From Private Surveillance to Public Protection: The Pervasive Interplay. The Case of NEOM

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of facial-recognition technology (FRT) in Saudi Arabia’s NEOM megaproject to show how the megacity’s “cognitive” infrastructure normalizes totalizing surveillance and reconfigures the political status of urban subjects. Combining a close reading of corporate and vendor material with critical surveillance studies, the first section maps the hardware–software assemblage that converts the human face into a continuously monitored, algorithmically actionable data point. We argue that NEOM’s promise of frictionless security and efficiency collapses the distinction between private and public sphere and erodes privacy as a meaningful category. The second section develops a philosophical critique grounded in an ethics of anonymity. We contend that anonymity can function as a normative counter-strategy: by reinstating zones of deliberate indeterminacy, it challenges the automation ideology that seeks to erase subjectivity itself.

KEYWORDS Facial recognition - Automation - Surveillance - Privacy - Ethics of anonymity - Responsibility - Security

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction. – 2. NEOM, FRT and the negation of privacy. – 2.1. NEOM and FRT. – 2.2. Negation of privacy. – 3. Ethics of anonymity as a form of resistance. – 3.1. NEOM as a model for society. – 3.2. For an ethics of anonymity. – 3.2.1. Elaborating a concept of anonymity. – 3.2.2. Anonymity and the concept of society. – 3.3. Could anonymity resist NEOM?. – 3.4. Is anonymity a threat to public safety?. – 3.4.1. Gyges’ ring. – 3.4.2. The question of responsibility: does anonymity necessarily lead to a crime without a perpetrator... but not without a victim?. – 4. Conclusion.