Disciplining Through Landlord Technologies: Why the Carceral Logics of Tenant Surveillance Require Abolition

Facial recognition and other surveillance systems are increasingly being deployed in low-income housing across the United States, adding new scopic regimes into an already carceral propertied landscape. While there are numerous harms associated with facial recognition, for instance the reproduction of racial bias, the imposition of new landlord technologies also impels disciplinary and biopolitical control, abetting the reproduction of racial capitalist market logics and carceral geographies. In this article, we focus on this entwinement of biopolitical, capitalist, and carceral imperatives undergirding surveillance, drawing upon tenant stories conducted with Landlord Tech Watch. We assess the mechanisms through which landlord technologies are used to catch tenants for lease violations and automate evictions, while also impelling the production of the “good tenant”. In examining reformist efforts to curb facial recognition abuse, we argue that as long as property functions as a technology of control, reformism falls short. Instead, we engage a broader abolitionist call against property, one that disavows the enactment of goodness and that embraces performing the “bad tenant”.