Since the Reagan era, American economic policy has amounted to self-colonization. Democratic majorities have consistently supported legal regimes that have enabled corporations to extract the lion’s share of the gains from trade from the public. For example, they have supported a corporate law regime that denies the public democratic control over the behavior of corporations and instead gives dictatorial powers to shareholders and managers. The Internet has made it even easier for firms to extract surpluses from consumers through surveillance and algorithmic pricing. One small contribution toward a project of decolonizing the public would be for consumers to obtain a property right in their personal information. This would allow them to claw back some of the surpluses that technology has taken from them.

Use Case 4 in Chapter 7 explores the regulation of MDTs in the context of employment monitoring under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Equality Acquis, the Platform Work Directive (PWD), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Article 88 GDPR serves as a useful foundation, supported by valuable guidance aimed at protecting employees from unlawful monitoring practices. In theory, most MDT-based practices discussed in this book are already prohibited under the GDPR. Additionally, the EU’s robust equality acquis can effectively address many forms of discrimination in this sector. The AIA reiterates some existing prohibitions related to MDT-based monitoring practices in the workplace. However, a core challenge in employment monitoring lies in ensuring transparency and enforcement. There has long been a call for a lex specialis for data protection in the employment context, which should include a blacklist of prohibited practices or processing operations, akin to the one found in the PWD. Notably, processing and inferring mind data should be included among the practices on this blacklist.

This chapter explores the prehistory of ambivalence as an embodied emotion related to human survival by examining the ambivalent reactions to plague law in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Long before the word “ambivalence” appeared in English, Defoe depicts actions and thoughts that we now think of as “ambivalent.” In the face of a deadly plague that resulted in legal regulation enabling government surveillance, Defoe’s narrator shifts loyalties as restlessly as he shifts positions, ambivalently pivoting between loyalty to the larger community as represented by the law and pursuit of his own concerns. The chapter suggests that Defoe presents ambivalence as a mode of resistance to state surveillance and control that avoids the most extreme expression of resistance, that of suicide, or as eighteenth-century law construed it, “self-murder.” Ambivalence, often thought of as a self-defeating emotion, is represented as serving a protective function, creating space for individuals to resist legal authority, neither capitulating to state control nor exercising a fatal form of resistance.

How the Shepherd conceives of human–spirit relations leads me to examine two examples of the consequences of this entanglement of spirit possession and enslavement. I point first to how the holy spirit in the Shepherd functions similarly to the Roman enslaved overseer (vilicus) who represents the physically absent enslaver and surveils other enslaved persons. The Shepherd solves the problem that despotic writers (e.g., Cato, Columella) lament regarding how to guarantee that the vilicus is not mistaken for the absentee enslaver: God becomes both the enslaver and the vilicus, the ever-present surveillance over the enslaved through spirit possession. I also focus on one tricky passage in the Shepherd, a parable about an enslaved person working on a vineyard and its complex layers of interpretations offered by the Shepherd (Similitude 5), to better understand how the Shepherd conceptualizes the relationship between the holy spirit and the flesh that it treats as a vessel. I show how the Shepherd views enslavement to the holy spirit as a necessary risk for the enslaver, since the spirit can be polluted and defiled if the enslaved body in which it dwells is not constantly maintained.

With its assessment of cases involving Oscar Wilde, Cindy Lee Garcia, Arne Svenson, and Hulk Hogan and analysis of authorial inquiries raised by slavery daguerreotypes, surveillance art, paparazzi photographs, revenge porn, and celebrity sex tapes, Chapter 1 identifies and critiques the problematic conflation of copyright’s authorship and fixation requirements that functions to deny performers property interests in creative works. Copyright’s authorship-as-fixation regime rests on a faulty premise, betrays copyright law’s role in recognizing and rewarding creativity, and denies authorial rights to a class of individuals – subjects – who provide significant original contributions to works within copyright’s traditional subject matter. Just as significantly, given the dramatic disparities in capital accumulation and control over the tools of creative production and continuing inequalities in the representation of women and persons of color behind the camera, the authorship-as-fixation doctrine has had far-reaching societal consequences by propertizing the white male gaze and giving legal bite to a system of production and ownership that imbues rightsholders with the power to control representations of female and non-white bodies.

This chapter takes aim at the assumption that affording special legal protections to journalists, beyond those enjoyed by the public, effectively limits law enforcement’s power to interfere with the press function. First, it describes how law enforcement often evades, violates, or simply ignores existing protections, raising questions about their effectiveness. Supporters of special protections from law enforcement might argue that the underinclusiveness of existing rules simply illustrates the need to update and expand these protections. But expanding procedural safeguards is unlikely to adequately protect the press function. Indeed, heightened press-specific rules might actually encourage law enforcement to use other substantive approaches to criminalize journalism and reporting and thus evade procedural protections. Amid broadening efforts to criminalize protest, trespass, and newsgathering, the substantive criminal law offers many possible avenues for law enforcement to crack down on critical reporting, threatening the checking function. This dynamic suggests that the press’s long-standing strategy of seeking procedural or narrow protections against law enforcement is misguided and ineffective. Instead, to ensure its autonomy and independence in the long run, the press should be a more active participant in seeking to limit law enforcement power and authority.

The production of knowledge in public health involves a systematic approach that combines imagination, science, and social justice, based on context, rigorous data collection, analysis, and interpretation to improve health outcomes and save lives. Based on a comprehensive understanding of health trends and risk factors in populations, research priorities are established. Rigorous study design and analysis are critical to establish causal relationships, ensuring that robust evidence-based interventions guide beneficial health policies and practice. Communication through peer-reviewed publications, community outreach, and stakeholder engagement ensures that insights are co-owned by potential beneficiaries. Continuous monitoring and feedback loops are vital to adapt strategies based on emerging outcomes. This dynamic process advances public health knowledge and enables effective interventions. The process of addressing a complex challenge of preventing HIV infection in young women in sub-Saharan Africa, a demographic with the least social power but the highest HIV risk, highlights the importance of inclusion in knowledge generation, enabling social change through impactful science.

This chapter considers the influential argument that there is a formal and substantive complicity between disciplinary surveillance and the novel, specifically the realist novel. Foucauldian readings of literature argue that the nineteenth-century realist novel functioned as a kind of disciplinary power, acting as a complement to the spatial technologies of a disciplinary society. This argument has not been readily acknowledged by the spatial turn in literary studies, but this chapter revisits the disciplinary theme in Dickens’ David Copperfield and compares that novel to Thackeray’s Pendennis. Finding very different treatments of space, surveillance, and the self leads to a reassessment of Foucauldian criticism and the idea that the novel is complicit with disciplinary spatiality. As Bildungsromans, Pendennis and David Copperfield have many similarities, but whereas Dickens plays up the themes of disciplinary introspection and an internalised form of carceral surveillance, Thackeray’s hero remains subject only to a worldly form of discipline, including the business of literature itself. Thackeray moreover suggests that prisons are a microcosm of society rather than that the techniques of the prison extend to a disciplinary spatiality. The chapter concludes that literature exhibits and exemplifies different kinds of spatiality and different versions of the carceral imaginary.

This chapter illustrates the rise of automated decision-making and surveillance technologies in government, alongside the growing political inequality within Western liberal democracies. It examines the historical development of the use of technology in government, from paper-based systems to increasingly networked electronic systems, culminating in the extensive use of automation and AI in government. It demonstrates the effect of new technologies on vulnerable populations, honing in on social security as a case study. It shows that since the 1970s, the rapid advancements of technologies, combined with the “new public management” ideology, have effected fundamental changes in the processes, structures, staffing levels, and operations of government to an unprecedented extent. To illustrate the significant issues relating to the use of automated government decision-making, the chapter focuses on the government’s use of automation in social security as a case study.

This chapter considers how the right to freedom of thought should be viewed in circumstances of injustice. Specifically, we discuss whether the right not to reveal thoughts, the right not to be punished for thoughts, or the right not to have thoughts impermissibly altered, should ever be overridden. Examples include whether histories of genocide can justify surveillance of antisemitic or racist attitudes, whether access to thoughts may be helpful in proving intent to discriminate, and whether internet privacy protections should yield in the face of uses of social media in ways that further structural injustice. The chapter concludes that defences of freedom of thought as an ideal may be less convincing in situations of significant injustice or threats of violence.

The right to freedom of thought is enshrined in Article 32(1) of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution. This right aims to facilitate democratic discourse, critical thinking, and societal progress. However, despite its constitutional protection, the right remains underdeveloped statutorily, in judicial decisions, and in academic literature. Ambiguity persists in defining and qualifying violations of this right, as no court has thus far engaged in a comprehensive analysis to establish its content and scope. Instead, it has been intertwined with discussions on the scope, application, and limitations of freedoms of expression, religion, belief, and opinion, being regarded as the essential inner element necessary for the exercise of these freedoms. This chapter examines the scope of the right to freedom of thought in Kenya and the importance of recognising it as an independent right, despite its interconnectedness with the aforementioned freedoms. Ensuring this recognition allows citizens to develop their own set of ideals and belief systems without facing coercion to disclose their thoughts, punishment for holding certain thoughts, impermissible alteration of their thoughts, or a lack of an enabling environment to hold and express their thoughts. To establish this, the chapter explores the historical and legal framework of the right to freedom of thought in Kenya and examines its interplay with related constitutional rights such as freedom of expression, belief, religion, and opinion. It addresses contemporary issues, including the impact of technology, surveillance, and cancel culture on freedom of thought. Recommendations are then made on its applicability and how courts and academics can navigate the complexities surrounding its scope, content, and limitations.