User:Laurier Rochon/readingnotes/future map

Brian Holmes > Future Map

Written in late 2007, this text has a very dark, deterministic feel to it - but I quite like it. Given the very short turnaround time to read and analyse this fascinating text, my observations will probably need some revisiting, but this will have to do for a first pass.

The author seems concerned about trying to link the social, political, economical, technological and military spheres within a broader context of increased surveillance in our neo-liberal age. The tone is very critical and a lot of the text refers to institutional and structural 'problems' that are caught in self-perpetrating loops. The text is terribly US-centric, which seems to force the argument into a very narrow context.

Some notes

• The introduction opens up the idea of 'Cybernetics' and the model of the feedback loop conceived by Weiner (American mathematician). Rather than using a brute force approach (as Von Neumann was doing) to solving dual-interaction games, Weiner preferred an 'error-correction' method that would use statistical analysis probability instead of trying to find absolute certainty.

• As of 1940, he started working on an antiaircraft predictor that would take down enemy planes by analyzing the trajectory of it, shooting at it, analyzing the ensuing results and correcting the aim afterwards. What he called 'negative feedback'

• In his conception of the predictor and the pilot in the plane, the combination of the human/machine extending each other became rather apparent. The binary nature of the 'violent interrogation' and the 'absence of the object' is called (according to Galison) 'the ontology of the enemy'.

• The concept of this 'ontology (study) of the enemy' is a metaphor for the new types of surveillance that he will try to describe in the following text.

• He then immediately draws a striking comparison between the antiaircraft predictor with today's apparent 'liberty' : "Our movements, our speech, our emotions and even our dreams have become the informational message that is incessantly decoded, probed, and reconfigured into statistical silhouettes, serving as targets for products, services, political slogans or interventions of the police."

• Four characteristic technological systems are then presented to us:

• 1)Joint Helmet Cueing System : semi-opaque visor that tracks where the pilot's head is and points. It can also lock on targets, get real-time information about what's going on around them, etc. According to the author, this is the ultimate man-machine interface.

• 2)InferX privacy preserving real-time analysis : data-mining tool that performs pattern-recognition on data aggregated from different source systems. It was initially used by the military, but also had a marketing branch (scary), that can single out groups of buyers according to the purchasing behaviors, who is buying what and why, etc. Once again, we are reminded of the 'ontology of the enemy'.

• 3)Personicx customer relationship management system : divides the entire US population in to 70 clusters according to a large array of configurable parameters. It covers 110 million households, and can give personal contact info to discrete households, not just zip code clusters. What I find is the scary part here is a few lines below the author writes "The resources of these companies are increasingly used by politicians." eurk.

• 4)Orbit Traffic Management Technology : an "unobtrusive ceiling-mounted video camera that compiles records of customer movement through the store and correlates them with both sales figures and labor-force data. [...] The ideal seems to be a situation where a single look leads inevitably to a purchase."

• They are innovative techniques in their respective fields, *but MOST importantly* : "all integrated to larger control systems which increasingly rely on predictive algorithms. When surveillance develops to this degree you can say goodbye not only to privacy, but to the entire public/private divide on which individual choice in a democracy was founded".

• "The main preoccupation of society is to preemptively shape the consciousness of the consumer [...] by targeting information thrown off by an invasive enemy." (again the metaphor with the antiaircraft predictor).

• Holmes then mentions and later develops on how the notions of Big Brother and the Panopticon have now faded to the background, although not disappeared completely. Especially in the case of the Panopticon, we are now facing a digital version of it, where we are all monitoring ourselves (decentralized) rather than 1 guard watching everyone else.

• Very negative view of our current panoptic society : "...is a society is a bureaucracy that individualizes its subjects through the imposition of a regular and codified system of differences, creating functional categories of able-bodied men and women whose actions and gestures can be articulated into a productive whole, and whose truth can be distilled into the discourses of specialists"

• In the chapter 'security devices', he argues that the goal of the liberal government is ultimately to 'arrive at the optimal distribution of certain phenomena in society'. "It is now a matter of political economists adjusting the parameters of an open environment so as to stimulate and channel the probable behaviors of a population, and to manage the risks entailed by its free and natural mobility, or indeed, by the expression of its desire."

• Going further : "The difficulty, in a fully fledged neoliberal society, is to see how a wide range of different actors continually attempt to manipulate the environments in which individuals freely take their decisions; and to see in turn how state power intervenes at the highest level, with attempts to readjust the concrete “security devices” of the corporations and the police, along with the broader and more abstract rules of economic governance."

• In a slight deviation/variation from the main theme, he then turns to popular media (movies in particular) to illustrate the different notions of surveillance in the future. He goes to The Matrix, Minority Report and The Truman Show.

• He then moves on to the 'possibly most twisted program ever' FutureMAP : conceived as a Total Information Awareness program, "will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components, and prototype closed-loop information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption, national security warning, and national security decision making. Policy Analysis Market” (PAM) would mobilize the predictive capacities of investors by getting them to bet their money on civil, economic and military trends in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. Finance, which for twenty years had been at the leading edge of cybernetic transformations, would now be repurposed for the needs of sovereign and disciplinary power." WOO!

• It is, ultimately, a 'system designed to precisely condition the free behavior of its participants.' It serves the 2 functions of a security device : optimize economical development + eliminate 'deviant behavior, of the kind that can’t be brought into line with any “normal” curve'.

• Our obsession with controlling the future has 2 consequences : we create environments that will immediately satisfy anticipated desires + "the simple removal of those who might conceivably trouble this tranquilized landscape with any kind of disturbing presence or speech. What remains in the field of public politics is dampened voice, dulled curiosity and insignificant critique, sinking to a nadir in the period of national consensus over American military intervention after September 11."

• The author thinks that authors, artists, hackers intellectuals, technologists, etc. are at the forefront of any possible change - they have to subvert the system in all ways possible. They have to create more evocative images and metaphors of the neoliberal government in order to heighten awareness of the direct manipulation of ourselves.