Robert M. Pallitto’s short book Bargaining with the Machine examines engagement with modern technologies of surveillance through the lens of the concept of “bargaining.” Its key claim is that most of the bargains we make in this domain—surrendering personal data for access to an internet service, for example—are vitiated by, among other things, lack of information, inequalities in bargaining power, externalities and other social harms, and harms to an individual’s dignity. Yet many bargains that involve surveillance are “irresistible”: the individual can neither negotiate their terms nor reject them out of hand given the pervasiveness of the technologies involved. Consider the case of social media. People who sign up for a Facebook account voluntarily surrender some personal information, including information about their “social graph,” in exchange for certain benefits, including ease of communication with their friends and acquaintances, a simple uniform interface to consume other information, and a variety of opportunities for further social interaction. Facebook has a “privacy policy,” but short of not signing up to Facebook, there is little people can do to meaningfully alter its terms. Moreover, the potential harms to privacy of surrendering information to Facebook are obscure to most people, and in any case the network effects associated with social media may make it difficult for people not to sign up or, once signed up, to give up on the service. Facebook’s bargaining power is thus large relative to that of any potential user.

Pallitto uses the figure of “the machine” to indicate not only the way in which these bargains with large, impersonal corporations or state entities do not seem to make room for actual negotiation but also the extent to which they hold the seductive promise of machine-like efficiency or convenience. Both of these ideas can be conceptualized as savings (of cost or effort), and in the first chapter Pallitto explores the trade-offs that emerge from exchanging information for convenience or efficiency with case studies of registered travel programs (which promise faster movement through airports in exchange for more intrusive prior screening) and customer loyalty cards (which promise savings in exchange for information about purchasing habits). The focus is on how these “technologies of convenience and efficiency” produce not only savings but also create differentiations among subjects, subtle status distinctions that “limit [people’s] ability to act and protect themselves and their personal information” (p. 42).

The book then expands its field of vision to the ubiquitous data gathering common in e-commerce and social networking settings, arguing that the pervasiveness and obscurity of this data gathering make a mockery of the possibility of opting out. Digital platforms, in particular, provide unavoidable infrastructure for a variety of activities, including retail, advertising, logistics, and software. Such platforms enable groups of people to easily find each other to conduct commerce (consider, for example, Uber drivers and people looking for rides, or shoppers using Amazon to buy products from independent sellers). Their convenience and efficiency make them ubiquitous, and their ubiquity makes them difficult to avoid. But “data extraction” from their users is a key part of what profitable platforms do, and this data then tend to be shared and used in ways obscure to users. The combination of pervasive data gathering by platforms and opaque uses of this data makes it difficult for users to understand the potential harms to privacy that come from using those platforms or to find remedies for actual data breaches.

The next chapter details data gathering in the built environment, especially how the technologies loosely grouped under the label of “the Internet of Things” interact with various “smart city” initiatives to use networked monitoring technologies to address municipal challenges. Here the key problem is the way in which many technological solutions to the problems of municipal governance tend to empower certain groups at the expense of others; they reinforce a “neoliberal ethos” that undermines collective action and prioritizes the profits of solution vendors over the interests of citizens (pp. 70–71). Pallitto draws a genealogy of the “smart city” going back to the nineteenth century, using the cases of Gold Rush-era San Francisco and Robert Moses-era New York to illustrate how technologies presented as solutions to municipal problems—dams, aqueducts, and roads, but also new laws designed to encourage redevelopment—contributed to private enrichment at the expense of the public. But he also notes how modern “smart city” technologies encourage the formation of novel “rhizomatic” networks of surveillance—with governments surveilling citizens, sharing data with private companies who use it to target ads, and citizens in turn surveilling other citizens and themselves. The Deleuzian metaphor is meant to indicate that the surveillant gaze does not emanate from a single point but creates “ever-branching” pathways through which power is exercised by seeing and being seen. Thus, governments and corporations watch citizens who adjust their behavior accordingly, and citizens also watch citizens, as well as governments.

Pallitto criticizes these “smart cities” not only because they present some dangers to privacy and autonomy but also because “smart city developers … cannot actually deliver the city that they promise because the specifics of the promise are in fact impossible to fulfill” (p. 83). By this he means that smart city developers promise the “total optimization” of city life, because cities are complex systems where human beings make free choices. Since this promise is unfulfillable, the “bargains” between governments and technology developers are “illusory,” serving merely to obscure sordid profit-making motives. This part of the book feels as if it is attacking a straw man argument; hyperbolic marketing materials aside (and not much of it is cited in the chapter), there is little reason to believe that proponents of “smart cities” promise “total” optimization or that they are believed if they do promise that.

A fifth chapter takes a brief trip down “avenues of resistance” to the technologies described in the previous four, including countersurveillance, encryption, cryptocurrencies, cash or barter transactions, and “surveillance art.” The principle of selection here is obscure: cryptocurrencies depend on encryption technology, and both cryptocurrencies and cash or barter transactions increase anonymity in commerce, but there is no obvious grid linking these various avenues of resistance. Given that many of these technologies of resistance also present some problems—cryptocurrencies facilitate illegal or harmful commerce, and cryptocurrency speculation is full of scams; countersurveillance can produce “collateral damage”; surveillance art is often ineffective in raising awareness—more discussion of the kinds of spaces that these technologies facilitate or make difficult would have been useful.

For example, some technologies may make possible escape from surveillance (e.g., anonymity via encrypted communication), whereas others may empower the people surveilled (e.g., countersurveillance of the police through cell phones), and depending on the environment they can render harmless the threats from other surveillance technologies. Consider, for example, how the proliferation of ad blockers and ad-clicking bots has rendered ad targeting increasingly ineffective (if it ever was particularly effective). Ad blockers enable anonymity, but ad-clicking bots result from the competition between ad sellers and buyers in automated auction markets where most online ads are sold (a topic not discussed in the book): they end up reducing the power of advertisers to make use of personal data (much of which may in any case be incorrect—see, for example, Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, 2020). Surveillance technologies are in some instances less powerful than a bargaining framework may suggest.

A final, theoretical conclusion brings the book’s “bargaining” framework into dialogue with theories of the social contract, emphasizing how the bargains we make with surveillance technologies can be thought of as “nested” within the social contract. Here Pallitto again has recourse to the figure of the “machine” to suggest that we end up consenting to these bargains because the technologies of neoliberal capitalism produce “desiring machines”: subjects willing to give up their freedom and privacy in exchange for the opportunity to consume freely. This is perhaps the weakest part of the book. Although the bargains we make with surveillance technology can certainly be criticized for their one-sidedness and obscurity, and technocratic projects promising governance improvements may undermine democratic collective action, Pallitto is not convincing that the constitution of the “consuming subject” is the ultimate reason why people ultimately accept the trade-offs proposed by technologies of surveillance. Genuine social contracts, after all, are also fictions with little choice involved, as Pallitto seems to recognize; yet they also encode ideas about good reasons for abiding by the bargain. Bargaining with the Machine is nevertheless a useful look at the many ways in which “bargains” with surveillance technologies are often vitiated in a variety of often subtle ways and should be of interest to students of the subject.