Monitory politics, digital surveillance and new protest movements: an analysis of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

Abstract

: In this article we seek to inject some dynamism and complexity into the current scholarship on digital surveillance. Drawing from ethnographic research in Hong Kong, we argue that digital surveillance is a multi-directional endeavour with top-down, bottom-up and horizontal dimensions. Therefore it cannot be reduced to desktop-down portrayals of an almighty ‘surveillance state’ – not even in advanced surveillance regimes like China’s. Instead we suggest that digital surveillance practices must be set within a much larger, dynamic system we describe as monitory politics , a type of political action in which state and non-state actors surveil and shape one another’s activities across a rapidly changing communicative landscape. To develop this idea, we first provide a brief methodological section based on our participant observation during the 2014 protests in Hong Kong, also known as the Umbrella Movement, after which we review the existing literature on China’s surveillance efforts. We then sketch an account of the protests, followed by a discussion of the uncannily similar horizontal (or lateral) surveillance practices of local people and the police. We conclude that China’s ‘networked authoritarianism’ (MacKinnon 2011, 2012) is far from being a perfect model of control, for numerous forms of dissent and resistance survive in the country, with the Hong Kong protests as a case in point.