Surveillance Industrial Complex (WIP)

“AI technology can be transformative to the whole of the law and order space. When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve by means of AI and technology what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon. That is, that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”

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- Shabana Mahmood, Secretary of State 

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Data centres are architectural and technological articulations of technocratic modernity. More than this, they are harbingers of an age of dystopian style surveillance, as large-scale commercial data harvesting practices are increasingly appropriated by the most secretive facets of government to spy on the population. Surveillance Industrial Complex is an ongoing project tracking the new and growing surveillance-industrial complex; the intrinsic relationship between the expansion of digital infrastructure in the United Kingdom and the ability of domestic authorities to monitor and control the private data and activity of citizens. Wrestling with Carl Schmitt’s treatise on the vacuum of meaning inherent in all modern industrial, technical, economic systems, Surveillance Industrial Complex characterises these opaque, cubes of the internet as ominous presences, infrastructure which not only increase the government’s capacity to monitor the population’s online activity, but will power and facilitate artificial intelligence’s ever growing encroachment into every pore of modern life. 

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