As citizens become more legible, the monitoring institutions themselves grow opaque.

Evidence

There is a strange asymmetry here. Anita Gurumurthy, head of Indian civil society organization IT for Change, writes that “as the citizen becomes more and more legible to the state, the state becomes more and more opaque to the citizen,” although we might add corporations to the state in that observation. When the goal of data extraction is the capitalization of human life, we should not be surprised that the resulting knowledges have at best an ambiguous public status. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the legibility inversion from paragraph 390 into a two-way opacity claim — good connective tissue for the reader’s rival-school mapping. — connects to: Citizen suspicion of government can trigger government suspicion of citizens. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 959; Mystified power thrives when citizens are far from its sources; Citizens resist surveillance by hiding from both the state and corporate data extractors — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1560 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Citizen suspicion of government can trigger government suspicion of citizens. #expands (0.85) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 959
• Citizens resist surveillance by hiding from both the state and corporate data extractors #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1560
• Complete surveillance requires those watched to begin monitoring themselves. #expands (0.80)
• Surveillance controls populations chiefly through internalized self-policing #expands (0.80) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 44
• Surveillance capitalists frame their practices as inevitable to hide calculated self-dealing. #exemplifies (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 59
• Mystified power thrives when citizens are far from its sources #corroborates (0.75)
• Undisclosed watchlist status keeps citizens in permanent uncertainty and vulnerability #exemplifies (0.75) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 202