For Eksample

Editorial Note

Argus Panoptes was the perpetual vigilante serving goddess Hera. The story survives because it was never really about him. It was about service, about who commands the gaze. The eyes of Argus, once in the service of Hera, now move within the command of capital. The vigilance is not without purpose; it exceeds even Hera’s design, no longer content to guard, but to anticipate and extract from what it sees. To be is already to be seen, and to be seen is to be placed within an order not one’s own. Yet such a condition, however pervasive, cannot claim necessity without remainder. For even Argus, in his watchfulness, was not beyond interruption.

The question of who watches whom has become inseparable from how we live, work, love, protest, consume and remember. From CCTV cameras and biometric databases to algorithms, attendance sheets, and the gaze we turn upon ourselves, surveillance exceeds technology. From watchtowers to things that fit in our pockets, the historic progression has been noteworthy. But do we see the crisis? Why would it keep evolving? As capital manifests in new ways, surveillance keeps finding newer disguises. This issue invites readers to linger in that uneasy space between visibility and invisibility, asking what it means to be seen and what it costs to remain unseen.

Contents

1. Surveillance as the Symptom of a Criminal State
   Anand Teltumbde
2. The Philosophy of the Gaze
   Anup Dhar
3. Can AI Surveillance learn from Medieval Surveillance?
   David Lyon
4. A Politics of Opacity: Thinking Against Surveillance
   Dilip Menon
5. Surveillance Academia
   Sabyasachi Das
6. Religion, Politics and Law in a Disintegrating World
   Sanaullah Khan
7. Surveillance: A Note
   Susan Viswanathan
8. Cloud Capital – The Force Behind Technofeudalism
   Yanis Varoufakis