On or around 5 June 2013, the world changed.

Over a few days Edward Snowden, a CIA subcontractor, began to leak information about public surveillance on a global scale. The revelations as to the extent and range of clandestine government surveillance echoed around the world. Particularly disturbing was the degree of collusion by Google, Yahoo, Verizon, and others, and the cooperation between the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ, as well as their counterparts in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Glenn Greenwald, one the first journalists with direct access to Snowden’s data, states that the NSA ‘collects far more content than is routinely useful to analysts’, that GCHQ was virtually unable to store all the data it had collected, and the information included even more data on UK and US citizens than on foreign nationals.[1]

Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s brilliant documentary about Edward Snowden, centres on questions of property, privacy, and the public. Whose property is our data? Who, in this age of global displacement, owns the places we reside in, visit, and inhabit? Spaces, data, privacy. Property as what cleaves to us: our luggage versus our inalienable rights. The spaces we inhabit, our homes, our data, and spaces forbidden to us: the locus of state and corporate power.

These questions concern nothing less than our survival. How do we survive the loss of our data, the loss of our homes, our places and things? Citizenfour is a narrative of exile driven by the unrelenting forces of surveillance capitalism. No one is still, and everyone is on the move. The chronotope of the road defines the moment, but the road is as much virtual as real. The lines of data flows girdle the world and converge in the centres of power, much as all roads once led to Rome. Parallels are to be found in airline routes and electric grids, both of which connect the material world to the virtual one.

Citizenfouropens with abstract footage shot from a car in a dark tunnel, with lights passing overhead like dashes, accompanied by Poitras’s voiceover reading Snowden’s initial emails to her. This puzzling, hypnotic image lasts 90 seconds, but never becomes recognisable: white lines against a black sky, with the barely perceptible tiny red taillights of the car ahead. The line’s perpetual motion transforms them into a kind of punctuation mark, a dash. As the flashing lights move through space, they might be said to form an arrow, but pointing at what? In one sense they point at the enormous surveillance apparatus uncovered by Edward Snowden, but in a more literal sense they are lights guiding us out of a traffic tunnel, though we only learn this a quarter of the way into the film. The imagery of darkness and light seen in the parallel between roads and data streams underlines the film’s interplay between entrapment and escape.

Snowden’s leaks, widely published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other major sites around the world, were preceded by Chelsea Manning’s whistleblowing on civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. drone programme. Manning’s court-martial took place over the exact same days as Snowden’s revelations, although the irony was lost in the frenzy of reporting on the new information, which far exceeded the scope of Manning’s leaks. Historically this marks the first moment that the public understood not just the extent of surveillance and the total complicity between mega-media corporations and the state, but the power of metadata and the algorithmic capacities to create unimaginably powerful tools that obviate any pretence of privacy and security. Just before we see Edward Snowden, having understood the stakes though not the specifics of what his whistleblowing will reveal, Poitras returns us to the black tunnel with the overhead lights, placing us in the car on the road to Snowden’s hotel room.

The technological apocalypse of totalitarian state surveillance is prefigured by an iconic Hollywood film from a generation earlier, James Cameron’s Terminator 2. It is a parable of the rise of self-aware intelligent machines who come to realise that humans are less their creators than their adversaries in a struggle for domination. The second film in the franchise, seen by many as the best one, has the original Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, return to protect rather than destroy John Conner, whose destiny it is to lead humans into a war to defeat the machines that have turned on them. The villain is a second, improved Terminator, made now of liquid metal with the capacity to reshape itself at will but whose primary avatar is that of a policeman on a motorcycle.

In a key moment, the protagonist Sarah Conner carves NO FATE into a table before she abandons her son in order to track and kill Miles Dyson, the engineer behind the AI defence network, Skynet, a computational cloud that becomes self-aware and launches an attack on humans. ‘The future is not set. No fate but what we make,’ she says to herself, repeating the message the father of her son has sent her from the future. The film ends on the open road, with footage of the yellow painted lane markers flashing by. For the first time Sarah Conner looks to the future with hope, because ‘if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of a human life, maybe we can too’.

Terminator 2ends in the desert, whereas Citizenfouropens and remains in the city, in the ‘free zone’ of Hong Kong, the very interface of global capitalism and the authoritarian socialist state. While the desert here still represents the Western fantasy of the frontier, the city represents a networked platform in which the heroic individuality of the frontier is no longer possible. What connects them is the space of the road and the ‘internet highway’ that each of our protagonists seek to evade.

There’s an interesting parallel between the closing of Terminator 2and the opening of Citizenfour. The first marks the space of the road on the ground, while the other marks the passage of space overhead, on the ceiling, but also in the sky. Two films separated by two decades, both articulating our anxieties around the technological domination of human life. The first is a fantasy, a nightmare, but the second is real. Our present is the future of science fiction. Our homes have been invaded by technologies that transform the relation between private and public and upend our concepts of privacy, intimacy, and domesticity. Our fugitive present is characterised by refugees, migrants, and exiles. The visual modality of surveillance, as characterised by Foucault’s panopticon, has become invisible, electrified by new technologies. The inescapable message is that the totality of the systems that contain us may perhaps destroy our lives as we know them.