Organized epistemic deception: Imagining the utopia-dystopia of contemporary digital surveillance through fiction

Surveillance and technology have long been central to utopian and dystopian fiction, where future societies use technology as an instrument of control, with utopian promises of security and dystopian risks to the rule of law, privacy, and freedom of expression. Contemporary digital surveillance, which relies on technological infrastructures that transform ways of seeing and knowing, opens new intersections between utopia and dystopia. This article examines, through speculative fiction, how digital surveillance enables the organized production of epistemic deception via processes of dis-epistemization that combine surveillance technologies and image manipulation. We analyze the BBC series The Capture as a form of speculative ethnography that allows prospective theorization. The series stages a hyper-surveilled society where images are manipulated in real time and in fully credible ways. Our analysis envisions a new form of surveillance that we call here decepticon, i.e. a distributed apparatus that monitors, observes, and subtly manipulates citizens to produce curated versions of reality. Shifting attention from the disciplinary power of surveillance to the processes through which it is epistemized and dis-epistemized, the decepticon operates with machineries of seeing and making see that break and manipulate the relation between data and reality and, rather than being alien to liberal democracies, it is grounded in its institutional conditions that organize expertise and its desires, while also producing important institutional consequences at utopian-dystopian intersections.