Histories of Tracking

International conference jointly organised by the C²DH – University of Luxembourg and Universität Siegen

Surveillance has become ubiquitous in digital media environments and is now taken for granted. With every PayPal interaction, at the least more than 600 trackers eavesdrop on its transactional data (Schneier 2018). While there is no lack of critique on digital surveillance and its discontents, its ubiquity and naturalization itself require more explanation. Which historical and economical trajectories have led into the current escalation of digital tracking, tracing, monitoring, classification, intelligence service, and advertising? How can we discover and mobilize counter-points and narratives that explain digital surveillance otherwise? Do micro-level media, data, and sensor practices represent “yet another mutation of capitalism,” to quote from Gilles Deleuze’s famous Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)?

Tracking persons, emotions, objects, apparatuses, money, signs and data is a veritable environing technique. It is also one of the key business applications of platform and data economies, which provide for the infrastructures of state-side institutional surveillance and control. With our joint Luxembourg-Siegen conference on Histories of Tracking we aim to track the trackers historiographically, technologically, and ecologically.

In a seminal text, Phil Agre (2003 [1994]) has encouraged us to think about the difference between rather centralized regimes of (visual) surveillance and data-based institutional regimes of “capture.” Agre has paved the way for a logistical theory of digital surveillance that investigates its micropolitics. While non-visual alphanumeric modes of capturing data do not feel like surveillance, they nonetheless establish an ever more mundane and affective mode of ubiquitous surveillance. What if we follow Agre’s analysis of institutional “grammars of action” that afford a whole spectrum of capturing, monitoring, sensing, and surveillant practices? Histories of tracking, we assume, are histories of the institutions, corporations, and agencies that create the tapestry of surveillance (Lauer 2017). That tapestry might seem all-encompassing and seamless by now, even if it contains loose threads, loopholes, and islands of encryption.

Histories of tracking are co-operative histories that involve the consent, non-consent and dissent of digital media usage (Jones 2024). They are also business histories that rely on what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has aptly called a “behavioral surplus” of data. Last but not least, histories of tracking are histories of its public scrutiny and accountability, from opposing civil rights movements to the political and legal controversies that make the case for regulation.

We thus invited dedicated contributions from Media and Cultural Studies, History, Science and Technology Studies, Surveillance Studies, Platform Studies, Code Studies, Socio-Informatics, Law, and Sociology that combine historiographic and empirical work with grounded theoretical approaches.

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Programme

Scientific committee

• Sebastian Giessmann
• Valérie Schafer
• Tatjana Seitz
• Anne Schreiber
• Inga Schuppener

Organisation

• C²DH – University of Luxembourg
• Universität Siegen

With the support of CRC Media of Cooperation, Siegen; project A01: Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization; C²DH, Université de Luxembourg; FNR, Luxembourg and DFG, Germany

References

^{Agre, Philip E. “Surveillance and Capture. Two Models of Privacy.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. MIT Press, 2003 [1994].}

^{Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7.}

^{Jones, Meg Leta. The Character of Consent. The History of Cookies and the Future of Technology Policy. Information Policy. MIT Press, 2024.}

^{Lauer, Josh. Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. Columbia University Press, 2017.}

^{Schneier, Bruce. “The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With – Schneier on Security.” Schneier on Security, March 14, 2018. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/the_600_compani.html.}

^{Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2019.}