Digital Technology, Surveillance, and Society Lecture Notes

Vocabulary flashcards covering key thinkers, concepts, and frameworks in digital technology, surveillance capitalism, platform governance, and critical infrastructure.

Ronald Deibert

Founder of the Citizen Lab (est. 2001) who argues that governments must take AI's harms seriously, question technology's role in society, and enact privacy laws, limits on data collection, and external algorithm audits.

Citizen Lab

A research group established in 2001 that conducts digital security and human rights research using mixed methods and forensic science, known for exposing spyware firms aiding governments in hacking devices.

Summerfield et al.

Researchers arguing that advanced AI can either strengthen or undermine democracy depending on governance, control, and safeguards rather than inherent benevolence or malice.

Surveillance capitalism

A concept coined by Shoshana Zuboff describing an economic framework that treats human experience as raw material for data extraction, behavioural prediction, and profit.

Big Other

A term coined by Shoshana Zuboff for the networked infrastructure that observes and influences human behaviour to generate profits and power.

Behavioural surplus

Data extracted from users beyond what is strictly required to provide a service, which is subsequently repurposed to train behavioural prediction models.

Data brokers

Entities that collect, combine, and sell personal information gathered via cookies, device tracking, data sharing, and inference to construct detailed consumer profiles.

"Move fast and break things"

A motto attributed to Mark Zuckerberg illustrating a tech culture that prioritizes rapid expansion over caution, often resulting in building new features over existing flaws.

Jürgen Habermas

Author of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere who argued that a healthy democracy requires an open deliberative arena free from state and corporate domination.

Public sphere

A deliberative democratic forum envisioned by Jürgen Habermas requiring universal access, autonomy from power, discursive equality, transparency, and an orientation toward reason.

B.F. Skinner

Psychologist who developed the Skinner box (operant conditioning chamber) to demonstrate how behaviour is shaped through operant conditioning and variable reward systems.

Variable rewards

A reward mechanism operating like gambling that hooks users by keeping them anticipating intermittent payoffs, exploited in platforms through dark patterns and infinite scroll.

Edward Bernays

Pioneer of public relations and propaganda who drew on the psychological theories of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to develop mass persuasion techniques.

Technocarcinization

A concept formulated by Cory Doctorow describing how tech companies structurally evolve toward similar business models along the dual axes of surveillance and control.

Enshittification

A platform lifecycle pattern identified by Cory Doctorow wherein services start user-friendly and progressively degrade as companies prioritize value extraction.

Maria Ressa

Philippine journalist and activist who exposed state-backed fake Facebook accounts and faced coordinated online harassment, illustrating Facebook's moderation failures.

Nathan Ensmenger

Author of "The Cloud is a Factory" who argues that cloud computing is not an immaterial abstraction, but a resource-intensive industrial system built on physical infrastructure and labour.

Submarine cables

Undersea fibre-optic lines carrying light pulses that transmit the bulk of global internet traffic, subject to physical damage and critical to geopolitics.

Techno-racism

A phenomenon defined by Petra Molnar wherein technology reproduces existing racial hierarchies and biases while lending discrimination a false veneer of objectivity.

Techno-solutionism

The ideology that complex socio-political problems can be resolved through technical interventions, often prioritizing deterrence over the root drivers of migration.

Algorithmic management

A practice documented by Human Rights Watch where platforms use automated tracking, metric ratings, and gamified incentives to control gig workers misclassified as independent contractors.