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 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."