1 Surveillance Noir: An Introduction

2 Born Under the USA: Gilead and Palestine

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Roberts Supreme Court combined with the rise of laws allowing citizens to surveil and report on each other, works examining life in surveillance societies demand serious thought and exploration, none more so than Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.Footnote ⁷ Atwood explains (1998, p. xiii) that she began to write her work in the ominous setting and year of West Berlin in 1984. Her rule in writing this dystopianFootnote ⁸ fiction was that she “would not put any events into the book that had not already happened … no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities” (p. xvi). Atwood’s imagined country of Gilead becomes all too real when citizens are deputized, and doctors are demonized for believing in bodily autonomy. While the original novel was written prior to the current century, with the publication of its sequel as well as the Hulu-produced television series, Atwood’s world has continued into the twenty-first century with ever-increasing relevance. As Gina Wisker (Reference Winston and Hanrahan2021, p. 93) argues, “telling and retelling histories exposes the fictive character of all history, the necessity of learning from history, from interpreted fact, invented cautionary histories;” however, she points out, “with revival of The Handmaid’s Tale recently in the Hulu TV series and Atwood’s sequel, The Testaments (Reference Atwood2019), the terrifying topicality of historical cautionary tales and warnings emphasizes its circularity, its repetitiveness.”

In Against the Loveless World (Reference Abulhawa2020), Susan Abulhawa, takes up similar thematic content; however, the setting and historical backdrop are not fiction; her novel uses the character of Nahr, a Palestinian refugee retelling her story from an Israeli high-tech prison cell, The Cube, to explore the history of occupation and exploitation in a world where her body is never seen as belonging to her; it is an object of sexual exploitation because she is a woman and an object of surveillance because she is Palestinian. Surveillance is not passive; it changes those who are watched. The rise of paranoia, anger, rebellion, and resentment is inevitable in such an environment. The affective state in these instances is not simply negative; the bodies trapped under captivity produce their own histories.

Both works are constructed as first-hand accounts by the respective protagonists, living in societies that have reduced their lives to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers to as homo sacer. One could think of this condition as a life deprived of its potential, unable to project into the future to have what we think of as “a life.” This condition reduces what Heidegger would call a person’s “Da-Sein” into merely a body that can only perish, like an animal, but never be sacrificed because their life is not viewed as something sacred. The body of the handmaid is a receptacle; she can be hanged on the Wall, fall victim to a Salvaging, or become an “unwoman.” However, she cannot become a citizen or a mother because, to use the language of Martin Buber, she is treated as an “it” rather than a “thou.”

Agamben (Reference Agamben1998, p. 9) explains “The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life.’” As previously stated, they made a distinction between zoē and bios. However, following Foucault, he does not see these two spaces as neatly divided as the Greeks; instead, Agamben notices that it is only through political life and by the fact of always-already being under sovereign power that one can become an “outcast.” When someone, such as the men who are flogged to death by the Handmaids, or those who are brandished on The Wall, has been reduced to “bare life,” they become the kind of person who can be killed but not sacrificed. That is to say, their death can bring no ritualized hope (such as ancient civilizations making sacrifices to appease the gods), nor can their death be punished as murder.

This death that is not murder can happen only because one exists in a society where the sovereign is defined by his or her (or their) ability to stand outside the law. The sovereign is the one who can suspend the law, and under this suspension decide who has citizen rights, or who can or cannot receive medical treatment, who must fight in wars, and other decisions of life and death, what is often referred to as biopolitics. Agamben (Reference Agamben1998, p. 12) explains,

The philosopher notes (Reference Agamben1998, p. 97), “Hannah Arendt once observed that in the camps, the principle that supports totalitarian rule and that common sense obstinately refuses to admit comes fully to light: this is the principle according to which ‘everything is possible.’” If everything is possible, one lives in a constant state of doubt and anxiety.Footnote ⁹

Combining Foucault’s concept of biopolitics with Carl Schmitt’s state of exception, Agamben articulates the danger that emergencies will be used by the state to expand its power and create a citizenry full of docile bodies. Agamben (Reference Agamben2005, p. 2) argues, “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.”

After establishing Gilead, the state of exception could never be lifted. All its citizens were expected to perform their roles without rebellion. Of course, in practice, not all bodies are expected to be as docile as others. To use an obvious example, the men in charge of Gilead (and the state more broadly) are not forced to be docile; rather, they enforce docility. However, this relationship is not as simple as it seems, for the logic of the totalitarian state implies that no one is beyond its reach, hence the refrain, “Under his eye.” Those who are enforcing power today may end up on the wall tomorrow depending on the actions of the state. The State has the power to both include and exclude members at will. Because “the state,” like other abstractions such as “the market,” is platonic in nature, one is never sure exactly where the threat produced by the totalitarian force is located. Much like the cause of anxiety, it is everywhere and nowhere at all.

Totalitarianism attempts to expand surveillance while limiting the range of communication. Much like in 1984, labels and categories are simplified to eliminate ambiguity. For example, if a Handmaid fails to follow orders, she risks becoming an “unwoman.” The slogan “Big Brother is watching” has been replaced with “Under his Eye.” As a result of this all-seeing eye of the state, the handmaids use various methods of speaking to discern the status of their interlocutor. Since one cannot simply ask, “Are you a spy?” rhetorical techniques must be employed to discern reality effectively. For example, even though discourse between the Handmaids is limited and circumscribed, the protagonist and others can interpret various meanings from syntactically similar statements. For instance, when Offred first meets Nick, he is nice to her, which causes her ambivalence. She explains, “Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was a cigarette. Perhaps it was a test … Perhaps he is an Eye” (p. 18). Because of the corruption and pervasiveness of the surveillance apparatus, communication is always-already ironic. One is never sure, and anything seems possible; or to say it another way, abduction becomes increasingly difficult as the categories of possible and plausible become harder to discern. Later, when Offred realizes there is a new Ofglen, her former May Day confidant replaced by a new Handmaid, she attempts to uncover whether Ofglen is a true believer. She explains the dilemma and her strategy upon gazing at the dead bodies on the Wall. The new Ofglen says, “Let that be a reminder to us,” and Offred explains, “She could mean that this is a reminder to us of the unjustness and brutality of the regime. In that case I ought to say yes. Or she could mean the opposite, that we should remember to do what we are told and not get into trouble” (p. 284).

Communicating effectively under the watchful eye of the state is literally a matter of life or death. From this vantage point, it becomes clear that language is a performance, not merely a matter of representing reality. The philosopher Donald Davidson explains the communication process through principles of triangulation and interpretative charity, explaining that there is a profound relationship between belief and meaning. In most cases, people can simply say what they mean, so to speak, because there is no reason to hide their communication; however, in the novels discussed as well as other examples of surveillance noir, the wrong person hearing the wrong sentence can lead to death. Davidson (2001, p. 135) points out “lies, commands, stories, irony, if they are detected as attitudes, can reveal whether a speaker holds his sentences to be true.”

Both Offred and Nahr must fight to take narrative control over their bodies, to own their identity; “Offred” refers not to herself, but to the man of the house who uses her body: “Of Fred.” Her actual name remains unknown in the novel. Nahr’s birthname is Yaqoot, named after her father’s mistress. She adopts “Almas” when performing sex work. The word “Nahr” means “river” in Arabic, and as her name implies, she moves fluidly between and through these identities as a matter of survival. In both cases, the woman’s body becomes an ambivalent space; as Sarah Appleton points out regarding Atwood’s text, “Offred like the other Handmaids, is paradoxically both defined by and deprived of her body” (p. 66). Nahr’s relationship with her body is similar. When she dances, she experiences a sense of power over men; however, this power does not spare her from violence from these same men. The same force that grants her agency reduces her to an object that can be bought and sold. Nahr retells her story to us in an isolated cell in an Israeli prison, known as The Cube. Through her retelling, the reader learns of the myriad ways her ownership of her own body can be jeopardized: it belongs to her husband until he abandons her; it belongs to the men who pay for it during her time as an escort; and finally, it belongs to the state of Israel as she exists inside of The Cube narrating her story. However, Nahr does not passively accept her status; rather, she consistently rebels against her conditions, forging a life that transcends the barriers imposed upon it. Through rebellion, through the refusal to submit to the conditions of the concentration camp, Nahr and Offred serve as models of resistance.

Neither woman begins as a revolutionary, suggesting the noir affect produced from living under constant surveillance produces at least as much revolutionary energy as it contains. Offred explains the camaraderie that occurs when the Handmaids must share in Janine’s childbirth through a ritualized performance: “We ache. Each of us holds in her lap a phantom, a ghost baby. What confronts us, now, is our own failure. Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a woman’s culture. Well now there is one” (p. 127). Nahr’s transition from citizen to revolutionary is equally produced by living under occupation.

Abulhawa’s novel reveals the complexity of the Israeli surveillance apparatus. As philosopher Achille Mbembe (Reference Kirn2019, p. 43) explains, “As it happens, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories serves as a laboratory for a number of techniques of control, surveillance, and separation that are today proliferating in other places on the planet.” He then provides a range of examples:

Nahr herself tells the reader from The Cube that “At some point in my confinement, Gaza became a giant prison camp” (p. 342). Antony Loewenstein’s (Reference Kirn2023, p. 4) The Palestine Laboratory supports Nahr’s claim, showing the porous borders between fiction and nonfiction in surveillance noir. He quotes Shir Hever, an expert on the economic impact of occupation: “If you listen to the [Israeli] arms companies themselves when they go to Europe to sell their products, they keep repeating the same mantra … that these Europeans are so naïve. They think that they can have human rights. They think that they can have privacy but that’s nonsense,” explaining that the only way to combat terrorism is to “judge people by how they look and the color of their skin.” Loewenstein explains that “Israel has developed a world-class weapons industry with equipment conveniently tested on occupied Palestinians, then marketed as ‘battle-tested’” (p. 5).

However, neither Offred nor Nahr accepts this status of confinement, and in rebelling, each forges an identity that cannot be excluded from the political space. When challenged about her past sex work by Jumana, Nahr states, “We are not all blessed to receive a good education and inherit what it takes to live with some dignity. To exist on your own land, in the bosom of your family and history. To know where you belong in the world and what you’re fighting for. To have some goddamn value.” Finally, exclaiming, “Some of us, Madam Honor, end up with little choice, but to Fuck. For. Money” (p. 183). Bilal, the revolutionary Palestinian fighter, tells her a few days later: “I haven’t stopped thinking about what you said to Jumana. It replays in my mind, and every time I admire you more … The way you live your life in our culture, without apology or shame … You, more than any of us, are a revolutionary, and the irony is that you don’t even see it” (p. 186).

Both Nahr and Offred produce their own documents under occupation. Living under surveillance creates an affective disposition that is, ironically, productive. Texts are produced because of the attempt to silence those living under the thumb of the state. In being able to tell their own story, they reclaim power by taking the position of observer instead of the one under surveillance. This relationship calls one to remember both the power and danger of writing under surveillance. However, despite the danger or the difficulty, both women refuse to be silent. Offred says, “I don’t want to be telling this story. I don’t have to tell it. I don’t have to tell anything, to myself or to anyone else. I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw … that will never do” (p. 225). The diary, by its mere form, suggests writing under surveillance, reminding the reader of the most powerful example of the form: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. Both works are metafictional in the sense that they argue that writing itself is a legitimate form of resistance – not in some abstract, finding-one’s-voice, morality-play; rather, as a materialist document that will be read, interpreted, and incorporated into action, which itself will forge its own history. The diary is a paradoxical text. It is written as a private document but viewed as a public record. The writing allows the author to communicate truths that are not permitted to be said aloud. In this way, the very act of writing becomes a powerful action, and not merely as a symbol, for there are real stakes in any clandestine action taken while under surveillance. These documents prove to be powerful rhetorical artifacts. For, while it is not impossible to forge a diary, one assumes that the author is recording their actual beliefs. The tension between recording and being recorded, between the desire to produce an account and being held accountable for any written word, illustrates a profound point about the productive power created by the very conditions meant to eliminate creation. In 1984, whose shadow is cast across all surveillance noir, Winston takes refuge in writing. We have The Handmaid’s Tale because Offred recorded her story, we learn in the epilogue. In Against the Loveless World, the author recounts her story while sitting isolated in a cell referred to as “The Cube.” American Spy takes the form of a journal for the author’s children. In Atwood’s sequel, The Testaments, Aunt Lydia’s story is created because of the surveillance apparatus of Gilead. Through her document Aunt Lydia can place herself inside a tradition of revolutionary figures, signaling her hope for the future in the quotation “my end is my beginning.”

The diary is one of the quintessential texts of surveillance noir,Footnote ¹⁰ for its very existence suggests unwanted readers. Even the diaries teenagers buy are often adorned with locks. Even if just for show, the cheap, plastic locks point to the power writing and rhetoric possess. What does it mean to be willing to die for one’s recorded history? From a utilitarian perspective, the risk and reward are out of balance. However, humans aren’t rational, calculating machines. The risk must be worth it to the writer because the document exists. One’s desire to record their history, to realize a kind of authenticity, is stronger even than the risk of death. Of course, the diary requires a reader. As Atwood’s epilogue illustrates, the reader’s ability to understand text, context, and subtext is paramount for a diary to have rhetorical force, to be seen as a living document and not merely a historical artifact, something to be studied but not incorporated.

Against the Loveless World asks the Western reader, much like a double agent, to leave the familiar historical assumptions and attempt, as best as possible, to embody a foreign perspective. The book demands that the Western reader become familiar with the brutal history that forces Nahr and her family to live consistently as second-class citizens, deprived of human rights.

According to The Guardian, deaths in GazaFootnote ¹¹ since the attacks of Oct 7th, 2022, have been estimated to be 172,000. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in front of a joint session of Congress, he was interrupted for applause about once a minute. American students, many of whom are Jewish, are typically criticized as anti-Semitic for protesting the actions of the Israeli government; however, documents such as the diary produced by Nahr ask the Western reader to reconsider the narratives they have accepted as true.

The line between those who are policed and those who are policing has blurred. In Texas, citizens were essentially deputized and encouraged to inform on fellow Americans who may attempt to subvert the law. Several cases have ended up in court and the details remind us that Atwood’s fiction is rooted in dark realities. According to The Independent, in Texas, Kierstan Hogan was forced to deliver a stillborn baby. Hogan explains, “I was made to feel less than human … Texas law caused me to be detained against my will for five days and treated like a criminal, all during the most traumatic and heartbreaking experience of my life.” She was informed by hospital staff that “if she tried to leave it could be used as evidence that she was trying to kill her baby and criminal charges could be brought against her.”

To use another example from Atwood’s own country, in Canada, a bill has currently been proposed that would radically change the landscape of expression. Much like the Texas bill, this would deputize citizens and reward them. According to The Spectator, “Under the bill, anyone can accuse you of the ‘communication of hate speech’ and if the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal finds you guilty it can order you to pay up to $20,000 to ‘any victim’ and $50,000 to the state (on pain of imprisonment)” (Young). Atwood herself has commented on the bill, calling it “Orwellian.” In England, citizens have recently been arrested for social media posts. Americans still supposedly have First Amendment protections, but there have been coordinated efforts to tamp down on online speech deemed problematic. Most notably, the attempted creation of a disinformation czar in the figure of Nina Jankowitz, as though something as complicated as truth can be untangled by one person, a bureaucrat at that. It is worth remembering that Socrates was considered the smartest person in Athens not because of his knowledge, but because he was aware of his ignorance.

3 Masters of War: CIA, FBI, and Human Resources

This section deals with the agents and agencies whose business is surveillance. In modern media, few figures are as alluring as the secret agent. Figures like James Bond, Ethan Hunt, and Jason Bourne give the impression that those working inside these agencies are borderline superheroes. However, documents such as the Pentagon Papers painted a very different picture. The release of the Pentagon Papers, detailing the secret history of Vietnam, along with programs such as COINTELPRO and MKULTRA alongside the Warren Commission report about the JFK assassination led to a profound distrust in the security state. Annie Jacobson (Reference Jacobsen2015) explains that “The Pentagon papers covered the U.S. involvement in Vietnam since the end of World War II. Revealed in the papers were specifics on how every president from Truman to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon had misled the public about what was really going on in Vietnam” (p. 229). Americans were discovering details about the workings from reporters such as Carl Bernstein.

In his Reference Atwood1977 essay from Rolling Stone “The CIA and the Media,” Bernstein mentions a reporter, Joseph Alsop, who was asked to go to the Philippines as a CIA employee in 1953. This became a common practice early in the agency’s history. Bernstein counts

Berstein (Reference Atwood1977) elaborates, “Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.” Americans are conditioned throughout the educational process to revere the Bill of Rights, constantly told that the difference between the US and “other countries” is that the US has freedom of speech and a free press. However, it is clear from the outset that those in power realized that their goal of consolidating power by whatever means possible could not be achieved without a prominent propaganda campaign. In The Devil’s Chessboard, David Talbot (2015, p. 3) discusses the CIA’s ethos from the origins, pointing out that “in the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust.” The FBI saw the world from a similar perspective. Democracy is seen as a bug to be contained, not a feature to be celebrated. As Tim Weiner writes, in Enemies: A History of the FBI, “Hoover stands at the center of the American century like a statue encrusted in grime … He carried out secret missions that were almost inconceivable in their time, spying directly on the leaders of the Soviet Union and China in the darkest days of the Cold War … He was an American Machiavelli … He was a founding father of American intelligence and the architect of the modern surveillance state,” concluding that “every fingerprint on file, every byte of biographic and biometric data in the computer banks of the government, owes its origins to him” (p. xvi).

Terms like “conspiracy theorist” were used to squash criticisms of nefarious CIA and FBI malfeasance, even after the public became aware of events such as the Gulf of Tonkin and the assassination of Fred Hampton. There has been a tendency to conflate the term with Bigfoot sightings, flat-earthers, and moon landing skeptics. However, none of these events have anything to do with the type of conspiracy that is not theoretical. In Conspiracy Theory in America (2013, p. 3), Lance DeHaven-Smith points out, “the term ‘conspiracy theory’ did not exist as a phrase in everyday American conversation before 1964.” The label was used as a way to criticize anyone who did not accept the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman theory regarding the Kennedy assassination. Before the report, “The New York Times published five stories in which ‘conspiracy theory’ appeared. In recent years, the phrase has occurred in over 140 New York Times stories annually.” The idea that conspiracies do not exist belies the long, brutal history of American coups.

In her eye-opening work Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (2018), Lindsay O’Rourke traces the history of America’s post-WWII foreign policy. She begins by quoting Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy: “Many more princes have lost their lives and their states through conspiracies than through open warfare.” O’Rourke’s “dataset reveals that the United States pursued a remarkable number of regime changes during the Cold War (1947–89) and that the vast majority of these interventions were conducted covertly.” Specifically, she finds, “sixty-four covert interventions compared to six overt ones.” Even if one granted the US the best possible intentions in these episodes (which I do not), the failure rate is alarming: “Twenty-five of America’s covert operations saw a US-backed government assume power, whereas the remaining thirty-nine failed to achieve that goal” (2).

O’Rourke also makes clear that the phenomenon of covert regime change did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather, “each American administration in the post-Cold War era has embraced regime change, intervening overtly and covertly in places such as Haiti (1994), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Syria (2012).” She concludes that “this preference for regime change seems unlikely to change anytime soon” (2). If one were to view the global map in terms of game theory, it seems the goal of the US foreign policy is to get all its pieces on the board. However, as the works in this section illustrate, this attempt at global hegemony consistently causes more instability than it irradicates, turning the people involved into nothing more than “human-resources” that are meant to be used and used up, no different than oil or cobalt.

In traditional spy thrillers, agents are athletic, competent, technologically savvy and most importantly successful at their mission. However, many writers have revived the genre as a way to critique power and deconstruct these assumptions. For example, Lauren Wilkerson’s American Spy and Mick Herron’s Slow Horses are stories about intelligence failures. Intelligence agents, much like any other “human resources,” are designed to be used and used up. Ironically, the biggest risk becomes not the enemy abroad, real or perceived, but the agencies supposedly keeping us safe.

Lauren Wilkerson’s American Spy explores the chaos left in the wake of the American surveillance apparatus. The novel explores the coup in Burkina Faso that led to the assassination of Thomas Sankara, referred to as the “Che Guevara of Africa,” but whose identity and story remain largely unknown in contemporary American political discourse. In the novel, the main character, Marie, becomes, first, a willing player for the surveillance state and then the unwitting pawn in a plan that revolves around financial gain from the expansion of the American military apparatus, which contains both the official three-lettered agencies as well as nongovernmental organizations whose work often provides plausible deniability for the official record. Plausible deniability creates the noir affect as it becomes untenable to map cause and effect as one is never sure where to start or who to grant agency. Desire, meaning, and belief are in an epistemological relationship whereby if you can know the desires and beliefs of your interlocutor, for example, you can solve for meaning. However, in the intelligence world, one often mistakes their interlocutors’ beliefs and desires, for their actual desire is to mislead.

Through the character of Marie, the reader notices that the institutions of a society reflect the biases inside the society. In Marie’s case, because she is a Black woman, her opportunities at promotion are diminished, and when they do arise, it is to be used as a sexual object. Her job is to seduce the left wing populist and real-life revolutionary, Thomas Sankara. The novel illustrates the tangled apparatus of the military-industrial complex. In a plot reminiscent of the clandestine actions in DeLillo’s Libra, a couple of rogue actors lead Marie to believe she is still working for intelligence agencies while being exploited for the profit of the armaments industry. Ironically, the character of Thomas Sankara, Marie’s target, expresses a morality that her country sees as a threat. Sankara, “had made it his goal to vaccinate as many Burkinabe children as possible in two weeks against three diseases that they routinely died from: yellow fever, measles, and meningitis.” He also argued that a “society that oppressed women couldn’t be a successful one,”Footnote ¹² which becomes ironic given the manner Marie is treated by her American handlers, Ed Ross and Daniel Slater. When Marie asks Ed Ross, “What do you really want from me?” he euphemistically replies, “Getting you close to Sankara is at the heart of SQLR,” the operation’s code name. Marie knows this means, “They expected me to sleep with him. For intel. Although I was angry and insulted, I was unsurprised to learn that this was the best way they could think of to use my talents” (p. 102).

Marie’s ability to move between worlds makes her a successful spy. She can view the world from the other’s perspective without losing her own identity. She notices that even though this would be her first undercover assignment, she “felt strangely confident; slipping into a false identity had proven easy,” pointing out that she has had “lots of informal practice with performing different versions of myself to please other people” (p. 128). She can see ambiguity in places others cannot because of their ideology. She sees devastation caused by US interventionist policies; however, she also worries that Sankara’s idealism may be unworkable.

Living between worlds, however, fractures one’s sense of self. On one side, there is the apparatus that sees the agent as a tool, and on the other, there is the agent who has her own beliefs, desires, and intentions. The problem is when the two merge and one cannot tell where the Agency ends, and personal agency begins. She explains, “When I’d suggested that we stay in my apartment, that I could cook for him, he must’ve heard a sexual subtext, because he’d quickly shook his head. I didn’t know how I’d meant the invitation to be honest.” Marie recognizes her indeterminacy and its root causes: “While I was attracted to him, I knew it was wrong to try and seduce him, because it was so clear to me that Ross wanted me to do so” (p. 142). In a similar moment with Sankara she laments, “I didn’t know if I was more worried that he could tell my flirtatiousness was manufactured or that he could tell it was real” (p. 133). While seeing the world from multiple perspectives is a prerequisite for spycraft, one cannot exist meaningfully in a state of permanent flux. Eventually, Marie decides what she will and will not live with, and through her reclaiming her agency from the surveillance apparatus, the reader gets her story. Both American Spy and The Handmaid’s Tale are presented as memoirs. In Marie’s case, she is writing to her children, whose father is Thomas Sankara. While it has always been part of the CIA to conduct foreign surveillance, citizens, once upon a time, thought that their internal surveillance apparatus only worked to protect citizens.

In the Showtime-produced series Homeland, the landscape of international politics in a post-9/11 world is examined. The show itself was purportedly a favorite of President Obama: ironic, given his history of drone bombings. In fact, one of the drone bombing acts as the catalyst leading to the conversion of Sgt. Brody in Season 1. The show’s entire narrative structure is driven by a response to America’s indifference to collateral damage during its drone bombing campaigns. Essentially, the show is a study in backlash.

In Season 7, the intelligence agencies themselves come under attack because of their history of failure. However, when the president attempts to rein in their power, the response is frightening. From their perspective, the president is merely a visitor; they are the deep state actors that transcend presidential administrations; therefore, if the president is a problem, make him go away. The situation is reminiscent of a moment of honesty by Chuck Schumer during the first Trump administration; talking to Rachel Maddow, arguing Trump’s ignorance vis-à-vis the power of the intelligence agencies, Schumer explains (Reference Porterfield2017), “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” The comment is startling as it is an admission in primetime that the agencies responsible for surveilling, both domestic and foreign, are under no obligation to follow the orders of the president. This felt like a win for many in the liberal class who saw Trump, rightly, as a danger to democratic norms; however, the problem transcends any particular president. In Homeland, the figure of Dar Adal, played by F. Murray Abraham, decides to implement a false-flag operation, deliberately inciting chaos and causing the death of innocent civilians, to maintain power. What occurs is the “Surveillance-based visuals are all filtered through the bodies and emotions of the CIA watchers, who themselves are core to the series’ spectacle,” adding that “If crime television typically seeks to reassure audiences that good people are watching, Homeland’s spectacles question the morality as well as the efficacy of the watchers” (Steenberg and Tasker Reference Steenberg and Tasker2015, p. 134). This “filtering through” is the affective change this study continues to highlight.

Carrie Mathison, the show’s protagonist, by the final season has seemingly been thoroughly disillusioned with the CIA and her role in the agency. She writes a tell-all book about the damage the agency inflicts and defects to Russia. However, in the last scene, she produces another text, hidden in a book, exactly the system Saul had used with his previous Russian mole. The show consistently references the novels of John le Carré, and the ending reads as an inversion of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. As opposed to Lomax getting killed attempting to come in from the cold, Homeland culminates with Carrie communicating to Saul from the cold, revealing the final twist: Carrie is now Saul’s mole; she hasn’t left the agency. She will continue to fight the Cold War until it kills her; sadly, the question we must reckon with is whether all of this clandestine activity, all the deception, all the lying to the public doesn’t create the very society they purportedly try to combat.

Slow Horses author Mick Herron, also compared to John le Carré, provides an account of a surveillance agency also using its domestic population as pawns in their war games. The plot of the first Season centers on a group of white nationalists who kidnap an Arab. However, as the kidnapping plot unfolds it becomes apparent that the event was staged by the government in order to be stopped. Eliminating the threat of white nationalism would lead to internal promotions and no one would be the wiser. However, thanks to the “Slow Horses,” a group of Intelligence outcasts led by their unkempt leader Jackson Lamb, the plot was foiled.

This fictional plot discloses something very serious about the latest iteration of the modern surveillance apparatus. Recently funds previously allocated for War on Terror projects have been directed to what is now conceived as the current existential threat: domestic terrorism. While these threats certainly do exist, the larger threat is the overreach of the surveillance state, which uses fear to justify its apparatus. After discussing the work of fiction, I will compare it to recent real-world activitity.

Slow Horses (2022), like all the fiction used in this study, is closer to reality than we would like to believe. The book and television series starring Gary Oldman both begin in the same manner: with a simulation. Importantly, the audience is also unaware and thus unable to discern reality from illusion, so to speak. In the simulation, we witness Rivers Cartwright attempting to apprehend a suspected terrorist before he boards a plane. He is told the suspect is wearing a “blue shirt, white tee”; however, the information given was incorrect and done so intentionally. This begins a season structured as an ouroboros: the surveillance state cannibalizing itself. Resulting from the all-seeing eye of the state, anyone working realizes they are also a potential target.

Most relevant about Season 1 is that the surveillance apparatus only tangentially concerns itself with the actual world; what those in power are most concerned with is their power and the inner workings of the surveillance apparatus. This becomes apparent when we learn that Spider Webb was ordered by the second in command to give River the wrong information so he would wind up in Slough House, the landing spot for failed agents. However, the most striking example in Season 1 is that we learn the entire plot is driven by a “false-flag” event: the kidnapping of Hassan Ahmed was coordinated by MI5, the British equivalent of the US FBI.

The simulacra became real when the MI5 agent, Alan Black, who had infiltrated the Sons of Albion was discovered and decapitated by a real terrorist whose sole interest was to broadcast a live execution. Ironically, the terrorist, Curly, who is so intent on performing a meaningful, symbolic act by taking his hostage and executing him in cold blood beside a castle, a structure whose existence, he believes, proves his cultural supremacy, is informed by his hostage that the castle itself is a simulacra. It was constructed recently and made to look old. At this moment it is Curly who appears as the tourist, his hostage the local tour guide.

When the plan becomes foiled, Diana Taverner, referred to as “Second Chair,” signaling her adeptness, though incompleteness, at rising through bureaucracy, attempts to redirect the blame to Jackson Lamb and his cohorts who work in Slough House. As soon as they are deemed inconvenient, they are disposable, which Lamb knows because he too is a product of this system that views murder as another tool in the toolbox. Realizing this the action becomes intramural; agent against agent, with the actual world they are paid to protect left to its own devices.

The modern experience of surveillance noir is firmly rooted in the very real threat that the intentions of the modern surveillance apparatus are neither noble nor transparent. In an instance that mirrors the fictional plot previously discussed, the public learned that the The Federal Bureau of Investigation had foiled a plan by white supremacists to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. However, as The Intercept reported, the details started to mirror events that happened during the War on Terror. In the article “The FBI’s Double Agent,” the authors, Aaronson and VanDussen, write, “The Whitmer kidnapping case followed a pattern familiar from hundreds of previous FBI counterterrorism stings that have targeted Muslims in the post-9/11 era.” In particular, the question that keeps coming up is “whether the crimes could have happened at all without the prodding of undercover agents.”

When the agency realizes it has crossed a line, the inclination is not to come clean in hopes of making amends with the public; rather, the inclination is to attempt to conspire. In this way, the agency becomes more concerned with its survival than all competing interests. As the journalists explain, “When the FBI. agents feared their informant [Stephen Robeson] might reveal the investigation’s flaws, they sought to coerce him into silence … telling him: ‘a saying we have in my office is, Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, right?’” The blurring of fact and fiction, discovery with creation, combine to cause a dizzying effect to anyone trying to unravel causality. As pointed out in the New York Times article, “Roles of FBI and Informants Muddle the Michigan Governor Kidnapping Case” (2022), “The FBI deployed at least 12 informants as well as several undercover agents, as well as several undercover agents.” During the surveillance of Whitmer’s home, a key event for the prosecution, “Big Dan” who had become a key informant was an organizer. Stephen Robeson was also present as an informant. Even the supposed “‘explosives expert’ who could topple the bridge was actually an undercover FBI agent, as was a man in another vehicle.” Critics of this methodology, and they are numerous, argue, “The agency [is] acting like Cecil B. DeMille, manufacturing complicated, theatrical scenarios rather than pursuing the more complex task of unearthing actual extremist plots.” Former undercover agent and current fellow at the Liberty & National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice, Michael German, argues that “Rather than focus on those crimes and investigating them, there appears to be more interest in this method of manufacturing plots for the FBI to solve.”

In another example, this time of the FBI infiltrating and attempting to coerce and entrap left wing organizations, Michael Adam Windecker, who went by Mickey, started showing up to Black Lives Matter events driving a silver hearse filled with weapons. Many activists such as Bryce Shelby believed Mickey to be a legitimate comrade. However, “Shelby and many other activists in Denver were wrong about the man behind the wheel of the silver hearse. Windecker was a fed. The FBI paid him tens of thousands of dollars in cash to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.” According to the FBI’s payment records, which Windecker signed, “he was paid more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020, when the FBI aggressively pursued racial justice and left wing activists based on nothing more than First Amendment-protected activities.”

Employing instrumental reasoning, whereby ends justify means, is not new to the FBI; rather it is foundational. In the article “He Was an FBI Informant – and Inspired a Generation of Violent Extremists” (2024), the authors explain, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a long and checkered history of letting confidential informants run wild,” elaborating that their subject, “Joshua Caleb Sutter firmly fits into this framework.” Referring to figures such as “Boston mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger” and “COINTELPRO-era provocateur Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.” to illustrate the sordid history. Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff explains, “Baked into that arrangement is the well-understood, avoidable phenomenon that these individuals are going to commit criminal acts … The FBI has authorized criminal and unauthorized criminal activity by confidential human sources, and the mere fact that those guidelines have those definitions is a recognition about the nature of informants” (qtd. in Winston and Hanrahan).

Institutions are products of their origins. The Dulles brothers along with J. Edgar Hoover, created a surveillance apparatus that has reshaped foreign and internal policy. In the years after the failures of the War on Terror, Americans learned of the abuses that occurred at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. After Snowden showed the world war crimes committed in their name, he was deemed a terrorist. Over and over, those who expose the illegal activities of the surveillance state become a target of that very apparatus. After the War on Terror lost the hearts and minds of the masses, the resources have been redirected to those considered radical at home. However, as we have seen, no group could be more reckless and radical than the security apparatus itself.

4 Paranoid Android: The Dangers of Digital Surveillance

Following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, I argue the most revelatory way to view any new technology is in terms of its ecological impact. By this I mean that technologies do not simply speed up already-existent environments; rather, they forge new connections, alter existing dynamics, and create new environments. This is what “the medium is the message” means. To use an analogy: if one removes earthworms from an environment, what is left is not the old environment minus the earthworm; instead, what is created is a new ecosystem. This new digital environment within which one dwells in the contemporary world is radically different than the previous iteration. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in A Thousand Plateaus, the dominant metaphor for understanding the structure of society has moved from the “arborescent” to the “rhizome.” What this means, in practice, is that the decentralized structure of the network is harder to control than the top-down (arborescent) power structures of the past.

As former CIA agent Martin Gurri points out in his work The Revolt of the Public, this new architecture has caused those in power to lose narrative control, making it more difficult to “manufacture the consent” of the public. He explains, “the development of new information technologies … shattered the categories we have inherited since the industrial age” (Reference Gurri2018, p. 351). In response to these concerns, there has been an effort to regain control of online narratives, raising concerns about who gets to speak, and more importantly for my argument, who gets to decide. As Frischmann and Selinger argue in Re-Engineering Humanity (Reference Eubanks2018, p. 5), “We live in a surveillance society now, and while some people, groups, and even nations resist, most of us are being conditioned to accept surveillance expanding in scale and scope.” Similarly, in the foreword to Feminist Surveillance, Mark Andrejevic states, “If in the physical environment, the pressing issue of the next several decades is likely to be the dramatic transformation of the global climate, in the social realm, the main issue will be the shifting surveillance climate.” Distinctions such as public versus private that once felt commonsensical are now impossibly entangled. Algorithmic formulas nudge, track, and report on our activities. In today’s digital landscape, one is always-already under surveillance. Questions about “choice” and “freewill,” while never as obvious as we would like to believe, now feel impossibly complex, creating “agency panic.”Footnote ¹³

This section will explore the implications of a digital world that is always-already interacting by examining two contemporary pieces of fiction: Jennifer Egan’s Candy House and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. This modern incarnation of surveillance is most novel and most in need of serious analysis. If time was the “goon” of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Candy House deals with the precariousness of space in the modern, technological world. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant persuasively argued, space and time are foundational for experience. That is to say, we don’t experience space and time; rather, we have experiences in the first place because we are always-already part of space-time. It follows that a dramatic reorientation of one’s experience in space and time would have profound ontological implications.

Candy House introduces a technology called Mandala that has been created by Bix Bouton. Using mathematical models designed for anthropological research by Miranda Kline, Bix creates a technology in which one can upload his or her own consciousness to “The Cube.” Not only is it possible to upload one’s memories, creating a giant collective database, but one can also search memories of others who have uploaded their data to the “cloud.” However, there is a catch: the only way to get access is to give access (to one’s own memories). Imagine being able to relive your past from the perspective of a parent or a sibling, perhaps no longer living. However, imagine a stranger experiencing what would have been private thoughts? How does one demarcate between public and private spaces in this brave new world? While many embrace this new extension of one’s consciousness, the technology also produces a group of rebels, “eluders,” who view this new world as a dystopian nightmare. The eluders go to extremes (hiring “Proxies” to impersonate their online activity) to retain privacy from those who see data as the new “oil,” namely, the most important and capitalizable resource.

In the chapter “Lulu The Spy: 2032,” Egan imagines a future where humans have fully merged with technology, essentially becoming cyborgs; however, this technology is not for maximizing pleasure or living more profound lives. Instead, the technology is adapted to the uses of the military-industrial complex. The concept of a “Citizen Agent” is introduced through Lulu’s mission to use her sexuality to avoid normal detection and infiltrate the lives of “powerful men” (p. 197). In the future, technology has been implanted inside the body, erasing the line between human and machine, analytic and digital: “A button is embedded behind the inside ligament of your right knee (if right-handed). Depress twice to indicate to loved ones that you are well and thinking of them. You may send this signal only once each day” (p. 197). We also learn of a nefarious technology known as a weevil that Lulu has implanted in her brain, recording her thoughts. The very existence of such a device becomes paranoia-inducing in the novel. Egan’s appropriation of the science fiction genre is effective as the line that separates science from fiction is always-already under erasure. For example, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts people will be able to upload their consciousness to the cloud in only a couple of decades.

William Gibson (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2012) is credited with saying, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” The line between science and science fiction cannot be mapped any longer. While Egan’s concerns may appear as science fiction, they are firmly rooted in present realities. In the article, “AI-Powered Super-Soldiers are More than Just a Pipe Dream,” Jared Keller explains, “According to US Special Operations Command, the next generation of armed conflict will be fought (and, hopefully, won) with a relatively simple concept: the ‘hyper enabled operator.’” Again, blurring fact and fiction, the Hyper-Enabled Operator (HEO) is an update to the previous idea of an Iron Man suit: the HEO “concept is the successor program to the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) effort that, initiated in 2013, sought to outfit US special operations forces with a so-called ‘Iron Man’ suit.” It becomes difficult to blame a population for paranoia when the military adopts the language of the Marvel Comics universe.

In The Battle for Your Brain (Reference Farahany2023), philosopher and lawyer Nita A. Farahany makes a convincing case that our rising paranoia about being watched is quite justified. The profound possibilities of the internet have been reduced into algorithms that quantify the probability that a particular person can be made to act. Disguised as games, goals, and achievements, devices slowly ask us to obey, challenging the commonsensical ways people talk about subjects and objects. Farahany (Reference Farahany2023, pp. 16–17) explains, regarding her epiphanic experience at a 2018 conference, “Until that day … I believed that our brains were the one place of solace to which we could safely and privately retreat,” realizing that “if people are willing to give up reams of personal data to keep in touch with their friends on Facebook, it seemed likely they would be willing to trade their brain privacy to swipe a screen or type with their minds” (p. 16). Much like the tradeoff asked of the characters in Candy House, the seduction of infinite possibilities functions like the infamous Pandora’s Box, a decision whose consequences cannot be undone.

Farahany’s examples of surveillance capitalism illustrate that this is not a science fiction problem; rather, this is a contemporary legal, moral, and philosophical problem. She points to an innovative in-store experience: “Since 2015, IKEA has commissioned contemporary artists to create limited-edition hand-woven rugs,” and in order to discover what customers actually liked (as if they had no access to their aesthetic desires) “prospective buyers were told to don an EEG headset so the IKEA (He)art Scanner … could find out whether they really loved one of the pieces” (p. 26). Most disturbing is that “not a single prospective customer objected to using the EEG device and that ‘everyone had a great time’” (p. 26). While the implications of corporations creating cognitive profiles should be frightening enough, perhaps citizens will be quicker to concern learning governments are already using EEG technology to ascribe criminality. For example, “Brainwave science sells a technology called iCognative, which can extract information from people’s brains. Among its customers are the Bangladeshi defense forces as well as several Middle Eastern governments” (p. 78). The details go a long way toward evaporating any metaphysical distinctions between mind and body:

Farahany reports that the P300 wave is not the only “brain-fingerprinting” technology and makes it clear that this technology is only deployed in so-called authoritarian regimes. She mentions “DARPA’s Neural Evidence Aggregation Tool program is exploring the promise of N400 signal to interrogate the brain for ‘congruent’ and ‘incongruent’ facts.” While one would hope that Constitutional protections would combat these dangers, Farahany suggests otherwise, claiming that “Even the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against their unreasonable searches and seizures and the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination are unlikely to keep the government from probing our brains” (p. 82). She elaborates, “but marry a future in which we wear neurotechnology all the time with the ability of the police to obtain its data and decode it, and the passive tracking of our brain activity may also become a reality that can be used as evidence against us in a criminal investigation” (p. 83).

Already, wearable devices marketed for fitness are being used as digital informants in police cases.Footnote ¹⁴ On the one hand, most citizens are happy when informed that a murderer has been caught and justice has been brought to bear; however, on the other hand, very few people, in practice, enjoy the thought of being an always-already trackable piece of data which is being judged by algorithms. There is a refrain that suggests that those who are not up to anything nefarious need not be worried about this technology. However, this misses something essential about humans: we act differently if we know we are being watched and recorded.

Dr. Elizabeth Stroycheck studies the connections between mass surveillance and behavior, discovering during one experiment that “participants who had been primed to think about mass surveillance were significantly more reluctant to share their nonconforming views” (p. 75). This suggests that even if one were not doing anything wrong, the person who believes his or her opinion to be unpopular will engage in self-censorship.Footnote ¹⁵ Farahany elaborates that “with greater conformity comes a passive acceptance of authority and authoritarianism, either out of fear or in hopes of appearing cooperative, even when that conflicts with one’s own moral compass” (p. 76).

The sensation produced by becoming an object of interpretation for Big Data, unable to escape its grasp, is not rootless paranoia: it is noir affect. As Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle shows, as the network effect grows, escape becomes a fiction; there is no return to a more primitive agricultural way of dwelling in this environment. The map and the territory must be equal. When Mercer, the ex-boyfriend of the novel’s protagonist Mae, attempts to go off the grid, his action is seen as a threat, as the system can only be satisfied when reality has been completely mapped digitally.

It is not simply that Mercer wants to be left alone. He desires authenticity in a world that desires to fabricate it through “likes” and various other online metrics. Thematically his desires align with Alfred from The Candy House, who attempts to force people out of conditioned responses through the outrageous act of screaming in public. The possibility of authenticity becomes a central concern in both works. Heidegger describes authenticity:

What is most important for our purposes is the insight that humans exist within possibilities; a life well-lived actualizes the possibilities that call out to an individual person in their unique situation. However, in this new technological world, the danger is that through digital technologies and addictive algorithms, the world ceases to appear open, full of possibilities.Footnote ¹⁶ Mercer’s concerns relate to these issues of authenticity. Mercer explains, “You people are impossible to scare. No amount of surveillance causes the least concern or provokes any resistance … It’s one thing to want to measure yourself, Mae … But that’s not enough, is it? You don’t want just your data, you need mine” (p. 436). He continues his letter, “I expect this is some second great schism, where two humanities will live, apart but parallel. There will be those who live under the surveillance dome you’re helping to create, and those who live, or try to live, apart from it. I’m scared to death for us all” (p. 437). However, when Mercer attempts to escape from the ever-expanding grasp of the digitized world, the results are terrifying.

Mae, like the leaders of The Circle, believes full transparency is the key to unlocking an honest, authentic world where everyone is always-already “accountable,” a term which should be taken literally. Everything is always counted and accounted for. When Mercer attempts to live his life on his own terms, he immediately becomes a threat to the system. As Agamben has pointed out, “In the eyes of authority … nothing looks more like a terrorist than the ordinary man” (2009, p. 23). This threat comes to the fore when Mae uses the novel technology SeeChange; citizens track and locate Mercer in real-time, while Mae watches from a digital screen. Eggers writes, “Mae worried about the ability of the participants to catch up to him, but knew they had the SeeChange camera, which was offering a view so clear and cinematic that it was wildly entertaining” (p. 461). However, while Mae believes she’s involved in a game, Mercer is literally fleeing for his life. However, the world of Thoreau, where one could go live in the woods to live deliberately, is gone. Mercer cannot escape. Mae explains, “something about his inability to give in, to admit defeat, or to at least acknowledge the incredible power of the technology at Mae’s command … she knew she couldn’t give up until she had received some sense of his acquiescence” (p. 464). The technology demands surrender; however, Mercer refuses:

In The Candy House, the character of Alfred represents the paradoxes of authenticity in a world full of simulations and surveillance. We learn that

Alfred attempts to break people out of conditioned responses. His method is to go into public and let out an unprompted scream. Since this act breaks all acceptable social norms, Alfred hopes his actions will force bystanders into a response that propels them into moments of authenticity. He explains, “I put up with negative attention in exchange for something else that matters more … authenticity. Genuine human responses rather than the made-up crap we serve each other all day long” (p. 33). However, Alfred’s experiment is undermined one day on a public bus when Mr. Kinghorn, the driver, acts outside Alfred’s expected norms. As Alfred anticipates the coming reaction, he admits his prejudices: “Alfred braced for physical confrontation, being guilty of prejudice about Black men and violence despite a passionate belief that he was free of it” (p. 35). However, Mr. Kinghorn undermines Alfred’s expectations, politely telling him, “Sir, you’ve made your racket for going on two minutes now … I’ll allow you thirty more seconds … at which point you’ll either have to stop hollering or leave my bus … Am I making myself clear? (p. 36) Ironically, this thrusts Alfred into a genuine authentic moment, and he cannot continue “screaming in quite the way he had; Mr. Kinghorn’s authority soothed the raved passengers, neutralizing the screams’ effects. Alfred had a sensation like a tent collapsing; awash in fabric, he fell silent” (p. 36).

Authenticity being a worthy goal, it is worth exploring why Alfred’s experiment fails at the end. Alfred is mistaking authenticity for shock and surprise. He also believes authenticity can be created by following a set of instructions, an algorithm, so to speak. He explains the process in phrases (Suspension Phase, Questioning Phase, and Something Happens phase). However, he learns through his interaction with the bus driver that authenticity is not an algorithm. One does not live an authentic life by doing the most radical, inappropriate action at all possible times; rather, being authentic is not formulaic in that manner. Alfred believes authenticity involves a disturbance that radically throws one out of their day-to-dayness; however, as Heidegger explains authenticity is not about randomness or breaking free from all social conventions. That would be easier. Authenticity is not a resource one carries around in their pocket ready to be deployed. Authenticity is a way of being-in-the-world. This is why after the debacle with the bus driver, Alfred says to Kristen, “You used to like my screaming … What changed?” to which she replies, “It got boring.” (p. 37).

For comparison, consider Sasha’s desert art project. Sasha first appears in A Visit from the Goon Squad, when we witness her compulsion to steal. Much like Alfred, she disrupts normal social relationships through her compulsion; however, this does not lead to moments of authenticity. Her life becomes authentic when she directs her compulsion into a genuinely creative project. In Candy House, Sasha, like many characters from Goon Squad, makes an appearance. We learn that she is no longer stealing; rather, she is repurposing recycled material to make works of art.

5 Twilight Zone Redux: Black Mirror’s Reflection

In the first chapter of 1984, perhaps the paradigmatic example of work to be examined under the heading “Surveillance Noir,” the reader learns that “freedom is slavery,” “ignorance is strength,” and “war is peace.” When one reads these slogans for the first time, usually in high school, cause is often given to celebrate American democratic values, where such propaganda will never hold sway. In the US, much dystopian literature serves as warnings for other people, not us in the land of elected leaders, democratic values, a free press, and the freedom of speech. However, in a post-truth world, where reality often purports to be rhetoric all the way down, there is a danger it is us who have inverted our values. The purpose of the preceding sections has been to identify the rise of a variety of paranoia described by the term surveillance noir.

From figures like Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman to modern social media companies, managing public opinion has increasingly become a behavior science, with everyone consistently feeding data into the very same machine that manages its users’ desires. John Ralston Saul (Reference John2013, p. 21) explains, “The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme … Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise.” This logic goes back to the birth of the modern scientific method with figures like Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Galileo.Footnote ¹⁷ However, these figures could only imagine the modern apparatus one is always-already inside of today.

The belief that what is real is measurable forces one to attempt to quantify everything. As we have seen throughout this argument, this process reduces objects and people into the same kind of ontological stuff: pieces that can be placed, shaped, arranged, rearranged, misplaced, reshaped, or discontinued. The world becomes necessarily platonic as the world of triangles is not a world anyone inhabits. The prerequisite for orderability is the reduction of phenomenological existence into that which can be ordered. To say this another way, what is lost is what we might call concern for the human condition.

As Heidegger (2008) explains in “The Question Concerning Technology,” “The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and maintain” (p. 320). He elaborates, “the forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose” (p. 323). Heidegger explains that this worldview, which sees everything as a replaceable resource, is only possible because humans too have become interchangeable. Everything is analyzed according to systems thinking. For example, think of the Amazon worker who has every movement tracked in real-time. The company “plugs its employees into a regimented efficiency algorithm called the ‘Associate Development and Performance Tracker’ (ADAPT)” (Kheriaty Reference Kheriaty2022, p. 19). The acronym “ADAPT” announces the intention of the software: to change the worker’s behavior to maximize his or her efficiency. The goal of this brave new world is for everyone to always be operating at full capacity. If the operating system is functioning, no matter the subject, everything becomes interchangeable, even education.

Giorgio Agamben has attempted to outline the ontology of this networked world. Early in his essay “What is an Apparatus?,” he quotes the forebear to his project, Michel Foucault, from a 1977 interview. Foucault explains, “What I’m trying to single out with this term [apparatus] is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions.” Foucault summarizes the totalizing capacity, “in short, the said as much as the unsaid.” He continues,

Foucault and Agamben have trouble giving a simple definition because they are describing an incredibly fluid process. This is the world of the rhizome, where every part can become the center, and similarly, every point, previously important, can become nonexistent in the next instance. The ubiquitous nature of the system is essential to understanding its power. The rise in computing power was the missing ingredient in a world where one is mapped both externally and internally. This new biomedical paradigm is viewed as a coming technological utopia by some. For example, Yuval Noah Harari, who has recently taken the scope of humanity as his subject, sees promise. Harari predicts, “What we have seen so far is corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what movies we watch,” claiming the “next phase is the surveillance going under our skin” (qtd. in Kheriaty, p. 161).

Increasingly sophisticated behavioral manipulation tools, such as those born in universities such as Stanford, are far superior to anything B. F. Skinner could have imagined. When people are viewed as manipulatable sets of actors, it calls to mind the importance of a simple realization about the Turing Test: it works both ways. The machine can become more humanlike; however, humans through soft power and ever-sophisticated behavioral models, are becoming more machinelike. The authors of Re-Engineering Humanity (2018) discuss this expansion of surveillance under the term “surveillance creep.” They explain, “surveillance creep is an offshoot of what engineers call function creep, the idea that a tool designed for one purpose ends up being used for another one,” giving the example of a driver’s license, pointing out that “in a short period, the document went from proof that you could legally drive a car to a credential for purchasing alcohol and getting into nightclubs; thanks to the post 9/11 passage of the Real ID Act (Reference Agamben2005) licenses have become more secure and are used as counterterrorism measures” (p. 20).

No show in recent memory has explored the implications of surveillance creep as well as Black Mirror (2011). While the episodes are self-contained, much like an updated Twilight Zone for the surveillance noir era, there is an affective malaise that transcends each episode. The episodes “Shut Up and Dance,” Nosedive,” and “Hated in the Nation” have been selected because of the ways in which they deal with modern attempts at behavioral control and modification. These episodes give insight into the dangers of such an apparatus and where such a piece of architecture shows stress marks. In one of the most disturbing episodes, “Shut Up and Dance,” a group of hackers blackmail various people with recordings of their illicit activity on the internet; some characters have had affairs, others have said awful things, and some have committed horrible crimes. These people are turned into characters and moved around as though in a video game under the threat that the compromising material will be sent to all of their contacts. During the climax, the audience learns that the two characters that have been set against each other in this final battle, of sorts, have both been guilty of viewing child pornography online. They are commanded to fight to the death while a drone watches, and the viewer watches from the drone’s viewpoint. After Kenny, the character the audience has been following, wins the fight, we learn that his secrets, as well as everyone else’s, have been exposed. Kenny is arrested as the credits roll.

The paradox becomes this: as a society we certainly believe pedophiles must be stopped, and as private citizens we also believe we deserve honesty and disclosure in our most intimate relationships; however, the end is disturbing. It does not bring the feeling of closure that accompanies classic crime fiction, where criminals are caught. Assuming the viewer is neither cheating on their spouse nor viewing underage, pornographic pictures, that is, most of us, why is the end disturbing? Of course there are some obvious answers: we never find out who is watching, nor do we know their ultimate intentions, and there is quite a difference between extortion, coercion, and justice. But most of all, what makes this an interesting text from the point of view of surveillance noir is that people don’t exist well in the state of anxiety produced by a panopticon. While it may have once been fashionable to say, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” that now speaks to a naivete unprepared for the agency panic to ensue in the twenty-first century.

In the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” the main character, Lacie Pound, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, lives in a world where all her interactions are graded, producing a social credit score. Immediately, the existence of the scoring system turns the world into a game as opposed to something to find one’s place in and make a life. The world has become a simulation in the sense deployed by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Anticipating the current predicament, Baudrillard invokes Borges’ use of the map and territory in his work “On Exactitude in Science.” Baudrillard explains,

In the episode, the world that matters is the world of the social media score. This is accomplished by the simulation of ideal behavior; as Baudrillard points out in the above quotation, this is a “generation by models of a real without origin.” They are not copying anyone in particular – yet every behavior is performative – a model of behavior disguises itself as model behavior. Much like one’s credit score today has a kind of ontological status, in “Nosedive” every single interaction is rated by each actor and that score is more real than anything else about them. Like Heidegger’s example of the farmer, even if the interaction might look similar, in this techno-capitalist world the differences are monumental. The goal of this world, much like an arcade game, is to have a high score. Because the goal is the high score, the world becomes one of status. Every person becomes relevant to the degree that they can be used to increase one’s status. Every interaction becomes a transaction. As Hatice Övgü Tüzün (Reference Steenberg and Tasker2021, p. 150) argues, “Living in a world of ‘mediated reality’ … ruled by ‘mediated desires,’ the vast majority of people have become voyeuristic consumers of second-hand emotions since almost all emotional phenomena is automized, rehearsed, and planned.” Throughout the episode, characters interact inauthentically to gain a high social credit score, but there is no correlation between a high score and what most would think of as living a good life.

The only character living what a good, old-fashioned existentialist might call an authentic life is the person with the lowest social credit score. When Lacie is stranded due to a series of downgrades to her score, she resorts to hitchhiking to make her way to a high-profile wedding where she will be maid of honor. Her attendance at the wedding is transactional; lots of highly rated people will be in attendance, so if her speech goes well, her score will rise, which will, in turn, allow her to qualify for a discount in an elite housing unit. Susan, a truck driver and the character with the lowest social credit score, offers her a ride. She must convince Lacie to get in her vehicle because, ironically, Lacie still believes in the epistemological value of the system that is responsible for all her current malaise. Susan explains how a personal tragedy – her husband’s cancer – ruptured her belief in the system. Now Susan can interact authentically because she has no fear of being downvoted. Lacie must learn the lesson for herself, much like Susan. This isn’t a failure of Lacie’s as much as a statement that changes of mind tend to follow changes in material conditions. Lacie needs to hit bottom, which she does when she’s arrested after arriving drunk and making a scene at the wedding. The police arrive because in this version of utopia, upsetting a formal event is on par with an act of violence.

During the final scene, she’s imprisoned across from a man and the interaction that occurs reveals something about language and its relationship to authenticity. She finally feels a sense of freedom not when she can speak truth but when she’s allowed the freedom to be offensive. It’s not that she literally believes the insults she hurls, and the same holds true for her interlocuter, but she no longer feels the need to censor herself. How much of a victory this is depends on what comes after, but one gets the sense that Lacie now understands Susan’s advice.

In “Hated in the Nation,” the surveillance apparatus is at its most malevolent; it arrives in the form of Automated Drone Insects, known as ADIs, which are virtual bees that have been created to replace the bee population, which has been eradicated by Colony Collapse Disorder. In the episode, these devices are initially found inside the bodies of two deceased people, both of whom had recently been the object of public outrage on the internet and connected to a “#DeathTo” hashtag. What begins as a classic police procedural – a rookie cop teaming up with a veteran – ends up resembling Borges’ “Death and the Compass” in that the detectives cannot read signs; they constantly confuse directions as detection. They believe their powers of detection unveil their superior wit, when at every turn the detectives have been directed like actors on a stage.Footnote ¹⁸ This concern about agency in a world of algorithms and automatons is a perpetual theme of surveillance noir. On one hand, objects, like the ADIs in the episode, are increasing in agency, while at the same time human behavior is becoming regulated socially with increasing precision, producing more predictable people.

The merger of market capitalist logic and social media changes the nature of both the public and the idea of communication. The public sphere has radically transformed since Kierkegaard (1962) described the way the print media created “the public” in 1846. However, his concerns remain relevant. Specifically, Kierkegaard sees “the public” as a force that neuters the revolutionary spirit in people. He writes (1962, pp. 14–15) “the public is a concept which could not have occurred in antiquity because the people en masse, in corpore, took part in any situation which arose, and were responsible for the actions of the individual,” but, he notes, “only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction ‘the public,’ consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization – and yet are held together as a whole.” Social media posts are directed to everyone all at once. In one’s day-to-day existence in the physical world, one never speaks to everyone all at once. In the physical world, the goal of communication is understanding; however, in the cyber world, the goal of communication is for a post to reach virality. This goal is exposed when identical posts from twin bot accounts are found to have started a sinister game where the person who has the most #DeathTo hashtags by 5:00 p.m. everyday will be killed. The fact that the hashtag began without origin, as a message to nobody, punctuates the profound problem of mass communication in late capitalism. When two people talk – or a room full of people discuss a topic – one can get a sense of what someone is getting at by understanding how their particular beliefs about the world shape their individual desires and actions. One can, through negotiation, arrive at an understanding. However, when one communicates with the hive mind, to use the metaphor invoked in the episode, what is received is a swarm of messages, the majority of which are hateful, as the medium promotes anger and vitriol. As the episode explores, online rage is popular because it is marketable.

By day four, the game has become a spectacle for opinion columns and daytime talk shows. This isn’t simply a failure of morality; it is a function of a market system that runs on advertising revenue. When the market chooses the Chancellor to be the next victim, the last solution becomes to shut down the ADIs, rendering them inert; however, in a move that mirrors the concerns about truth since postmodernism, the law enforcement officers continuously confuse detection with production. This confusion is embedded, by definition, in the surveillance architecture that produces the noir affect. From Slow Horses to American Spy and into the present example, the confusion of cause and effect due to the misunderstanding of agency, becomes the epistemological knot of surveillance noir.

The process gains momentum when a digital file is discovered inside of the ADI that killed journalist Jo Powers. The file contains a manifesto about technology that calls to mind “Industrial Society and its Future” written by Ted Kaczynski (Reference John1995).Footnote ¹⁹ After reading the manifesto, the young detective, Blue, believes she has discovered a mistake – she can geolocate where his picture was taken. While searching this abandoned building, the confusion is repeated when they believe they have discovered a hard drive that contains Scholes’ “toolkit,” allowing for the detectives to regain control of the hive of drones. However, the senior detective questions the logic. Much like Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” the detectives cannot think like their criminal counterpart; neither Blue nor Li is capable of thinking like Scholes. This matters because they are unable to triangulate in Davidson’s sense. Since desire, action, and belief are always-already in a relationship whereby if you can know two, you can triangulate to find the third, it is essential to pin down at least two of the positions. The detectives confuse his desire and beliefs and so misunderstand his actions. It is not until the climax, when the incompetent man in charge ignores the advice of a female detective with experience, that the audience learns that the previous three deaths were bait; the real victims ultimately become 387,000 people who participated in the game. This mass murder is possible because of the facial recognition software the government insisted on embedding inside the drones. The government will not spend billions of dollars for environmental reasons alone, like all surveillance creep; on a long enough timeline, the outcome is total, nationwide surveillance. Shaun Li, who comes in from the National Crime Agency, explains, “[The]Government’s not going to pump billions into it just cause some lab coat says so, and it grabs 200 green votes. They saw an opportunity to get more, they took it.”

The man responsible, Garret Scholes, is a former employee at Granuler, creators of the ADIs. He becomes radicalized when his roommate and coworker, Tess, becomes the object of online scorn and, as a result, attempts suicide. He saves her and this act becomes his breaking point. Scholes believes people must be punished for their online rhetoric and believes this punishment will eventually create the proper online set of behaviors.

Each episode discussed uses surveillance technology to attempt to not only alter but also improve behavior through a punishment system. This apparatus can only expand. We live with constant surveillance creep, and the results are creepy. In a totalizing system, everything that falls outside is a threat. As “Nosedive” illustrates, being inside the system alleviates the threat of becoming a digital “unperson” without access to banking or social media. However, being inside the system also requires one to exist within a perpetual state of self-censorship.Footnote ²⁰

The modern surveillance apparatus is far more sophisticated than any previous incarnation. Workers are reduced to their rate of production with the body being but one more interchangeable cog in the machine. Kelly Nantel, speaking on behalf of Amazon, “argued that employee monitoring via data collection and constant surveillance are ‘prudent business measures,’” adding that “Like any business, we use technology to maintain a level of security within our operations to help keep our employees, buildings, and inventory safe – it would be irresponsible if we didn’t do so,” concluding that “it’s also important to note that while the technology helps keep our employees safe, it also allows them to be more efficient in their jobs’” (qtd. in Kheriaty Reference Kheriaty2022, pp. 20–21). The argument that this architecture of surveillance is being unleashed for the general welfare of the workforce is more than a little suspicious, especially coming from corporations whose profits outpace many countries’ Gross Domestic Product. However, arguments about the positive aspects of living under the watchful eye of the state continue to proliferate.

The authors of the New York Times article “Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe” (2024) attempt to alleviate concerns about the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the expanding surveillance apparatus in general. Waxman and Klein explain, “At the center of the debate is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally passed in 1978, it demanded that investigators gain an order from a special court to surveil foreign agents inside the US. Collecting the communications of foreigners abroad did not require court approval,” however, the digital age has complicated matters as “many foreign nationals rely on American providers such as Google and Meta, which route or store data in the US, raising questions as to whether the rules apply to where the targets are or where their data is collected.” The solution Congress proposed was Section 702: “Instead of requiring the government to seek court orders for each foreign target, that provision requires yearly judicial approval of the rules that govern the program as a whole. That way, the government can efficiently obtain from communication providers the calls and messages of large numbers of foreign targets – 246,073 in 2022 alone.” Further complicating matters is the fact that, although Section 702 was designed to surveil foreigners abroad, the digital data net also catches Americans “when they interact with foreign targets.” The authors assure us that not only is “incidental collection” not a problem, calling it “inevitable,” but more importantly this new spying apparatus “can be vital to U.S. security.” Without being hyperbolic, it’s only a few short steps from the logic that transparency is inevitable to the argument made in The Circle that some kind of existential freedom lies just behind this total surrender of privacy. In short, freedom is slavery.

The confluence of organizations like the FBI and CIA, along with the rise of digital technologies and social engineering embedded inside of them, has created the conditions for a world where not only is one always-already being nudged, but one is also unable to be certain of where, when, or how this manipulation is coming. The concept of agency is foundational for how we think about ourselves as well as entire fields such as law. Famously, when British mathematician Alan Turing theorized his test, he argued that if one could not tell the difference between an answer coming from a machine and a reply from a human, one must grant that the computer thinks. Undetectable simulation, however, works in two directions. As I’ve argued previously, as humans become more predictable, we may be losing agency at the expense of our technologies of surveillance capitalism.

The attempt to conflate all opinions into one led to a complicated apparatus of government agencies working with social media networks to coordinate which accounts should be “shadow banned.” While rumors had circulated about such activity, they were often dismissed as conspiratorial; however, the Twitter Files revealed that there was indeed a conspiracy at work. As the New Civil Liberties Alliance report,

Judge Doughty described the case as “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history” and “akin to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”

Orwell’s understanding of propaganda, combined with Huxley’s belief in the seductive powers of entertainment, gives one a reasonable picture of the modern American media apparatus. This apparatus has historically been very good at convincing the population that war is peace, whether Iraq, Afghanistan, or the support for Israel’s utter destruction of Gaza, we are used to propaganda toward the other. However, this new surveillance apparatus is being directed inward. We are watching ourselves and we know we are being watched. Fields from sociology to physics have addressed the fact that observing itself is an action that affects that which is observed. We quickly become tangled in a web, like Hamlet, always unsure about realities, both internally and externally, perpetually asking “Who’s there?”

6 Pynchon: Prophet of Surveillance Noir

Thomas Pynchon, arguably America’s greatest postwar cartographer of American paranoia, sets his most recent novel, Shadow Ticket, in 1932, mapping the rise of both Fascism and the hard-boiled detective (and thus the genre of detective fiction) himself. Also released in the fall of Reference Pynchon2025, Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland, One Battle After Another, is the second Pynchon adaptation the auteur has tackled. The modern social imaginary is shaped by its paranoia regarding power structures – this paranoia has been Pynchon’s subject throughout world-building, and our world is starting to resemble his. Even the characters in our real-life drama could occupy his most absurd fiction. What could be more Pynchonian than Javier Milei presenting a seemingly intoxicated Elon Musk with a custom “chainsaw for bureaucracy” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Associated Press Reference Anyon, Colombo, Cullen and Lisle2025). As Andrew Katzenstein (Reference Jacobsen2025) points out, “It’s as if recent history has made it unnecessary for him to spell out his usual themes, since the supposedly hidden forces that his previous work exposed have rarely been more visible than they are now. Who at this point would deny that Trump is the latest expression of a long American tradition?”

While Shadow Ticket is set, like Pynchon’s novels generally, at a moment of historical flux, where things could have potentially taken a different turn, it’s clear the novel is not a piece of historical fiction; rather, the novel brings to the fore the uncomfortable parallels in the modern world. Pynchon also highlights the connection between detective fiction and the state through the character of Hicks, a former strikebreaker turned detective. Prior to his turn as a private eye, Hicks worked for the Pinkertons. Hicks’s career trajectory serves as an important reminder about the history of detectives and hence of the genre: “Hard-boiled fiction might not exist if not for strikebreaking. The detective industry in the US grew out of the Pinkerton agency, which in its early decades was hired by businesses to infiltrate labor unions and use violence to crush strikes. Before Dashiell Hammett became a writer, he was a Pinkerton” (Katzenstein Reference Jacobsen2025). In the character of Hicks, Pynchon is bringing the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction into being, historizing it as a response to the clash between capital and labor. Furthermore, Hicks is employed by an agency called “The Un-Amalgamated Ops,” reminding one of the coming amalgamations of private investigators into official agencies like the FBI and the OSS. That is to say, the novel is chronicling the birth of the surveillance apparatus that this work has attempted to examine. For example, the first version of an “interweb” is chronicled when “enthusiasts around the world, via waves the average civilian still has little idea of, waves they have learned, sometimes at a certain cost, to ride and respect.” These amateur radio operators “lurk at the fringes and frequency bands public and private, listen in on and try to decipher secret messages, sell some of what they learn, use some of it themselves for the purposes of mischief, or, as the Hellraisers think of it, ‘practical joking.’” (p. 52).Footnote ²¹ Sentiments such as these could as easily have been written about modern cyberpunk groups such as Anonymous.

As this new secret information economy could be both dangerous and disruptive, it necessitates other “interested parties … prowling around in little panel trucks with rotating loop antennas on top trying to get a fix on sources of transmission, obsessed by what these kids might find out … lately more and more making use of encrypted radio traffic, being of particular federal concern” (p. 51). Lew Basnight, a detective from Pynchon’s Against the Day (2007), provides a metacommentary about the genre itself, warning Hicks to not become “one of those metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation. Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines, start thinking it’s all about who done it. What really happened. Hidden history … For some, that kinda thing gets religious quickly” (p. 45). Of course, this comment applies equally to Pynchon readers as conspiracy theorists.

Pynchon’s novel reminds us of the uncomfortable proximity to fascism in the US in the 1930s, which culminated in the 1939 Nazi Rally held at Madison Square Garden. Hicks visits his uncle Lefty, who supports Hitler, his uncle telling him, “Der Fuhrer is der future.” Later his uncle takes him to Nurenberg Lanes where he encounters National Socialism in middle America when he is confronted by an old acquaintance who asks, “You didn’t go Bolshevik on us, I hope, a Commie flatfoot,” to which Hicks replies, “How about your pal Hitler, you’re handing your life over to this li’l comedian now.” Hicks is then warned, “Don’t wait too long. Leaving th’ station, now’s the time to climb on board, later maybe it won’t be so easy” (p. 66). Pynchon shows us that fascism did happen in the US, even in the Midwest, reminding us that this is a tradition that, unfortunately, can be traced from the 30’s to the modern day.

Pynchon makes many comments, references, and subtle anachronisms hinting that this isn’t merely a historical novel. For example, the name of the Austria–Hungarian submarine is named the Vampire Squid, a phrase popularized in a Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi about the 2007–2008 financial crisis caused by the meltdown in the housing market. Ryan Ruby, writing for The New Left Review, argues “the central figure in the novel is undoubtedly the vampire,” pointing out Hicks and April saw Dracula as well as other examples such as the fact that “Egon Praediger … pronounces Bruno Airmont ‘the way Dracula pronounces Van Helsing,’” and “in Transylvania, ‘the vampire motherland itself’, the characters encounter the fascist motorcycling gang, the Vladboys, named for Vlad the Impaler, the historical source for Dracula.” Karl Marx, as Ruby points out, invoked the same metaphor of the vampire for capitalism. Vampires live off the blood of others, along with their ability to duplicate themselves – qualities that mirror not only capital’s relation to labor but also the contemporary relationship one has with the information economy: in order to enter this information economy, one knows one will be surveilled, nudged, copied, and commodified. If fascism is the merger of capital and the state backed by militarized force, Shadow Ticket warns that those forces have always been in collusion along with the rise of the modern state. At the end of Pynchon’s novel, Roosevelt has been taken out in a coup, replaced by General MacArthur installed as a dictator, eliminating the promise of the New Deal and leaving the country to a much darker fate.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another (Reference Pynchon2025), a loose adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland, is reminiscent of 70’s cinema that interrogated power and examined the rising surveillance architecture as corporate and governmental interests become more intertwined. While origins are always a bit arbitrary, the ending of the Hays Code, allowing Midnight Cowboy to receive the Oscar for Best Picture in 1969, serves as a useful demarcation line; the Powell memorandum from 1971 also gives license for the structures that will come to be part and parcel of the surveillance apparatus to expand. Films such as The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), Network (1976), and All the President’s Men (1976), to name but a few, begin to question not simply bad actors but structures of power.

It is from this tradition of systemic critique that I view One Battle After Another. From the point of this analysis, the salient line in the film comes during the time-jump when we hear the voice of Willa Ferguson (Bob’s daughter, likely not biological) explain that “sixteen years later, the world has changed very little.” Given the timeline of the film, it’s clear that the sixteen years in which little has changed would have encompassed both Obama and Trump’s presidencies. In both time periods, a central issue is the surveillance and detention of migrant bodies. From this point of view the Democratic and Republican institutions are simply two wings of surveillance capitalism, rhetorically different, but functionally the same.

The film opens with a break-in to a holding facility and the first confrontation between what, at first, purports to be the central rivalry: Perfidia Beverly Hills and Steven J. Lockjaw. After sexually humiliating Lockjaw, Perfidia escapes, and the anarchist organization known as the French seventy-five commits a group of domestic terror actions culminating in a bank robbery gone wrong. Watching Perfidia commit murder and “bail out” of the bank after the robbery goes wrong points back to the Obama administration’s handling of the financial crisis, employing another basket of Goldman Sachs bankers, such as Timothy Geithner, to navigate the bailout. The scene also marks the end of the audience’s belief in Perfidia as she quickly sells out her movement, leading to the death and imprisonment of her fellow comrades.

The hope and letdown that the viewer witnesses in the character of Perfidia Beverly Hills symbolically mirrors the hope that the liberal class had in the figure of Barack Obama, which was squashed after the arrest of journalists, the drone bombings, the expansion of foreign wars, and most relevantly the mass deportations. The name Perfidia, of course, signals the word “perfidious,” meaning “untrustworthy.” While the political right pretended his name meant something nefarious, what really solidified Obama’s untrustworthiness happened because of the above-mentioned issues. As the ACLU points out from 2014,

The organization concludes by noting “The Obama administration has prioritized speed over fairness in the removal system, sacrificing individualized due process in the pursuit of record removal numbers.”

However, it would be a mistake to think things cannot get worse; the affective state the country lives under due to unhinged rhetoric and incompetent leadership of the Trump administration is unmatched. This incompetence, alongside the proliferation of law enforcement, creates a malaise that exists on the margins of all interactions in modern-day America. In the film, General Steven J Lockjaw, in attempting to join a secret society of white supremacists called The Christmas Adventurer’s Club, is told by a club member that “You want to save the planet, start with immigration,” and by another that “our aim and your aim is the same: to find dangerous lunatics, haters, and punk trash and stop them. No more lunatics.” This declaration mirrors Stephen Miller’s statement regarding whether Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil would be deported for what appear to be essentially speech crimes: “Yes he will, as will anyone who preaches hate for America … Under this country, under this administration, under President Trump, people who hate America, who threaten our citizens, who rape, who murder, and who support those who rape and murder are going to be ejected from this country.”

Trump’s rhetoric regarding those he deems un-American is no less alarming. As the BBC reports (Matza Reference Kirn2025), “US President Donald Trump has said he does not want Somali immigrants in the US, telling reporters they should ‘go back to where they came from’ and ‘their country is no good for a reason,’” and then amplifying the xenophobic rhetoric saying, “I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you … go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” His attorney general, Pam Bondi, not to be outdone, sent a memo to the FBI explaining that “These domestic terrorists use violence or the threat of violence to advance political and social agendas,” which she defines as opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality; and an elevation of violence to achieve policy outcomes, such as political assassinations.

The memo conflates both academic Marxists and literal bomb-throwing radicals, meaning everyone not falling in line may as well watch out. Of course, with online activity being monitored by the collusion of big tech and big government, we will be living in a world of thoughtcrime and precrime.

One cannot help but speculate that the exponential expansion of ICE’s budget points to a future where not only immigrants, but all Americans, are kept under the watchful eye of companies like Palantir. As the Brennan Center reports (O’Herron Reference O’Herron2025)

Given the previous administration’s record of deportation, it is clear that the radical increase in budget cannot be justified simply by Trump’s expansion of scope (all people of color being at risk).

To return to Shadow Ticket, Richard Beck, writing in The Yale Review (2025), brings these central issues of surveillance to the fore, “In McTaggart, one finds a forebear of all the ‘dirt-stupid gorillas,’ to borrow Pynchon’s phrasing, who are now joining ICE because (among other reasons) they’re excited about the pay and opportunities for work-related travel.” He continues, “Or one sees Joe Biden, who took office promising to save the rules-based international order and then, by supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, ushered in that order’s final disintegration,” and concludes, “or one sees George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom decided that the benefits of waging unlimited war across the globe while wielding unchecked executive authority would outweigh any potential longer-term negative consequences.” In the same way, Pat (whose initials are an anagram for the director) and Perfidia represent a similar failure. While we do see serious figures such as Benicio del Toro’s character, Sensei Sergio, Pat, and Perfidia are frauds. The film ends with the former taking a selfie and the latter pretending her actions, which led to the deaths of fellow revolutionaries, are somehow forgivable. Both works resonate because of the weight they bring to the present and their utter certainty that we are not seriously prepared for what is about to come. Equally unprepared for what is to come, Bruno and Skeet will encounter an America very different from the one they left, FDR no longer being in charge. In the most powerful image of the book, Pynchon paints a symbol for “post-American” life.Footnote ²² He writes, “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman draped in military gear less ceremonial than suited to action in the field.” When Bruno guesses that he’s looking at the “Statue of Liberty,” he’s told, “there is no Statue of Liberty … not where you’re going.” Confused, Bruno questions whether he’s being taken back to the US only to hear “We are, and then again we’re not … It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile” (p. 290).

However unready we may be for a world where the Statue of Liberty is viewed ironically, prepare we must, as the world of surveillance technologies and predictive analytics is always-already intertwined with the incentives of capital and the weaponized fantasies of the state. Over the last decade we have seen two styles of control (shaping thought and physically limiting movement), one overt and one covert, both dangerous and previously thought of as dialectical. What I’m getting at is expressed in the following quotation by linguist and foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky: “in what [is] nowadays called a totalitarian state/military state or something, it’s easy you just hold a bludgeon over their heads and if they get out of line you just smash them over the head, but as societies become more free and democratic you lose that capacity and therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda” (1992). Specifically, you artificially narrow the range of debate while intensifying the debate over that narrow range of issues. While one could certainly point to the ways the state pressured media companies to narrow debate around topics such as Covid, however, the fact of the matter is we will never be in a “free and democratic society” the way we once imagined as long as between all of our communications and behind all our desires are actors looming in the shadows, watching and influencing the actions of those being watched. However, what Chomsky misses is the conflation of these two styles of domination. We live in a world with both concentration camps, militarized police, and rogue ICE agents alongside surveillance technologies producing an omnipresent architecture in the background of all our actions. This merger could be thought of as techno-feudalism, as Yanis Varoufakis has coined the term.

With the ballooning ICE budget and concentration camps with names like Alligator Alcatraz,Footnote ²³ it is clear this country is sick; the mythologies that sustain and reinforce our democracy are becoming harder to believe. America seems to be having its Nietzschean moment, a death which none of us can quite believe has arrived. When Americans can now watch American-made bombs blow limbs off of Palestinian children, or when we watch American babies ripped from the arms of their American parents, who may not have broken any laws, or when we watch our leaders celebrate extrajudicial murder, we know that our mythologies are sustained only by collective beliefs and the actions that reinforce them. As things break down, those in power will attempt to broaden the scope of surveillance, and with artificial intelligence, the world of thoughtcrime and precrime is already here. With all communication being monitored and everyone potentially under suspicion, this new state of surveillance noir, one where everyone is always-already watched, nudged, and judged, is ripe for examination. For, as the poet Juvenal asks, who will watch the watchmen?