'Granular biopolitics: Facial recognition, pandemics and the securitization of circulation' by Mark Andrejevic, Chris O’Neill, Gavin Smith, Neil Selwyn and Xin Gu in (2024) 26(3) New Media and Society 1204-1226 comments
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric monitoring to expand into new markets. One anticipated result is the wholesale reconfiguration of shared and public space enabled by the automated identification and tracking of individuals in real time. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, this article considers the forms of ‘environmental’ governance envisioned by those developing and deploying the technology for the purposes of security, risk management, and profit. We argue that the ‘contactless culture’ that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic anticipates the normalization of a form of mass-customized biopolitics: the ability to operate on the population and the individual simultaneously through automated forms of passive identification. This form of governance relies not just on machinic recognition, but on the real-time reconfiguration of physical space through automated access controls and the channelling of both people and information.
A New York City attorney received widespread media coverage when she was singled out by an automated facial recognition system and denied access to see the famed Rockettes with her daughter at Radio City Music Hall during the Christmas holidays. Reportedly, the venue’s parent company, which owns several New York City venues, including Madison Square Garden, had a database of the employees of law firms engaged in legal action against and was systematically excluding them from events (Hill and Kilgannon, 2022). The incident was, in the scheme of things, relatively minor, but it highlighted the use of facial recognition technology for the management circulation in a way that is likely to become increasingly common as the technology spreads. We open with this example, because the control of access and circulation with automated facial recognition was a recurring theme in our research on the deployment of facial recognition technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. The multiplication of boundaries and checkpoints during the pandemic lent itself to automated firms of identity and status verification. As in the case of the New York attorney, individuals in a crowd could be identified and singled out – based on a range of information including COVID-19 symptoms (such as elevated temperature), past exposure, and their vaccination or quarantine status. Although the focus of this article is on the framing of the utility of facial recognition during the pandemic, the logic of automated governance we examine has broader relevance in the era of remote, real-time biometric identification.
Indeed, the imperatives of the COVID-19 response – social distancing and contactless-ness – accelerated the development and deployment of passive forms of tracking and detection that enable increasingly individualized forms of social control. As soon as physical proximity came to be viewed as a threat, technologies that provide ‘at-a-distance’ services were enrolled to replace face-to-face activities so as to reduce the potential for viral contagion. At the same time, the goal of preserving as much circulation as possible led to the replacement, in many contexts, of blanket forms of quarantine by targeted forms of screening and sorting. The goal was to allow ‘safe’ forms of circulation while identifying and curtailing avenues of potential contagion. As it transpired, the social distancing imperative became a selling point for the emerging smart-camera and facial recognition industry, which mobilized the promise of efficient, passive, mass-customized monitoring. The result was, as one news account put it, ‘a lucrative market for facial recognition manufacturers’ (O’Donnell, 2020).
The widespread highly publicized response to the pandemic thus spurred, ‘novel uses of biometric technologies to limit contagion and maintain economic opportunities’ (Van Natta et al., 2020: 1). Our field work in security industry trade shows suggests that for the promoters and vendors of the technology, the pandemic provided additional impetus for highlighting the personalized logics of governance and control already envisioned by the technologies they have been developing and promoting. ‘Frictionlessness’ – for example, could be reframed not just as a means of easing passage through existing checkpoints (such as secure locations, ticketed venues and transit turnstiles), but as a way of managing the proliferating array of borders and access points associated with pandemic management. Office buildings, apartment complexes, shopping malls, and public facilities sprouted checkpoints to monitor vaccine status, symptoms, and potential exposure risks. Some systems regulated access to workspaces based on pandemic occupancy requirements. This ‘thickening’ of the borders to fill a growing number of spaces – and even to enable continuous real-time monitoring – heightened the need for automated forms of identity and status verification. The ability to deploy automated recognition systems at the level of individual movement and access control represents an emerging scale and temporality of the governance of circulation with implications that, while revealed by the pandemic, extend beyond it.
Drawing upon field research on the use of facial recognition during the pandemic, we describe this form of governance as a ‘granular’ form of biopolitics – a formulation meant to highlight the customized forms of intervention it envisions. A more precise, though perhaps more obscure, formulation would be to describe the mass-individualized governance of shared spaces as a granular form of ‘environmentality’. This term invokes speculative observations by Michel Foucault (2008: 259) about forms of control that operate not at the level of subjectification (as in the case of disciplinary practices), but at that of the environment, or ‘milieu’. Typically, the milieu refers to a shared environment, however, the novelty of automated identification is that it enables the individualization and customization of the milieu itself. The result, we argue, is the mass-customized management of populations at the level of the individual, without necessarily relying upon the attendant forms of subjectification that mark the disciplinary ‘pole’ of biopolitics. As Han (2022) puts it in his reflections on ‘infocracy’, ‘. . . disciplinary power gives way to smart power, a power that does not give orders but whispers, that does not command but nudges. In other words, it pokes us with subtle tools that influence our behaviour’ (p. 5). As we shall see, a range of imperatives including heightened acceleration and norms of efficiency can be built into the material and informational environment without necessarily being ideologically internalized. We may not consciously desire to continually accelerate our production of electronic communication, but the systems we rely upon make this process all but inevitable. Processes of subjective internalization can, in this respect, be displaced or bypassed by feedback in the physical and informational environment. Rouvroy et al. (2013) make a similar point in their work on algorithmic governmentality, which, they argue, ‘produces no subjectification, it circumvents and avoids reflexive human subjects, feeding on infra-individual data which are meaningless on their own, to build supra-individual models of behaviours or profiles without ever involving the individual’ (p. 169).
This shift marks a historical development in the deployment of biopower anticipated by the widespread deployment of automated forms of real-time identification at-a-distance, and, relatedly, in the development of customizable environments including virtual and augmented reality.
