Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Political Science

Advisor

Susan Buck-Morss

Subject Categories

Communication Technology and New Media | Mass Communication | Political Theory | Politics and Social Change | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Digital Labor, Surveillance, Settler-Colonialism, Palestine, Neoliberalism, Decolonization

Abstract

This thesis investigates Palestinian digital labor through the method of montage. Digital labor, understood as bodily activity transfigured by digital machines into exploitable information, is examined within the context of Israeli surveillance technologies used against Palestinians. The study critically explores the dual political functions of these technologies: as tools of settler-colonial domination aiming to dispossess Palestinians, and as neoliberal mechanisms seeking to profit from the surveillance of Palestinian bodies. The second half of the thesis turns to the ways Palestinians engage with such technologies and unsettle the economic and colonial logics embedded in them.

The research is structured nonlinearly using fragmentation, juxtaposition, and amalgamation as tools that mirror the operating principles of digital technologies, and how these help shape social realities. Chapter 1 examines how Israeli settler-colonialism and neoliberalism become embedded in surveillance technologies. Chapter 2 deals with the question of profit in colonial surveillance, whereas Chapter 3 deals with the colonial question in capitalist surveillance. The inherent tension between these two logics forms the crux of this study. The intention is not to portray Palestinian digital labor as unique in the context of global surveillance, capital accumulation, and sovereign violence, but to position it as another extractive regime closely connected to Western colonialism and its dominant narrative of history. This argument will be reinforced by exploring other forms of digital labor, such as slave labor in the Congo and assembly work in China, which are crucial for sustaining the same corporations and technologies that affect Palestinians.

Chapter 4 shifts the focus to Palestinian resistance, highlighting how Palestinians disrupt and reappropriate the technologies used to surveil them to counter various forms of Israeli oppression. This chapter underscores the importance of understanding the contingent interactions between technology and human agency, challenging deterministic interpretations of the potential of technologies to mediate social reality.

The thesis concludes with a discussion on the relationship between surveillance, the nation-state, and possibilities of technological mediation of human relations beyond carceral and profit-oriented logics.

Download

Share

COinS