7(2) 2021: Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism

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Nudged to Normal: Images, Behaviour, and the Autism Surveillance Complex
Wentz, Daniela (2021) , S. 265-286
For Shoshana Zuboff, affective computing is one of the key technolo- gies of “rendition” through which surveillance capitalism is realised (Zuboff 2019). An epistemic and technical condition of affective com- puting is the combination of facial detection and facial expression recognition, i.e., the identification of faces by computer vision and the process of measuring human emotions by identifying the corre- sponding facial expressions. While Zuboff criticises affective comput- ing primarily in immediate economic contexts, particularly in market research, this article is devoted to its application in an area that she considers “innocent”: the therapy of people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The focus of this paper is on wearables based on Google’s smart glasses, which aim at teaching social interaction skills to children diagnosed with autism. The paper critically analyses the role of images, their operational logics and datafication for this heterogeneous human- machine constellation and shows that these technologies are hardly innocent. On the contrary, the glasses are a prime example of what Zuboff terms “rendition”, and of the commercialisation of dis/ability in surveillance capitalism.