Keywords: Surveillance
The field guide is concerned with helping us spot “the tools and techniques that ‘watchers’ use to surveil our actions, behaviors, and purchases in digital and physical space.”
They problematize surveillance as a means of regulating, governing, or affecting our behavior.
More broadly, they problematize surveillance capitalism: “The unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets—business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later”.
The guidebook aims “to help you spot, understand, and question the practice of surveillance in your daily life”. It can be used to go into the field and spot various kinds of surveillance infrastructures, as well as mapping them.