CommentStreams:296c634e500c0378dd9eb26b0213c8b2

Hi Maja! Your analysis of 2024 Parisian city surveillance is very effective for me, particularly how you aim to understand what "dataveillance" does in crafting, and controlling, citizens' behavior. That makes the Faster section of this piece quite the highlight for me. The specifics you provide of the city's transformation into a heightened state of screen-oriented, camera-oriented surveillance is striking. Thinking alongside Shannon Mattern (particularly her book The City Is Not a Computer), I'd argue that autonomous systems of surveillance might have changed their distribution of materials, but these systems have been equally present in urban design before the CCTV era. I'm wondering if further contextualizing Paris's present situation within a history of urban design's biopolitical desires to shape the law-abiding citizen might be beneficial to further illuminating the security transformation you describe in this piece.

What I'm curious about is: before the streetlamp became "a surveillance instance in empire green or anthracite," and was "a distributor for romantic light," what parts of the city took the role of the surveillance instance? Why have the avenues of surveillance shifted to include the streetlamp? The mention of "antifascist countermovements" makes me think of May '68, and what shifts in their battle with city surveillance might have resulted in our present moment. I totally understand if this line of questioning takes us too far down a historical path and is outside the scope of this piece, but it was great that your approach to this subject matter got me thinking about these topics. (And I didn't even get to the concluding section which I really like, tying shifts in surveillance to the international scale of "digitalization of warfare".) I appreciate this multifaceted analysis of urban control--thanks for sharing!