Surveillance Capitalism in America

This volume offers a crucial and long overdue historical intervention in the study of modern surveillance and capitalism in the United States. At a basic level, it historicizes what has been taken as unprecedented, revealing a deep logic to surveillanceas a mode of rationalization, bureaucratization, and social control traceable to the late eighteenth century forward. The chapters in this book highlight a variety of surveillance practices that predate computers and miniaturized electronics-from the disciplinary control of enslaved labor, to the management of customer service staff, to the solicitous scrutiny of hotel guests before 1950. Many of the chapters illustrate the power of written records-account books, lists, and reports-as technologies of control, monitoring, and investigation. By historicizing modern surveillance, this volume shows how post-9/11 surveillant practices and contemporary digital platforms are elaborations, rather than breaks, from the past. Though surveillance themes are often implicit in historical studies, as in the fields of labor history and the history of civil rights, the chapters in this collection make such themes explicit and central to the story of American capitalism--