Notes:Society of Control-Participatory Surveillance

Group: Lídia, Tamas, Chen

-surveillance
-discipline
-training
-individuality

NSA surveillance

"Obama is a nice guy. David Cameron is a nice social Democrat 民主主义者. About three hours from London in Greece there are some very nasty 下流的肮脏的political parties. What there is is the infrastructure 基础设施 for total surveillance. In history, all the precedents 例子 are unhappy," a more important/useful question: how can these systems of surveillance and control be put in place and operate with a “nice guy” in charge 负责? Because it is already happening, and it has been happening for a while.

Narratives叙述/叙述的手法 of surveillance - There’s a debate going on whether the Internet has become a totalitarian极权主义 state, which we should fear given the information it holds about us. According to one of the many narratives today about this subject matter主题, we shouldn’t be worried about this power being used against us, because the good guys are in charge - liberal democracy民主主义 saves us from state control. The problem only begins if this powers falls into the wrong hands. However, are they really good guys? Doesn’t the whole concept of surveillance devices completely obliterate消灭 the whole control-for-altruistic利他的-reasons (if there really is such a possibility) discourse论述? But this is not a surveillance state, it is something else. This is what we might call participatory surveillance or participatory capitalism资本主义. What this means is that we become performing, we make ourselves visible with our online personas, making our data available to the market economy. And this is one of the reasons why in his article “The Internet is Not a Surveillance State”, B. Gottlieb argues that “the qualms良心谴责one has about permitting unmitigated全然的 and unmonitored无监视的 access to one’s social life are discounted as a mere inconvenience one must endure容忍 so that the machines can “serve us better”. The state likewise同样地 asks us to put up with the invasion入侵 of privacy隐私 in order to provide us with such things as “security” and “democracy”.” And here we might introduce the concept of panopticism 全景敞示主义(Michel Foucault): we have internalized the surveillance system, we both participate in and contribute to it. In the later years of his life, Foucault introduced the concept of governmentality, that is, governing from a distance: we don’t need big brother anymore because power is distributed. The distribution of power is implicit in the structures we participate in. E.g. school, military, prison and factories have very clear and obvious power structures, so anyone within such a structure knows where they stand, who has power over them, and their behavior will be influenced by knowledge of and participation within the structure.

“Discipline and Punish”, Michel Foucault

The Panopticon is a very important concept for the surveillance era. The Panopticon is a round building like a donut, in the middle there’s a man on a tower who watches everything. People start behaving because this man might be watching. This happens because people start internalizing this surveilled被监视 behavior, which contributes to subject formation. From an utilitarian功利主义者 point of view this is aimed at making us more efficient, so this subject normalization is really in our best interest. In order to better participate in society we should reform ourselves. The Panopticon, then, provides a paradigm范例 for power and disciplined behavior.

During the classical age (XVII/XVIII centuries), the body was a subject of power through punishment. Behavior is modified by punishing subjects who exhibit “incorrect” behaviors. In the modern age, the body is trained, transformed. The more you (as a subject) invest in this transformation, the more you fall into these norms, the more you are rewarded (usually in the form of greater efficiency at navigating the structures you live in). The disciplinary system works through space and time codes, routines which shape subjectivity and determine ranking. The concept of biopower refers to this distribution of bodies in space and time. Discipline societies encourage their subjects to become docile. The more docile you are and the more you allow society to train you in a particular manner, the less resistance you will encounter from your environment. Disciplinary Societies are possible regardless of the political structure they exist in. A disciplinary society is possible in democracies, monarchies, etc. In all cases, power is distributed.

Where is the individual in this disciplinary system? If we are a product of the system,where is our own self? As stated before, we are programmed into giving up on subjectivity for our own interest.

The Means of Correct Training

1) Observation/Surveillance of the subjects
2) Normalizing judgement
3) Examination- Classify, qualify, punish and diagnose

Photography as a means of normalization

Muybridge was a photographer who made many studies of human motion. For example, a series of photographs documenting the way in which someone walked or ran. This could be seen as a means of normalization since a given walk could now be analyzed and determined to be “normal” or “abnormal.” For example, from one of Muybridge’s studies on the running method of an athlete another man once attempted to replicate the athlete’s style by studying the photos and mimicking the movements of the athlete. This is another example of normalization working in favor of efficiency.

Foucault and the Individual

Power is distributed over a series of mechanisms, which create subjects. What is social construction? Are we constructed by the system, opposed to being Cartesian subjects (“ I think, therefore I am”)? Individuals are discouraged by disciplinary systems. To function at maximum efficiency in a disciplinary society you must give up individuality, to allow yourself to be formed by the systems you live in. People who resist discipline may be individuals, but they will have a hard time functioning in a disciplinary society.

The society of control – Gilles Deleuze

Power in Foucault is different from power in a capitalist system. When people are all at the same place,they’re easier to control. Deleuze asks about the displacement of this power, the prosaic material control. We have a regime of discipline similar to the one described by Foucault. What happens when space is no longer a rule? What should we do then to keep the power structures? We move on to controlling access to and the flow of information. This includes information for which controlled access is in our benefit (requiring a PIN at the ATM or a username/password for your computer) but also information which can be detrimental to an individual when it controlled by another agent (such as the news, or documents detailing the processes by which surveillance is carried out on citizens). In all cases, this control is enacted for the benefit of the system as a whole, not for the benefit of the individual. This leads to a society of control, representing a paradigm shift from a disciplinary society. This difference resides also in the decentralization of power. The all-seeing-eye is disembodied, the database and encoding provide the means for surveillance. The discourse of encoding shapes us, it is part of the discipline system. By adding layers of abstraction and opaqueness, the database becomes the organizational The discourse of encoding shapes us, it is part of the discipline system. By adding layers of abstraction and opaqueness, the database becomes the organizational system. More than a semantic link between economy and our participation in that economy. How do we supply it? We perform,we become commodities, we sell ourselves. Increasingly, we contribute more to the economy (entrepreneurship) This sale of the self is marked in two ways: First, in a shift from simply selling your manual labor in exchange for a paycheck to now needing to “market yourself” to a potential employer as an individual. They now want to know if you’re a good fit for the company, what your values are, etc. This can lead to a blurring of the line between work and personal time as employers are continually looking for more and more information about individuals. And second, in the sale of your personal data in exchange for services like Facebook, GMail, etc.