This is the sixth conference in the "Color of Surveillance" series, which was started by the Center on Privacy & Technology in 2016 to put racial and economic justice at the center of conversations about digital era surveillance. This year's conference — the first in person since 2019 — will be co-hosted by the Privacy Center, the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice and the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).

The theme, "Surveillance/Resistance," is broader and more ambiguous than the themes for previous years, and this is purposeful. What does resistance mean when surveillance isn't just something that occurs in the environments where we live and work and play and think and create and struggle, but is actually the material with which so many of those environments are built? In a context of broad institutional corrosion and capture, in the face of proliferating global catastrophe, this is a question that remains open and difficult.

The conference will not answer this question, but will offer space for us to riff on it together. Instead of traditional panels and workshops, the day will be structured around four plenary sessions led by some of the bravest writers, teachers, activists and artists taking on the problems of technology and surveillance that define our moment in history. In addition to participating in conversation with session speakers, conference attendees will be invited to learn and engage with one another through a variety of other modalities, including poetry, music and art. There will also be unstructured time, and comfortable physical spaces, for talking and reading and resting.