and the public” (159).

Through this discussion, Poster argues that there are multiple levels of surveillance happening both from consumers and users and that these modes of surveillance reinforce the “dominant hierarchies” (161). Poster concludes with a discussion about how consumers can use these spaces as resistance and rework platforms.

Connection to other readings
I can see two connections to our class readings here, but considering race and technology. The first is Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology. As I looked through our class notes, this quote from Benjamin’s book felt especially relevant: “The animating force of the New Jim Code is that tech designers encode judgments into technical systems but claim that the racist results of their designs are entirely exterior to the encoding process. Racism thus becomes doubled – magnified and buried under layers of digital denial” (11). While Benjamin is talking about design and production here, I think Poster’s explanation of end product and surveillance demonstrate similar concepts but by looking at a different audience.

Additionally, Beth Coleman’s article “Race as Technology” felt relevant to this chapter. Especially Coleman’s argument that technology can be used to “liberate race from an inherited position of abjection toward a greater expression of agency” (177). I especially thought that this quote from our class notes connected with this reading: “In a sense, race has been rendered a technology by science itself, since it is now figured in sequences of code. There is no cranium to measure, but rather tendrils of information that cross continents. What used to be a matter of flesh and blood is now highly abstracted data. Race has been made information” (193). I think there is a similar turn to what users/consumers can do to resist the racialized surveillance on platforms at the end of Poster’s writing that fits with Coleman’s argument.

Connection to other chapters
Van Oort's Employing the Carceral Imaginary ties with this reading. In specific, the job hiring surveillance and the use of technology to surveil overlaps a great deal with Van Oort's analysis of how technology is used to surveil employees and ends up targeting specific demographics and regions.