Further Reading — Chapter 40: Living Under the Gaze — Synthesis and Student Manifesto

The reading list for the final chapter is organized differently than previous chapters. Rather than focusing on specific surveillance technologies or frameworks, it offers resources for synthesis, ongoing engagement, and continued learning beyond this course.

The Book's Major Intellectual Antecedents — If You've Read Nothing Else, Read These

1. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage, 1977 (original French 1975).

The unavoidable foundation. Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon — Bentham's design, its social function, and the broader disciplinary society it exemplifies — is the intellectual architecture on which this entire course's conceptual framework rests. The book's opening pages, describing the detailed regulations governing every hour of a seventeenth-century French prisoner's life, are among the most powerful in all of social theory. Foucault argues that modern power works not through brute coercion but through the internalization of observation — that we discipline ourselves because we have learned to watch ourselves as if through the inspector's eye. Everything in this course is in dialogue with this argument.

2. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.

The necessary update to Foucault for the digital age. Zuboff identifies the economic logic that drives the surveillance capitalism system — behavioral surplus as raw material, prediction products as commodity, behavioral modification as the ultimate goal — and argues that this represents a qualitatively new form of power that existing conceptual frameworks are inadequate to describe. Reading Foucault and Zuboff together provides the conceptual architecture for understanding surveillance as both disciplinary (Foucault) and extractive (Zuboff).

On Living Under the Gaze — Personal and Political

3. Snowden, Edward. Permanent Record. Metropolitan Books, 2019.

Snowden's memoir provides what the case study in this chapter could not: the first-person account of what it felt like to work inside the surveillance state, to come to understand what it was doing, and to make the decision to disclose it. Whatever one's view of the wisdom or legitimacy of Snowden's choice, Permanent Record is an extraordinary account of individual conscience confronting structural surveillance. His description of growing up in the surveillance age — of his generation's relationship to the internet as a space of freedom that was then colonized — echoes Jordan's arc in ways that make it a natural companion to this chapter.

4. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.

Not a surveillance studies text. A work of poetry and prose that documents the experience of racial micro-aggressions, hyper-visibility, and surveillance in the body — in the skin — of a Black woman in America. Rankine's text provides what academic surveillance analysis cannot: the texture of what it feels like to be watched racially, to inhabit a body that is surveilled by every glance, to negotiate public space with the knowledge that certain bodies are always legible to authority as potentially threatening. The chapter on racial surveillance (Chapter 36) explains the structures; Citizen makes them felt.

On Resistance and Possibility

5. Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016.

Davis's essays and interviews on the connections between incarceration, surveillance, racial capitalism, and liberation movements provide the most intellectually rigorous articulation of the abolitionist argument touched on in Chapter 36. For students who found the abolitionist position compelling or who want to engage seriously with the argument that reform is inadequate, this is essential reading. Davis's intersectional analysis — connecting Ferguson, Palestine, and mass incarceration as expressions of the same global system of racial capitalism — also models the kind of structural analysis that the book has been trying to develop.

6. Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press, 2020.

The practical framework for understanding how design can be restructured to serve communities rather than extract from them. Costanza-Chock's analysis of design justice — who designs for whom, whose values are embedded in technical systems, what it would look like to design with rather than for marginalized communities — is the practical complement to the theoretical analysis of Chapter 39's privacy by design discussion. For students who want to pursue careers in technology, design, or policy, this is the ethical framework for that work.

On Knowing and Not Knowing

7. Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books, 2004 (expanded edition 2016).

A political and philosophical essay on hope as a practice — distinct from optimism, distinct from certainty about outcomes, grounded in the recognition that history is not settled in advance and that the actions of people who understand what they are doing matter. Solnit writes about social movements, about the unexpected consequences of political action, about the ways that the present is shaped by the past's unresolved struggles. She offers the only honest version of hope that is adequate to a clear-eyed assessment of structural problems: not the certainty that things will improve, but the recognition that they might, and that this possibility requires action. For students who found the surveillance landscape this book documents daunting, Solnit is the appropriate medicine.

8. Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House, 2015.

Graeber's essays on bureaucracy, technology, and the imagination argue that our collective inability to imagine radically different forms of social organization is itself a form of power — that the surveillance economy, like bureaucratic domination generally, maintains itself partly through the foreclosure of alternatives. His essay "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit" is particularly relevant to the question of why surveillance capitalism became the dominant form of digital economy when other forms were possible. For students who want to think about why the surveillance landscape is organized the way it is, rather than differently, Graeber provides the analytical tools.

Ongoing Resources — Staying Current

9. Electronic Frontier Foundation. deeplinks.eff.org. Updated daily.

The EFF's blog is the most reliable ongoing source of accessible, accurate analysis of current surveillance developments — from new surveillance technologies and legislation to court decisions and corporate data practices. The EFF's staff includes both technical experts and lawyers who can translate surveillance developments in both directions. For students who want to remain informed about the surveillance landscape after this course, bookmarking deeplinks.eff.org is the single most efficient thing they can do.

10. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso, 2022.

Gilmore's collected essays on carceral geography, racial capitalism, and abolition provide the structural analysis underlying the most important ongoing debates about surveillance and justice. Her definition of racism — "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death" — is among the most analytically precise and politically clarifying definitions available, and it applies to surveillance as an instrument of racial capitalism with direct force. For students pursuing careers in policy, advocacy, law, or public service, this is the intellectual foundation for the most important work.

A final note: The most important surveillance education you will receive after this course is not from books but from the world. Pay attention to the surveillance systems you encounter. Read the policies that govern them. Attend the meetings where decisions about them are made. Support the organizations working on them. Ask the questions this course has taught you to ask. The architecture of surveillance is not static — it is being redesigned right now, by people who are deciding what kind of world to build. The question is whether you are one of them.