User:Dave Young/Trimester 1 Research

Points of Departure

Methods of information distribution > limiting information exchange across a network
Collateral listeners / Overhearing / Eavesdropping
Radio broadcasts > encryption > Number Stations
Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation

Control, Paranoia, and Technology

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

Adam Curtis documentary about "how humans have been colonised by technology." Adam Curtis has kindly made this available to watch online - find all three parts on thoughtmaybe.

Part 1

Ayn Rand > The Fountainhead/Atlas Shrugged > Rational, systematic blueprints for a new society. Free from political/religious control.

Order without social control.

Ayn Rand's theories greatly influenced tech-entrepreneurs in 70s > Heroic individuals > decentralisation of control systems.

Fear of anarchy from decentralised control.

Alan Greenspan > Encouraged a cybernetic approach to managing US economy [the New Economy] in late 90s, then changed his mind > met with fierce opposition, backed down > then deregulation, low interest rates > crash!

The Asian Miracle > S Korea, Thailand, Indonesia > Forced to accept IMF agreements, loans immediately went to pay back American investors > Indonesia currency crashed > "most catasrophic economic disaster since the 1930s"

Robert Rubin > ex-Goldman Sachs > created computer systems to predict "safe financial bets" > stopped council of economic advisors warning Clinton

Commodifying Yourself > Carmen Hermosillo, Pandora's Vox

1970s Countercultural Dream > "That computers would liberate us from al the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny. Instead today we feel the opposite, that we are helpless components in a globalised system. A system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge, or to change."

Part 2

Arthur Tansley > Ecosystem theory > Inspired by Freud's concept of the brain as a machine > translated this idea to the natural world as a whole

Ecosystems tend towards equilibrium

Howard Odum > ecosystems as circuit schematics > studied environments and created self-regulated electronic circuits based on interactions between animals and vegetation and climate

James Lovelock > Gaia Theory followed on from this > see The Revenge of Gaia

Jay Forrester > Early Warning System > Cold War > Network of satellites that would "predict" an attack from Russia

Jay Forrester > Club of Rome > Environmental Disaster in the early 70s > Forrester's crisis-aversion feedback system viewed humans as automatons, heavily criticised > his model predicted societal breakdown in the early 21st Century

George van Dyne > Colorada ecosystem project > failure? > seemed to disprove eco-equilibrium theory

The failure of the communes > Synergia > flat hierarchical system actually generated power/control relationships between commune members

Richard Brautigan > All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace manifesto > viewed harmonious relationships between animals and machines

Buckminster Fuller > The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics

Chun, W.H.K - Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre-Optics (2005) MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts & London England

Annotation of the Introduction

In the introduction to her book Control and Freedom: Paranoia and Control in the Age of Fiber-Optics (2005), W.H.K Chun states that “power now operates through the coupling of control and freedom”. (1) This idea is explored throughout the rest of the introduction, establishing a firm basis for a more detailed investigation in the following chapters.

Through the analysis of the cultural shift from disciplinary systems to control systems in the internet age, Chun discusses the effects of this on our social, political, and economic use of technology. She begins by briefly addressing the issue of privacy and the reproducibility of online content, and how our internet activity can be monitored using data-sniffing technologies. These acts of eavesdropping and cyber-espionage are contrasted with respect to Foucault's idea of disciplinary society and Deleuze's control society: in the former, power should be always visible but unverifiable, whereas in the latter the illusion is that the subject is provided with greater liberties while alternative, more subtle forms of enslavement are utilised. From an economic perspective, Chun draws a parallel between George Bush's statements on capitalist freedom (ie, the freedom to “make a living”) and Marx's “condemnation of [the] bourgeois freedom” that leaves the living person with a subordinated relationship to capital. (11)

Chun argues that the online relationship between control and freedom can be experienced as sexuality, or sexual paranoia. Referencing the terminology of hardware components such as plugs and sockets, Chun describes how online networks are dominated by sexualised metaphors and concepts. She describes technology as being a trojan horse for pornography – putting forth the idea that the ubiquity of sexualised content and interactions online essentially render technology as being a “carrier” for pornography. Following on from this, she describes how the protection of minors from online sexualised content were the dominant reasons for internet censorship pre 9/11.

With relation to ideology, Chun describes how computers simulate ideology by acting as a “false interpretive apparatus.” (19) Software, she argues, provides us with a representational relationship with our hardware, symbolising the real-world concepts of recycling bins, folders and files. Furthermore, the way in which the computer addresses the user directly highlights the notion of the “personal computer”, or the users assumed power over the machine. The implications of this can be seen in the acknowledgement of the prescience of cultural theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari by studies and analyses conducted by various new media researchers. For example, studies into usage of online chat rooms and multi-user domains in the late 1990s suggested that Foucault's notions that sexuality is becoming increasingly discursive and that gender is performed seemed to be proven.

Finally, Chun argues that while technology has been seen as an antidote to political problems, in effect using it in this way “generalises paranoia.” (25) She states that “to claim users are an effect of software is not to claim that users, through their actions, have no effect.” (30) Arguing that we must be made aware of our vulnerability online, Chun argues that we “must seize a freedom that always moves beyond our control.” (30)

Notes from Chapter 5: Control and Freedom

Cisco Systems ISP adverts in 90s based on paranoia > showed people from developing nations using internet, playing on fear of being left behind > Lacan's theory of Paranoid Knowledge: I want it because it is the object of another's desire.

Post 9/11 Paranoia > American Dept of Homeland Security feeds public paranoia

Terrorists use Yahoo! to plan their attacks!

There is always meaning for the paranoid subject - whether meaning is explicit or not.

Steganography > hiding messages "between the pixels" of image files.