This book offers a lively, accessible and informative introduction to surveillance through the lens of globalization, and globalization through the lens of surveillance. The story that unfolds is wide-ranging, taking a thoroughly multidimensional and transdisciplinary approach that brings clarity to a complex subject. Drawing a long historical arc, and freely crisscrossing the Global North/South divide, Timothy Erik Ström traces a narrative beginning with colonial land surveys. He convincingly shows how surveillance and capitalism are inextricably linked, illustrated through in-depth studies on Google and China’s Social Credit System and the broader reconfiguration of everyday life. Drawing on a wealth of empirical examples and historical context, his book is a theoretically informed but accessible example of engaged scholarship that provides a provocative and critical examination of the uneven and contradictory subjective and material social meanings and consequences of surveillance and globalization.
