Seeing Like a Capitalist: Histories of Commercial Surveillance in America.

The 2018 fall conference will explore the history of commercial surveillance in the United States, from settlement to the present. These non-state surveillance activities might be found in a variety of business settings and industries, involve a range of formal or informal practices, and might be directed at customers, media audiences, borrowers, consumer markets, employees, or labor. The long history of commercial surveillance serves to illuminate the precursors, continuities, and logic of today's "surveillance capitalism."