It seems as though a capitalist class operating in the archipelago is anxious to grab—that is, ready and poised to identify, expropriate, and exploit land that is best suited for a simplification into oil palm plantations. On the ground, residents we’ve talked to describe this experience as living inside a “war zone.” Other residents and local activists are set to advance a lawsuit on behalf of “future generations” to protect traditional lands threatened by development. It is surveillance that produces such a war for territory; however, it is not the typology of surveillance typically debated in North Atlantic symposia, where private rights and personal freedoms tend to be weighed in some proportion against the importance of security and crime prevention. This form of surveillance has, from the outset, eliminated the individual as a consideration because it is surveilling land and its productivity more than any individual or their family’s welfare or livelihood. The outcome is simple: optimized expulsions and increased development. Or, seen from the point of view of those subject to such brutalizing and optimizing modes of surveillance: a “war zone.”

From this perspective, it is important to emphasize some crucial reflections made by David Lyon during his lecture on “life mining” after Snowden. Focusing mainly on the transformations brought about by computerized surveillance in the individual’s workplace, Lyon first introduced his ideas according to a structure of “the three Vs”—Velocity, Volume, and Variety—the strategies, he argued, used to produce portraits of individuals by extracting and calculating their metadata. While we agree with Lyon’s general caution that “life on the internet requires a rethinking what it means to be an individual and […] the responsibilities within internet life,” it was his invocation of two other “V-words,” brought up later in the lecture, that we want to recall here: the notions of value and vulnerability. If surveillance capitalism is indeed poised to erode notions of mutualism and reciprocity, we hope that the debates regarding such a “complete collapse” (Lyon’s phrase) can move well beyond liberal concerns regarding individual, self-securitizing subjectivities; these discussions would benefit from a greater attention to the broader questions of access to data, remote sensing technologies, and the entire apparatus of valuation and vulnerability that is currently being operated as a means for expulsion in the tropical rainforests of Indonesia and so many other regions in this world. If discussions of surveillance remain solely within the framework of individualized, liberal rights, we see little chance of combatting or confronting the interminable violence enacted in the name of security.