Tag: surveillance (page 1 of 1)

August 7, 2024

the state and the people

A few years ago I published an essay called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity,” in which I described the rise of certain technologies by which people have become “legible” to the state. At that point I had not read a classic, though a somewhat controversial classic, of history, A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945. I am reading it right now, and when I saw the book’s first two paragraphs I thought, Damn, I wish I had known this when I wrote that essay. Here they are:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since I January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

Highlighting mine. Of course it would be war that created the bureaucratic mechanisms of modern identity, for, as Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.”

I’m just making notes for later reflection here, but: The creation of this identity system led to a complex and ever-shifting pattern of relation between the state and modern capitalism. James Burnham, in his landmark book The Managerial Revolution, argued that the comprehensive power of the state would lead to the rise of a managerial class that would take power away from the capitalists. But it hasn’t really worked out that way, has it?

When I come back to these issues — which I will do eventually — I expect to say a little more about Bourne and Burnham, about George Orwell’s reviews of Burnham, and about anarchism. And maybe even about the Church.

August 1, 2023

Encyclopedia Babylonica 4: System

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The Bob Marley and the Wailers album Survival (1979) is one of Marley’s most politically militant recordings. The imagery of the album cover, which with one exception features the flags of African nations, suggests its theme — the need for Pan-African political unity — and the songs on the album say that that unity is to be rooted in emancipation from the dominance of a global political and economic system, a system which is largely controlled by white people. (The Wikipedia page linked to above explains the flags and the image hiding behind the album’s title.)

One of the most constant and powerful images of Rastafarianism is that of the Babylonian captivity. You may get a brief summary of this theme by reading this essay by David W. Stowe, and then, perhaps, go deeper by reading Stowe’s remarkable book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137. Stowe has a lot to say about the version of Psalm 137 with which I prefaced my previous post, “Rivers of Babylon” by The Melodians. I don’t suppose there’s any song that more fully captures the tone and mood of Rastafari — and the best song on Survival is a kind of extension of it, as though “Rivers of Babylon” were rewritten by a critical race theorist. That song is called “Babylon System,” and I’m invoking it here because I think it suggests a different approach to living in Babylon than the two we have already considered: infiltrating the halls of power and praying for deliverance.

But before I go any further, I need to clarify some things. It’s pretty obvious what I’m suggesting in these posts: that living in Technopoly is best figured as a kind of Babylonian captivity. But do I really mean to compare my situation — as a comfortable, economically secure white person in one of the world’s richest countries — to those who have been uprooted from their homes and sold into slavery, subjected to endless bigotry and oppression both overt and covert? And my answer is: Yes, I mean to compare — but not to equate.

Consider for instance the moment in “The Scouring of the Shire” when the returning hobbits see what has been done to Hobbiton:

‘This is worse than Mordor!’ said Sam. ‘Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.’

‘Yes, this is Mordor,’ said Frodo. ‘Just one of its works.’

By any rational reckoning, of course, Hobbiton is not “worse than Mordor” — as Sam of all people ought to know, having spent too much time in that blasted land. But you know what he means, you know where the feeling of revulsion comes from: his love of the Shire and his long-cherished hope to return to it, his unreflective expectation that upon his return it would be what he always knew it to be. But would he exchange his condition for that of a prisoner in one of Sauron’s towers, or an Orc soldier? Of course he wouldn’t. The Mordor System is darker and fouler at the center than at the periphery; but its logic is the same everywhere. And what has been learned about it near the center can be used near the periphery as well. That’s the theme of my essay on Albert Murray: white American Christians who think they’re suffering should take some lessons from their Black brothers and sisters, who know what real persecution is. If you feel threatened by the Beast, then maybe you should consult people who have spent generations in that Beast’s belly.

If I had to choose between (a) raising my child in an environment of material and social comfort but also with the constant preaching of the dark gospel of metaphysical capitalism, and (b) raising my child in an environment of economic hopelessness and racial bigotry, in which he or she must spend a lifetime constantly at tiptoe stance — well, I would certainly choose the former. The first situation has dystopian elements, but also hopeful possibilities and some degree of freedom; the second is dystopian to its core. Those in the first situation can at least learn from the miseries of those in the second.

Okay, back to Bob Marley. What does Babylon System do? It’s a vampire, sucking the blood of the sufferers; and it builds churches and universities for the express purpose of deceiving the people and keeping them enslaved. That is, to borrow the Marxist terms, it consists of an economic/political base and a cultural superstructure: As Louis Althusser said, it’s a model of political economy that sustains itself not simply by force, or the threat of force, but also through the work of ideological state apparatuses. Foucault borrowed this distinction when he coined the phrase “power-knowledge regime” — the hard power of the state-as-such and the soft power of its knowledge-disseminating apparatuses.

Not a bad description of life under surveillance capitalism. — at least, once you start thinking about it. If you manage not to think about the costs, life in Babylon can be kinda pleasant at times, and questioning the System can feel risky. But once you start thinking … well, for one thing, to do do all this unpaid labor for social media and AI companies is to tread the winepress, but thirst.

So what do we do? Do we strive to sneak our young men and women into the ruling cadre? Do we pray for deliverance? Or do we do what Bob Marley says we should do: rebel? If we’re drawn to the last, then we have to ask another question: What might successful rebellion look like?

December 27, 2022

markets and economies

David L. Bahnsen:

[Rusty] Reno’s ongoing mistakes are derived from his first mistake — the straw-man claim that market orthodoxy seeks to value everything solely on market principles. This simply is not true. A rigorous defense of the price mechanism in how goods and services are transacted does not require any such framework for how we understand truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Believing in the transcendent things and believing in them with the depth and breadth that moral enlightenment and spiritual nourishment provide makes us better market actors. That Reno and I are living in a time where the clear and unmistakable maladies of culture are evidenced in the marketplace does not make the forum for our observation the cause of what we observe. I know it is frustrating, unsatisfying, and in many cases, unacceptable, but the moral deterioration of society evidenced in various aspects of our marketplace are the fruits of idolatry, low regard for family, disdain for neighbor, and a general abandonment of Ten Commandments ethics. Markets cannot assure regard for neighbor or beauty, but a disdain for markets can assure us of impoverished conditions for our neighbors and a limited landscape for the creation of beauty.

Bahnsen makes a point worth considering here but my general position with regard to markets is closer to Reno’s. (My general position as opposed to my specific policy preferences, which are very far from Reno’s.)

Bahnsen makes a distinction between culture and markets that’s simply not sustainable. Markets are part of culture — i.e. they’re among the things that human beings collectively do — and we have plenty of evidence that the people who are most determined to make money in the markets tend also to exploit the weaknesses of the other parts of culture for their gain. That is, market thinking is like kudzu: a powerfully invasive species that can conquer an entire ecosystem if it is not forcibly restrained. The logic of markets always wants to extend its reach into sphere of culture in which it does not belong, and its spread should be closely observed and resisted.

As Augustine taught us long ago, we live in a single culture governed by what Wendell Berry calls two economies in tension with one another. (Perhaps some readers will know what I mean if I say that we live in a space like the one doubly occupied by Besźel and Ul Qoma. Which reminds me that I need to write something about that fascinating book.) At least some degree and kind of sphere sovereignty is suggested by Jesus’s instruction that we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. The problem is that capitalist kudzu doesn’t respect such distinctions, which is how we get surveillance capitalism and, ultimately, metaphysical capitalism. (See the tags at the end of this post.)

The market is not something other than culture; it is an element of culture that wants to become the whole thing, as kudzu wants to spread and as water wants to run downslope. If a culture is going to thrive this tendency must be resisted, and such resistance requires constant vigilance and political imagination — both of which are in very short supply.

P.S. The whole matter of alternative (and possibly irreconcilable) economics is central to thinking wisely about out cultural moment. In addition to the link above to Wendell Berry on the “two economies,” see also:

UPDATE: “So what lessons, if any, remain from Polanyi for us today? At the broadest level of his argument, the recognition that there is no bright-line division between the economy and society continues to be an important, if still underrecognized point. Recognizing it explicitly would improve policy discussions all around.”

December 13, 2022

defilement redux

What the Hell Happened to PayPal?:

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above.

An obvious point, but one worth making: We tend to think of social-credit systems as the province of governments, but the big American tech companies are right now imposing their own such system — and in some ways are better placed to do it than our government would be.

As I have been saying for several years now, the “ideology [is] lacking clearly defined ideological contours” because it’s not an ideology, it’s a feeling of defilement and a consequent need to be purified, cleansed. I should do a long readthrough here on the blog of Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil….

November 27, 2022

Barney Ronay:

Qatar is not, when you look more widely, some kind of rogue state peopled by a different kind of human being. In fact, the best way to look at it is perhaps as a very literal-minded and efficient expression of the forces at work across every other modern state. Qatar just does it wilder, harder and without apology. It is a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of supremely wealthy overlords, of the surveillance state, of an underclass of workers, of increasingly repressive laws, of the global carbon addiction. Do any of these sound familiar? In many ways Qatar is like your furiously able and efficient younger colleague; who has essentially looked at this, learnt the mannerisms, and said, yeah, we can do that.

September 8, 2022

The Woman Who Became a Company:

Since corporations can claim trade secrets, [Jennifer Lyn] Morone decided to resist pervasive data capture by incorporating herself, so that the company, JLM Inc., contains the intellectual property and activities of the human Morone. If a corporation can be a person, perhaps a person could be a corporation and so protect their data! The articles of incorporation enable Morone’s data to qualify as intellectual property and thus purport to offer protections from the data marketplace. The human Morone’s privacy is possible because it is the product and trade secret of the company, JLM Inc., which is incorporated in the state of Delaware. With its own Court of Chancery that hears cases involving corporate law, Delaware’s legal structure is favorable to business. The state also does not collect corporate taxes from those that do business outside the state or tax “intangible assets” — like data. […]

As JLM Inc., Morone has an obligation to refuse the terms and agreements that permit apps and websites to share data with their parent tech companies, alongside third and fourth parties. She must protect the secret formula of who she is so that she can sell it, making it a challenge for her to participate in many of the interactive information streams common to the 21st century. She can’t use apps, websites with cookies, or most search engines. They track her and collect data about her. That data is the property of JLM Inc. and so she must not engage these services. The problem with maintaining the marketplace as the point of reference for data governance is how it reinforces exploitative practices that don’t have clear, long-term safeguards for participants. Morone’s experience shows that the corporation doesn’t provide a solution to the extractive practices of these apps, platforms, and sites for a human who wants to live, work, or socialize today.

Everything about this story is deeply sad.

May 18, 2022

pandemic and biopower

“Permanent Pandemic,” by Justin E. H. Smith:

When I say the regime, I do not mean the French government or the U.S. government or any particular government or organization. I mean the global order that has emerged over the past, say, fifteen years, for which COVID-19 served more as the great leap forward than as the revolution itself. The new regime is as much a technological regime as it is a pandemic regime. It has as much to do with apps and trackers, and governmental and corporate interests in controlling them, as it does with viruses and aerosols and nasal swabs. Fluids and microbes combined with touchscreens and lithium batteries to form a vast apparatus of control, which will almost certainly survive beyond the end date of any epidemiological rationale for the state of exception that began in early 2020.

The last great regime change happened after September 11, 2001, when terrorism and the pretext of its prevention began to reshape the contours of our public life. Of course, terrorism really does happen, yet the complex system of shoe removal, carry-on liquid rules, and all the other practices of twenty-first-century air travel long ago took on a reality of its own, sustaining itself quite apart from its efficacy in deterring attacks in the form of a massive jobs program for TSA agents and a gold mine of new entrepreneurial opportunities for vendors of travel-size toothpaste and antacids. The new regime might appropriately be imagined as an echo of the state of emergency that became permanent after 9/11, but now extended to the entirety of our social lives, rather than simply airports and other targets of potential terrorist interest.

An absolutely brilliant, disturbing, essential essay — to be considered in light of certain reflections by Giorgio Agamben. From later in the essay:

There is no question that changes of norms in Western countries since the beginning of the pandemic have given rise to a form of life plainly convergent with the Chinese model. Again, it might take more time to get there, and when we arrive, we might find that a subset of people are still enjoying themselves in a way they take to be an expression of freedom. But all this is spin, and what is occurring in both cases, the liberal-democratic and the overtly authoritarian alike, is the same: a transition to digitally and al- gorithmically calculated social credit, and the demise of most forms of community life outside the lens of the state and its corporate subcontractors.

I’m annotating this in detail — and by the by, there ought to be a better way for me to share my annotations. You can do some cool stuff with Hypothesis, but not all the things I want and need. Maybe more on those wants and needs in another post, but for now, back to my PDF of Smith’s terrific essay.

October 5, 2021

governance by image

In Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the factory in which the Tramp works in the opening scenes is controlled by a boss whose image appears in certain strategic places in order to issue commands:

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— and even to order back to work employees who sneak into the toilet for a quick smoke:

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Hey Charlie, read any Jeremy Bentham lately?

In this film industrial capitalism and the state work hand in glove, and they work by the manipulation and display of images. The boss’s image (ubiquitous and available in any size necessary) is a primary instrument of control; images of workers, conversely, are used to control them. Paulette Goddard’s gamine gets a reputable job as a dancer, but it’s her mug-shot image that allows the police to track her down and arrest her:

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Note that what she’s wanted for is, primarily, vagrancy: being “without visible means of support.” See, relatedly, this essay of mine on passports, passport photos, and the technologies by which states and their allies in the corporate world make us legible and therefore controllable. (A good deal of the movie takes place in factories and jails — remarkably similar environments, though the Tramp strongly prefers jail.)

To work, this movie suggests, is to subject oneself to panoptic surveillance and to ceaseless state and corporate control. By the movie’s end the gamine is, though better dressed and more elegantly coiffed as a result of her brief employment, close to despair over the inescapability of the system:

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But if there’s one thing the Tramp knows it’s … well, how to be a tramp. How to survive, however frugally, off the grid, out of the System, beyond the panopticon’s lines of sight — illegibly.

So off they go. After twenty years of dominating the screen, Chaplin’s Tramp says goodbye to us all. And this final view of him is the only time that he clearly takes his wandering way with a companion.

MT14 the end web 1000

October 2, 2021

deracination

Paul Kingsnorth:

This process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

July 2, 2021

tales of technocracy

The chief theme of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is that, in the midst of World War II, a series of Christian writers and thinkers discerned that the Allied victory over the Axis powers would be perceived not as a victory of democracy over tyranny but rather as a victory of technology. They sought to recommend humanistic models of education that would counterbalance the coming Novus Ordo Seculorum. But they were not successful, at least on their own terms; technocracy arrived, and dominated. Today’s surveillance capitalism is the product, in quite direct ways, of the particular form taken by the Allied victory in World War II.

I have just been re-reading some books that I first read almost fifty years ago — Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End — and am struck by how much they have in common, and how strongly they echo the themes of my story. Asimov’s three novels were originally published as stories between 1942 and 1950, then stitched together into novels; Childhood’s End was written in 1952. Clarke’s book is far, far more technically accomplished than Asimov’s creaky contraptions, and they differ dramatically in scale and setting: Clarke’s story treats of events that span a century on near-future Earth, while Asimov’s trilogy covers several hundred years and ranges around the entire galaxy. But their core concerns are remarkably similar, and are the product of the same historical moment to which my five Christian intellectuals in YOOL1943 were responding.

In the Foundation books a man comes to understand the historical development of humanity, past and future, and implements a plan for directing it; in Childhood’s End aliens who understand the historical development of humanity, past and future, come to Earth to implement a plan for directing it.

In both cases the new planned order successfully displaces an existing political structure quite like our own: unequal, decadent, sclerotic, tired.

In both cases satisfaction with the new order gives way eventually to a kind of complacency. In Asimov’s fictional world, the planet Terminus, guided by the science of the Foundation, comes to dominate its sector of the galaxy, but perhaps at the cost of its soul; in Childhood’s End, “The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really outstanding new works of literature, music, painting, or sculpture for a generation. … It was a much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure.” Technocracy is powerful, and once a society experiences its blessings a return to an earlier status quo is unthinkable; yet as time goes by thoughtful people, knowing what technocracy enables, can’t help reflecting on what it inhibits or flatly disables.

The parallels eventually give way to significant divergences: Clarke is interested in imagining new and strange evolutionary pathways for humanity; Asimov wants to suggest that all empires follow the path Gibbon traced for Rome, energetic success giving way to decadence. But it’s noteworthy that both of them are so deeply invested in thinking about the ways old political orders give way to self-proclaimed Utopias; and both, also, see that the technocratic Utopia — as distinguished, I think, from the more traditional Utopias of authoritarian and totalitarian states — is a new thing in the world.

June 24, 2021

Are you still there?

Nick Carr:

Late Tuesday night, just as the Red Sox were beginning a top-of-the-eleventh rally against the Rays, my smart TV decided to ask me a question of deep ontological import:

Are you still there?

To establish my thereness (and thus be permitted to continue watching the game), I would need to “interact with the remote,” my TV informed me. I would need to respond to its signal with a signal of my own. At first, as I spent a harried few seconds finding the remote and interacting with it, I was annoyed by the interruption. But I quickly came to see it as endearing. Not because of the TV’s solicitude — the solicitude of a machine is just a gentle form of extortion — but because of the TV’s cluelessness. Though I was sitting just ten feet away from the set, peering intently into its screen, my smart TV couldn’t tell that I was watching it. It didn’t know where I was or what I was doing or even if I existed at all. That’s so cute.

I had found a gap in the surveillance system, but I knew it would soon be plugged.

November 24, 2014

architectural-review:

The ghosts of surveillance.

September 26, 2014

to know as I am known (by Apple)

Take a good look at the iOS screenshot above and you’ll see something interesting. Look just above the keyboard, at the row of suggested words — a new feature in iOS 8, though one that has been around a while in Android.

Apple doesn’t just get its suggestions from a universal dictionary. Its description of this “predictive typing” says,

As you type, you’ll see choices of words or phrases you’d probably type next, based on your past conversations and writing style. iOS 8 takes into account the casual style you might use in Messages and the more formal language you probably use in Mail. It also adjusts based on the person you’re communicating with, because your choice of words is likely more laid back with your spouse than with your boss. Your conversation data is kept only on your device, so it’s always private.

The key phrase here is “based on your past conversations” — but it’s not only conversations that Apple is drawing on.

See the word “DeepArcher”? Not a dictionary word. In fact, it’s a recent coinage, from Thomas Pynchon’s 2013 novel Bleeding Edge, where it’s the name of an MMORPG. How did it make its way into a list of “predictions” for my typing?

This is how: I wrote a review of Bleeding Edge. Apple didn’t scan the internet for it, though; rather, a few months ago, I decided to test the “Open in” feature on my iPad, and opened the MS Word version of my review — I always send stuff to editors as .doc files, even though I never actually write anything in Word, and in fact don’t own it — in Pages, Apple’s own word processing application. By opening it in Pages, I saved it to iCloud, and Apple evidently uses all my documents in their cloud, as well as my “conversations” in Messages or in my .me mail (which I don’t use), to create a corpus from which its predictions may be drawn.

Either innocent or creepy, depending on how you think about it. But considering Pynchon’s status as the unquestioned poet laureate of paranoia, there’s something perversely appropriate about that word showing up on my keyboard — and about my surprise when it did.