Glossary

Agency: The activeness and purposefulness of individuals and groups to attempt to influence their social reality in a variety of ways.

Cycles of imposed transparency: A dynamic in which two sides increasingly use transparency in order to combat each other.

Deny, Dismiss and Downplay (3Ds): The response of some developers towards the risk their tools create to affected stakeholders: Deny their own role in creating the risk, dismiss the potential or existing risk, and downplay the risk’s seriousness.

Empowering Surveillance: Surveillance that is done in the name of empowering a disadvantaged social group. Within it:

• Data-Driven Empowering Surveillance: A type of empowering surveillance done by creating a database and feeding it with the monitored content.
• Video-Driven Empowering Surveillance: A type of empowering surveillance done by shooting a video, and disseminating it to audiences.

Hollow Infrastructure: Infrastructures that have lost much of their utility for particular groups of users but still maintain a façade of a fully functioning infrastructure.

Independent Research: Research in which the scholar has no compromising dependencies either on funding organizations or fellow scholars.

Industrialization of Surveillance: The current shift to mass-scale surveillance due to the surge in data-hungry AI methods (deep learning, large language models).

Insiders: Individuals with high access to services and the decision-making of an organization.

Large-Scope Research: A research that tries to answer a significant question regarding society by covering substantial ground, either in terms of studied period, location, or case studies.

Move / Counter-Move: The dynamic form in which struggles over conflictual issues play out. Virtually no move is ever the ‘final act’ in a given conflict.

Nontargets: Individuals/groups who most likely will not bear the brunt of a given surveillance technology, at least not in the short- and medium-term, and thus do not fear it.

Repressive-Responsiveness: Repression of large social groups that stems from democratic pressure applied by large, often majoritarian social groups on political actors to produce such repression.

Social Closure: A central power move within society in which resources are made accessible only to a particular group (and not to anybody else) through an exclusion criterion.

Sociological Accountability: Associating a detrimental social phenomenon with the social groups that either designed or contributed to the policy that created it.

Stratified Society: The tendency of societies to be characterized by different tiers of affluence and access to resources according to rigid criteria (e.g., ascribed categories such as race) and semi-rigid criteria (acquired and lifestyle categories such as education).

Stratifying Union: A trade union whose operations result in an increasingly stratified society and in increased inequality between workers.

Targeted Surveillance: Surveillance that is aimed at a specific social group, even if it is broadly applied.

Technological Reinventism: The attempt of developers and innovators to offer a bold and radically different technological solution in a high-stakes field in which many technological solutions have been tried.

Top-Down Power Flow: Refers to how power flows vertically, from the top, within an organization. There are two main types:

• Domino Power Flow: Orders are given by the top (e.g., leadership, management), with the lower echelons following suit, like knocking down a series of dominos by tapping the first one. This type is limited to either issues with low stakes for the lower level of the organization or to issues that the top can easily monitor and punish its members for in the case of digressions.
• Human Wave Power Flow: Directions are given by the top but stream downwards to the lower echelons only as long as each level chooses to comply. This operates like a human wave in a stadium. In order for the directive to continue spreading, each section needs to cooperate with it.

Transparency: Exposure of information about an individual or an organization in both the positive sense (e.g., revealing the truth) and the negative sense (e.g., exposing to attack). Transparency is subdivided into:

• Voluntary transparency: adopted with consent, relying on self-disclosure, and applied universally.
• Imposed transparency: imposed without consent, relying on outside monitoring (surveillance), and targeting certain individuals/groups/organizations.

Union Exclusion/Inclusion: The policy of trade unions with regard to the individuals of a specific social group. Within it, there are four categories:

• Full Union Exclusion: a complete ban on joining a trade union.
• Severe Partial Union Exclusion: individuals from the group are allowed in but are given very limited services and very limited access to the union’s decision-making, to the degree that union membership is hardly worthwhile.
• Moderate Partial Union Exclusion: individuals from the group are allowed in but enjoy limited services and limited access to the union’s decision-making.
• Full Union Inclusion: individuals from the group are given equal services and access to the union’s decision-making as the union’s most privileged members.

Union Standardization: The semi-automatic process in which trade unions equalize the conditions of their members and workers covered under their agreements.

Union Uses: A theoretical model that suggests that trade unions are tools in the hands of some of the union's members in order to achieve their goals, not only as they relate to employers but also to other workers.