User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/holmes/

Abstract

Brian Holmes: Future Map. Or: How the Cyborgs Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance. In: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com, September 9, 2007.[1]
The essay explores the "systemic unity of man and machine, split at its heart by an ontology of the enemy […] in order to understand a new understanding of surveillance".

1. Norbert Wiener
   • God & Golem, Inc. > Can god play a significant game with his own creature?, 1964
   • Teleological Society to study intersections of neurology and engineering
   • this transformed into the famous Macy Conferences > term Cybernetics, 1947
   • about "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems"
   • renounced any direct collaboration with the military brass and giant corporations
   • anti-militarist stance placed him next to anti-communist and mathematician Van Neumann
2. John Van Neumann
   • central figure in the creation of the atom bomb and developer of two-person game theory
   • attended the Atomic Energy Commission meetings on a wheelchair
   • thought to have been among the models for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
3. Wiener – God and Golem
   • worked on a closed-loop information system called an antiaircraft predictor, 1940
   • inscription of the human element into a system > servomechanism and feedback loop
   • new creatures between machinelike, implacable humans and intelligent, humanlike machines
   • cybernetics was a manichean science, permeated by the violent interrogations of its subject and the dissimulating absence of its object > the ontology of the enemy
4. Concept of Surveillance
   • has to be expanded far beyond its traditional range
   • automated inspection of personal data can no longer be conceived as purely negative
   • proactive force > multiple feedback loops of a cybernetic society, to control the future
   • Golem is ourselves, the cyborg populations of the computerized democracies
   • our movements become the information that is merged into statistics for products / services
   • Wiener's philosophical question returns in an inverse form:
   • Can a creature play a significant game with her creator / the cybernetic society?
5. Cardinal Points
   • four characteristic technological systems, which trace out the contours of our society:
   • The Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System
   • InferX privacy preserving real-time analytics
   • Personicx customer relationship management system
   • Orbit Traffic Management Technology
6. Surveillance Techniques
   • control systems which rely on predictive algorithms
   • opposes the public/private divide on which individual choice in a democracy was founded
   • Habermas: structural transformation of the public sphere has crossed new threshold
   • different kind of society, based not on informed debate and democratic decision but on electronic identification, statistical prediction and environmental seduction
   • future mapping via data collection, predictive analysis and environmental simulation
   • architectural critic Sze Tsung Leong: control space, i.e. real-time shaped urban design
   • adjustment of an apparatus / environment according to feedback data on its human variables
7. Case Studies
   • literary image of Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984
   • complex architectural image of the Panopticon
8. Michel Foucault
   • lectures Security, Territory, Population, 1978 > distance himself from the Panopticon
   • he introduced this concept of a disciplinary society two years before (Discipline and Punish)
   • examples like redevelopment plan for the city of Nantes in the 18th-century
   • "reduce the most unfavorable, deviant normalities in relation to the normal, general curve"
   • liberal art of government consists in intervening not on players but on the rules of the game
9. Cybernetics
   • etymology means both steersman and governor
   • has become the applied social science of control at a distance
   • correlate of American aspirations to global free trade / to liberal empire
   • relation between classical liberalism and technological control
10. Daniel Bell
    • "games between persons" have replaced any kind of collective struggle against nature
    • society is the framework in which individuals, groups and populations all become Cyborgs
    • Cyborgs > people bound inseparably to machines
    • they are struggling to make sense and achieve purposes within these manipulative systems
11. Precog Visions
    • William Bogard: The Simulation of Surveillance
    • explores an imaginary future or social science fiction where surveillance outstrips itself to become simulation > virtual reality in which crime is already vanquished and desire is satisfied
    • simulation is "perfect surveillance […] where nothing escapes the gaze" > foreknowledge
    • very close to a game-theoretic vision, in which all the moves are already known and played
12. Steven Spielberg: Minority Report
    • tale of the experimental pre-crime department of the Washington D.C. police in 2054
    • tracking technologies by imagining their logical development in the future
    • precognitives > strange, misshapen creatures, full of drugs, bathing in some amniotic solution, with electrodes in their heads to read off their visions of the future > Cyborgs
    • precogs generate mental images of the future without any mediation of computer analysis
13. FutureMAP
    • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency > Futures Markets Applied to Prediction, 2002
    • part of the Total Information Awareness program under the authority of a convicted criminal
    • Foucault > system of correlation between juridico-legal / disciplinary / mechanisms of security
14. PAM trading interface
    • PAM trading interface is literally a map of the future > what Foucault calls security device
    • offers precise insight into the dynamics of surveillance under cybernetic capitalism
    • market instituted program to precisely condition the free behavior of its participants
15. God Machines
    • sleep of reason under informatics surveillance gives rise to God machines
    • which inventions of abstract mathematics will allow the insurance against collapse of system
    • Stanley Kubrick's war room > calculation of the underground survival of selected members
16. Consequences
    • society's obsession with controlling the the future has at least two consequences:
    • 1– organization of consumer environment for the immediate satisfaction of anticipated desires
    • 2– removal of those who might conceivably trouble this tranquilized landscape in any kind
17. Conclusion
    • How can artists, intellectuals and technologists play a significant game, instead of reclining and declining in a gilded cage? How to engage in counter-behaviors, able to subvert the effects of cybernetic governance?
    • create more precise images and more evocative metaphors of the neoliberal art of government
    • heighten awareness of the ways that intimate desire is predicted and manipulated
    • dig into the existential present and transform the everyday machines, by hacking them
    • elaboration of different functional rules for our collective games with language of technology
    • distributed infrastructure exists for such projects, in the form of open-source software
    • sustained institutional commitment is still missing > governments
    • everything depends on who writes the rules, and even more, on how you play the game
    • distributed critique of military neoliberalism and surveillance is needed

Related Media

Futurama EyePhone[2]
Mark Shepard Sentient City Survival Kit[3]
Alexei Shulgin Privatronics[4]

Terminology

Surveillance[5]
Sousveillance[6]