Cultural interventions against Internet surveillance and data collection A descriptive study of whether the creators of six cultural products effectively inform the social critique to change the status quo

Abstract

This thesis aims to reveal whether the creators of six cultural products created with the incentive to inform Internet users about surveillance and data collection successfully transform their audience into active participants empowered to understand and alter commercial entities’ insight into their lives. Walter Benjamin’s concept of The Author as Producer (1970) is used as an analytical lens, as it presents the qualities a cultural producer who desires social change needs to incorporate in their work. The cultural products analyzed here, the web browser extensions Lightbeam and Go Rando, the web application commodify.us, the informational website myshadow.org, the advertising campaign Anger Marketing at Roskilde, and the physical artefact Transparency Grenade, are created as responses to commercial surveillance and data collection that is now an unquestioned part of everyday life that nevertheless affects Internet users, often unbeknownst to them. A qualitative content analysis is conducted to understand the extent to which the creators inherit Benjamin’s cultural critical claims. First, the origins of cultural products and performativity as part of social critique are outlined, including Benjamin’s concept. The next section illustrates contemporary cultural critique of technology including the hacker ethic, followed by a section informed by Foucault’s take on power and Deleuze’s control society to demonstrate the corpus’ relevance. Current scholarly approaches to Internet surveillance and data collection are then presented, transitioning into a corpus overview that explains the cultural products, and their creators’ background and view on the issue. The methodology includes an analytical coding framework based on academic articles that implement Benjamin’s concept in the current social technological context. The analysis is structured in the order Benjamin presents his concept. It is found that all analyzed creators make Internet users active participant, empowered to change their situations in the described productive relations. Further studies into the audience’s reception of the analyzed cultural products would bring a more complete understanding of the creators’ achievement.