The Surveillance Economy: Toward a Geopolitics of Personalization

Since the Snowden revelations of 2013, wider public knowledge of online surveillance practices has led to increasingly sceptical attitudes about the corporate world’s surveillant analytics and Silicon Valley's innovations. But these developments must be seen as part of a geopolitical apparatus that works, in part, according to a cultural logic of personalization. Two works from End User at the Hayward Gallery (curated by Cliff Lauson, 27 November, 2014 – 8 February, 2015) – Jon Rafman’s The 9 Eyes of Google Street View (2009-) and Liz Sterry’s Kay’s Blog (2011) – analyze the geopolitics of personalization, questioning whose bodies are made to bear the brunt of this economy’s sundry spatial transpositions.