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TechnoSecuritySociety: Catastrophic Futures, Pre-emptive Security & Mass Surveillance

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TechnoScienceSociety

Part of the book series: Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook ((SOSC,volume 30))

Abstract

In the age of technoscience, science and technology have indiscriminately fused. The dominant narrative is no longer the one of knowledge and progress but rather of application and innovation. This transformation needs to be taken into account when studying security and surveillance architectures in contemporary (post-)democracies. In this chapter, we propose to understand TechnoSecurity as Culture and invite scholars of techno-science to bring their knowledge and skills to the study of security and surveillance architectures. TechnoSecurity is highly technology-oriented and driven by the Post-Newtonian rationality that is genuine to contemporary technoscience culture. The crucial epistemological and ontological difference between modern forms of security and contemporary TechnosScurity is, that contemporary security practices seek to premediate any possible future event, even highly unlikely ones, in the fear that they might turn catastrophic. We argue that to understand TechnoSecurity, it is not sufficient to study specific security technologies in isolation, but we need to situate contemporary security discourses and practices in the context of technosciences at large.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “I will use the word technoscience from now on, to describe all the elements tied to the scientific contents no matter how dirty unexpected or foreign they seem” (Latour 1987: 174).

  2. 2.

    See Cultural Studies of Technoscience: i.a. Franklin and McNeal (1991); Haraway (1985a, b, 1997); Reid and Traweek (2000); Suchman (1987).

  3. 3.

    There are, of course, notable exceptions besides the scholars mentioned in the text, for example, Monahan (2006, 2010). Still, it is fair to claim that (techno-)security remains an underresearched topic in STS.

  4. 4.

    One may take some relief in the fact that the providers of security are very much interested in minimizing the number of false-positives. However, for a person marked as suspicious, the basic uncertainty remains. The individual may even not be aware that she is being confronted by security providers because of an alarm triggered by a technological system.

  5. 5.

    One example of the application of these techniques would be the arrests of peaceful demonstrators at the Olympic Games in London and their ban from the Olympic arena, which implies a suspension of their civil rights.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

    Michael Nagenborg

  2. Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany

    Jutta Weber

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  1. Michael Nagenborg
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Correspondence to Michael Nagenborg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich, Munich, Bavaria, Germany

    Sabine Maasen

  2. Institute of Sociology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Sascha Dickel

  3. Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Christoph Schneider

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Nagenborg, M., Weber, J. (2020). TechnoSecuritySociety: Catastrophic Futures, Pre-emptive Security & Mass Surveillance. In: Maasen, S., Dickel, S., Schneider, C. (eds) TechnoScienceSociety. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43965-1_12

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