Forced habits: How wires and words made digital surveillance second nature

Rasmus Helles’ inaugural lecture and subsequent reception.

Being watched online has long been a basic condition of reading the news or using an app. The historical paths by which this condition emerged have varied considerably. This lecture examines that variation by turning contemporary computational tools into instruments of interpretation and critique. Collected since the early days of our online world, web archives preserve the hidden code used to track readers. They also reveal how institutions and organisations have written about technology and data on their websites, both in explicit reflections and in passing references appearing in communication about everything else. Together, these materials show how surveillance was installed website by website and gradually woven into how we talk about technology. As AI begins to shape how knowledge is discovered, absorbed and produced, similar patterns are poised to recur. The variation in these patterns suggests where resilience can be built while new systems are still taking shape.