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  • The Wire, Big Data, and the Specter of Naturalism
  • Laura Bieger (bio)

A data-gathering device is the namesake of the TV series The Wire (2002–2008). Shorthand for the surveillance technology around which the story revolves, the wiretap is used by a special unit of the Baltimore Police to gain insight about the increasingly sophisticated drug trafficking going on about town. On the receptive level, the wiretap links the show's viewers with the work of the detectives, with the effect of instructing us to read the crime-ridden world of the show as they do. Scholars have noted that watching The Wire takes an unusual degree of commitment, the pay-offbeing a strikingly truthful encounter with an otherwise inaccessible social milieu.1 In aesthetic terms, this commitment thrives on a mode of reception that, regardless of the often-appraised social realism of the show, is not that of a sociologist or a journalist, but that of a detective. From the very first scene, in which Detective Jimmy McNulty sits on the doorsteps of a rundown brownstone in Baltimore's notorious black ghetto and talks to a teenage homicide witness, it is the work of the detectives that takes us into an urban underworld of crime and corruption, asking the viewer to gather and decipher data along with the cops. Like the trickles of blood on the pavement in the opening scene, flickering meaningfully in the blue light of the police car, data trails lead the way into The Wire's dense and complex storyworld. And if data are in the most basic sense bits and pieces of information, the rationale behind the show's data-gathering mania—manifesting itself beyond the title-giving wiretap in the widespread use of surveillance cameras and undercover informants, secretly taken photographs, rummages through housing registers and real estate files, etc.—is to fight the Octopus-like organization of crime wrecking post-industrial American cities like Baltimore on a mind-boggling scale. [End Page 127]

I argue that the resemblance to Frank Norris's naturalistic epos evoked here is more than merely superficial. Yet where The Octopus (1901) exploits the raising of wheat as its primary plot-driving force, The Wire supplants wheat with data. In approaching data as the crop that organized crime cultivates, I assume that an octopus-like network rather than a clear-cut group of individual actors—the criminals—raises this crop. The criminals cannot do without leaving data trails. Yet being acutely aware of this in-bred vulnerability of their operations, they develop ever more sophisticated strategies for dispersing and encrypting the trails they are doomed to leave by sheer virtue of being organized. The police work engaged in reining in organized crime cannot do without tracing and deciphering these trails. But the brilliance of The Wire lies in bringing into clear view that any effort at detection involves interfering, redirecting, and ultimately co-producing these trails. As sites in which criminal and criminological activities are mutually invested, data trails are thus exploited to the end of telling a story that, riffing on Walter Benn Michaels, repeats naturalism's perfidious logic to serve "the interests not of any individual or any group of individuals but of the [surveillance] economy itself" (178). The specter of naturalism that haunts The Wire springs from this uncanny replication.

David Simon's deep-seated conviction in the legitimacy of surveillance operations like the wiretap of his much-acclaimed show has made him an outspoken defender of the National Security Administration in the recent scandal. Not only is data out there anyway, Simon states in an entry on his personal blog on June 7, 2013, but most of us tacitly consent to leaving data trails by using Google, Facebook, the fast-track lane, etc. So why, Simon asks, "should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist"? Those who gather it in the name of the law should, of course, not abuse their powers—to which he swiftly adds: "We don't know of any actual abuse." Stressing the importance of measuring "privacy rights" against "the legitimate investigate needs of law enforcement," he finds comfort in...

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