This paper examines pre-packaged policing: the outsourcing of complex policing functions to technology companies as parcelled socio-technical services, offered as a subscription to governments who do not need technical expertise. These varied commodities include software that bundles facial and voice biometric analysis, deep packet inspection, spyware, and more. In particular, it looks at how these commodities are not value neutral but instead accrue important discretion to service providers as well as dependencies on them. It does so by using frameworks from abolitionist, critical data, and critical surveillance scholarship to analyse three suites of commodities from Europe. Three arguments are made: First, that pre-packaged policing creates policing templates through the curation of seemingly self-evident packages of surveillance that are already pre-configured. The mass export of off-the-shelf policing allows discretionary power to be exercised by providers long before the technologies are deployed. Second, discretion and dependencies are accrued through the policing labour and architecture that is sold. This influence is obfuscated through the artificial binary between what is labelled as technical versus policing work—as well as the anything-as-a-service model that bundles subscriptions of software, hardware, and policing labour. Third, an uneven geography of export is created whereby different communities have varying abilities to influence providers based in Europe. These relationalities present a continuation of colonial projects that also exported policing regimes around the world. The adoption of simplified interfaces of policing with clickable surveillance options reifies carceral logics and excludes alternative possibilities of safety. This paper concludes with lessons from abolitionist scholarship and ways to counter the carceral horizons baked into pre-packaged policing commodities.
As with numerous other AI-assisted educational tools, neurotechnology is now also entering classrooms. While techno-optimists herald the importance of using modern technologies for the purposes of personalising education, less is known about the public’s reaction to witnessing these technologies in action. To critically investigate audience responses to the use of neurotechnology in the classroom, we collected n= 3,754 comments posted to a YouTube video story about the experimental use of AI-assisted attention-monitoring headbands in Jinhua Xiaoshun Primary school. By applying a critical discursive psychology approach, our analysis shows a clash between techno-optimistic views and people who view such technologies as symbols of oppressing students, particularly their creativity. Discussions of the technology could be categorised under three interpretive repertoires: (1) “Like a Fitbit for your brain,” (2) “Making cookie-cutter kids,” and (3) “It’s all about control.” We discuss the implications of introducing doom-monitoring technologies—indiscriminate and inaccurate surveillance conducted in anticipation of the “next bad thing”—into children’s learning paths. Wider socio-cultural discourses of resisting oppression and excessive surveillance are at the root of critical assessments of doom-monitoring technologies, while techno-enthusiasm towards the potential for precise measurement of children’s attention spans underlies support for the continued use of similar technologies. Moreover, Western audiences view Chinese use of such technologies as oppressing, while often failing to notice the hypocrisy that lies therein: when authoritarian regimes use surveillance technologies, it relates to control and oppression, while similar instances in Western contexts are mere bumps on the road to important innovation.
