Browsing by Author "Uçak, Mesut"

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Resistance Is an Inside Job: Liquid Surveillance Within the Context of Dispositif, Subject and Lines of Flight
(Kadir Has Üniversitesi, 2020) Uçak, Mesut; Diken, Bülent
Despite the growing human rights and privacy concerns, liquid surveillance machine is now capable of moving with lightning speed in all areas of our lives. Governments and huge transnational companies exploit the data that are gathered from our physical and digital activities with highly questionable methods and purposes. While governments legitimize their efforts by relying on national security discourse and companies on so-called customer satisfaction, now we face an unprecedented privacy crisis which also generates ethical and ontological concerns about human dignity. However, ordinary people who voluntarily participate in liquid surveillance machine, especially within the consumer realm, are as responsible as afore-mentioned actors since they provide the required data and make that machine work and expand. That's why it is meaningless to attribute all the responsibility to the Big Brother who sees everything. Hence, the thesis argues that liquid surveillance is a dispositif of the societies of control and the subject that is the product of the relationship between that dispositif and living beings is the nihilistic last man. The study tries to explore lines of flight from the societies of control within the context of liquid surveillance. In the light of that theoretical framework, the thesis analyzes activities of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which is a non-profit, anti-surveillance organization that promotes digital privacy, free speech at digital platforms and innovation. The study builds a theoretical methodology that enables a comprehensive analysis of the EFF's activities within the contexts of liquid surveillance as the dispositif, nihilistic last man as the subject and counter-information as incarnation of lines of flight.