In December of 2005 - 4 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and just over 2 years after the U.S. launched troops to fight its “War on Terror” in Iraq - journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a bombshell report in the New York Times detailing the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens taking place at the behest of the George W. Bush administration as part of its intelligence-gathering operations. This expose was the first of many reports to emerge in the early years of the 21st century that outlined the continually expanding surveillance powers that the U.S. government and its various intelligence agencies put to use against its own citizen population, as well as against foreign governments and civilians.

That very same year, a holiday-themed children’s book titled The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition was published by mother-daughter author duo Carol Aebersold and Chanda Bell. The book tells the story of a “scout elf” from the North Pole whose job is to observe children’s behavior during the Christmas season, and report back to Santa Claus whether they have been “naughty” or “nice” - thus, whether they deserve to have their Christmas wishes fulfilled.

Both of these artifacts tell a story about the growing presence and awareness of surveillance in American culture, and about our continuing acquiescence to being watched by powerful entities with mysterious motives. While the reports of journalists like Risen & Lichtblau, as well as whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, tell of a government wielding dystopian technology to spy on its citizenry, The Elf on the Shelf presents a seemingly more anodyne, innocent form of total panoptic surveillance - one that surely promises to take some stress off the backs of busy parents and teachers during the holiday season. But at what cost? What happens when we put a patently creepy, always-watching children’s toy in charge of teaching our children lessons about morality and self-discipline?

On today’s show, we explore just some of the many cultural artifacts that form the assemblage of The Elf on the Shelf as a new holiday tradition that celebrates surveillance culture. In doing so, we contextualize Elf by analyzing the forces that give rise to the tradition: from Jeremy Bentham’s & Michel Foucault’s exploration of the “panopticon,” to the ever-watching “eye of God” in Christian religious traditions, to the ravaging culture of consumer capitalism that seems to drain the genuine substance from every tradition by replacing it with a constant yearning for new products. We lay bare our trenchant critiques of Elf’s place in American holiday culture, and attempt to imagine new types of holiday traditions that focus on mutual aid, ethics of care, teaching children consequences (both good and bad) for their actions, and resisting the culture of surveillance perpetuated by both Big Brother and Big Santa.

Special thanks for research assistance on this episode to Dr. Laura Pinto, who co-authored research examining The Elf on the Shelf and surveillance in 2014, and was kind enough to correspond with us and point us to some useful background reading in preparation for this show!

Elf on the Shelf videos featured:

Inside Look at Scout Elf Training Camp

Scout Elves Take Flight for Scout Elf Return Week

The Elf on the Shelf's Night Before Christmas Song & Music Video

Works and concepts referenced:

Bentham, J., & Božovič, M. (1995). The panopticon writings. Verso Trade.

Curtis, Adam. The century of the self. London: BBC Four, 2002.

Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.

Hertsgaard, M. (2016). Bravehearts: Whistle blowing in the age of Snowden. Skyhorse.

Lyon, D. (2014). Surveillance and the Eye of God. Studies in Christian Ethics, 27(1), 21-32.

Pinto, L. E., & Nemorim, S. (2015). Normalizing panoptic surveillance among children: ‘The Elf on the Shelf’. Our Schools/Our Selves, 24(2), 53.

Risen, J., & Lichtblau, E. (2005, December 16). Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts. The New York Times, A1.

Additional reading on surveillance discourse, power, privacy, and consumerism:

Barnard-Wills, D. (2011). UK news media discourses of surveillance. The Sociological Quarterly, 52(4), 548-567.

Cohen, J. E. (2012). What privacy is for. Harv. L. Rev., 126, 1904.

Lacan, J. (1991). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955. W. W. Norton & Company. [Describes Lacan’s concept of “the Big Other”, a useful tool for understanding surveillance power.]

Papacharissi, Z. (2010). Privacy as a luxury commodity. First Monday. [Explains how privacy is distributed unequally based on economic class.]