Towards an Ecology of Surveillance

In this paper I discuss the necessity to overcome the image of Big Brother in addressing surveillance issues through design practice. The idea of an ecological approach to surveillance, with references to the society of control (Deleuze, 1992), the sensor society (Andrejevic and Burdon, 2014), the capture model (Agre, 1994) and the concept of opacity (Glissant, 1990; Blas, 2014), is then presented as a suitable theoretical framework for understanding and questioning contemporary digital surveillance. The ecology of surveillance makes it possible to highlight: the decentralized and variable geometric structure of control; the shift from optical to an informatic visibility; the persistent asymmetries of knowledge and power implied in the ecology of surveillance. Based on this framework, a pool of case studies is analysed in order to trace two different approaches in the design of counter-surveillance practices: the deconstructionist approach and the tactical one.