He’s Watching You foregrounds the materiality and cunning politics of surveillance capitalism. The collage depicts a modified Mark Zuckerberg floating within layered original photographs of the pipes at one of the internet’s transatlantic entry points that carry fiber optic cables into the United States.
Surveillance capitalists have long cloaked the political consequences of their work in shows of golly-gosh innocence. They have similarly obscured the materiality of surveillance capitalism in a fog of deceptive euphemism (recall, for instance, uses of the terms “engagement,” “privacy,” “share,” “cloud,” “connect,” “A/B test,” “friend,” “digital breadcrumb,” “anonymize,” “user,” “smart,” “speaker,” and “personalize.”) With He’s Watching You, socio confronts both disingenuous innocence and insidious euphemism. The digital collage invites viewers to reflect upon the continuous surveillance systems that look back at us from beyond our screens. Contra the all-too-familiar lullaby of Silicon Valley “innovator”-worship, it depicts visually the unceasing artifice and ruthless guile which undergird the systems of individualized mass behavior alteration that increasingly enmesh us.
He’s Watching You takes its title from an iconic World War II era propaganda poster, which warned Americans to beware of spies.
Note: This work is published on page six of the present issue (#159) of Adbusters, a Canada-based activist magazine, and in promotional materials for the same. Those interested in purchasing this work should only do so with the understanding that it does not confer retroactive or future rights to Adbusters revenue associated with the appearance of this image in the magazine or its associated promotional material.