The Podcaster's Dilemma

5 Recolonizing Podcasts Moving beyond the Frontiers of Instrumentarianism

Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat. We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action – this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society – that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power(New York: Profile Books, 2019), p. 55

In an article excerpted from her book Sounding the Nation: Radio and the Politics of Auditory Culture in Interwar France, Rebecca P. Scales addresses the topic of an imperative for, and origins of, French colonial surveillance – as exercised on the listening habits of the “native” populations in Algeria:

In November of 1934, Algerian Governor-General Jules Carde asked the Algiers Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the French ...