A Satirical (?) Book Review of Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology by its Author

Abstract

Surveillance is neither good nor bad but context and comportment make it so (at least most of the time). G.T. Marx O poor Aristotle! Thou who has discovered for the heretics the art of dialectics, the art of building up and destroying, the art of discussing all things and accomplishing nothing! D.T. Suzuki In 2017 I published Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology. It illustrates the profound and sometimes harrowing ways in which the new surveillance has penetrated and saturated institutional, organizational, social and personal liveswhether involving governments, merchants, employers, families, hackers or the merely curious. The book summarizes and expands on work over many decades dealing with issues of surveillance and social control. It is based on interviews, observation and the social science literature in the U.S., Europe and Asia, but also contains five satirical narratives that seek to convey the lived experience of being watched and a watcher. From an interdisciplinary perspective, and using a variety of methods, the book offers a systematic mapping and middle-range conceptual language to help understand our emerging surveillance society. It disentangles and parses the empirical richness of an emerging surveillance society.