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".

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
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
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
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?
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
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
Case Studies
- literary image of Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984
- complex architectural image of the Panopticon
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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