Thanks, Yosem. Good one. At the book's Amazon page <https://www.amazon.com/How-Became-Our-Data-Informational/dp/022662658X/>, do the "look inside" thing and go to the chapter titled "Redesign: Data's Turbulent Pasts and Future Paths" (p. 173) and read forward through the two pages it allows. In that chapter, Koopman begins to develop "the argument that information politics is separate from communicative politics." We might note that his frame (what he earlier calls "embankments") is politics.
Now take three minutes for A Smart Home Neighborhood: Residents Find It Enjoyably Convenient Or A Bit Creepy <https://www.npr.org/2019/11/09/777747209/a-smart-home-neighborhood-residents-find-it-enjoyably-convenient-or-a-bit-creepy>, which ran on NPR this morning. It's about a neighborhood of Amazon "smart homes" in a Seattle suburb. Both the homes and the neighborhood are full of convenience, absent of privacy, and reliant on surveillance—both by Amazon and residents. A guy with the investment arm of the National Association of Realtors says, "There's a new narrative when it comes to what a home means." The reporter enlarges on this: "It means a personalized environment where technology responds to your every need. Maybe it means giving up some privacy. These families are trying out that compromise." In one case the teenage daughter relies on Amazon as her "butler," while her mother walks home on the side of the street without Amazon doorbells, which have cameras and microphones. Two more pieces. First, About face <https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2019/10/31/about-face/>, a blog post where I visit the issue of facial recognition by computers. Like the smart home, facial recognition is a technology that's useful both for powerful forces outside of ourselves, and by ourselves. And, to limit the former, we need to rely on the former. That's a political quandary that verges on impossibility, which is why looking for a policy solution may be a waste of energy and time. Second, What does the Internet make of us <https://medium.com/@dsearls/what-does-the-internet-make-of-us-118421ac5e>, which I conclude with this: My wife likens the experience of being “on” the Internet to one of weightlessness. Because the Internet is not a thing, and has no gravity. There’s no “there” there. In adjusting to this, our species has around two decades of experience so far, and only about one decade of doing it on smartphones, most of which we will have replaced two years from now. (Some because the new ones will do 5G, which looks <https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linuxs-broadening-foundation> to be yet another way we’ll be captured by phone companies that never liked or understood the Internet in the first place.) But meanwhile we are not the same. We are digital beings now, and we are being made by digital technology and the Internet. No less human, but a lot more connected to each other—and to things that not only augment and expand our capacities in the world, but replace and undermine them as well, in ways we are only beginning to learn. One more: Mark Stahlman's The End of Memes or McLuhan 101 <https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/the-end-of-memes-or-mcluhan-101/>, in which he unpacks both figure / ground and formal cause. The point of both here is that what we tend to focus on—data, surveillance, politics, memes, stories—are figures on a ground that causes all of their forms. And that ground is digital technology itself. That ground is like the power of speech, of tool-making, of writing, of printing, of rail transport, mass production, electricity, automobiles, radio and television—all of which were obsolesced by new technologies that also retrieved what was still useful about them: new technologies that in turn will also became obsolesced and retrieved anew by another round of formally causational tech which in modern times we call "disruptive." Digital technology, however, is less disruptive and world-changing than it is world-making. It is as hard to make sense of this virtual world than it is to sense roundness in the apparently flat horizons of our physical world. It's also too easy to fall for the misdirections inherent in all effects of formal causes. For example, it's much easier to talk about Trump than about what made him possible. (McLuhan: "People...do not want to know why radio caused Hitler and Gandhi alike.") So here's where I am now on all this: We have not become data. We have become digital, while remaining no less physical. And we can't understand what that means if we focus only on data. Politics in digital conditions is pure effect, and pure misdirection away from how digital tech causes not just politics, but everything it involves. Looking to policy for cures to digital ills is ironically both unavoidable and sure to produce unintended consequences. For an example of both, look no farther than the GDPR. It demoted human beings to mere "data subjects," located nearly all agency with "data controllers" and "data processors," has done little so far to thwart unwelcome surveillance, and has caused boundlessly numerous, insincere, misleading and wasteful (of time, energy, and cognitive and operational overhead) "cookie notices," almost all of which are designed to obtain "consent" to what the regulation was meant to stop—and called into being monstrous new legal and technical enterprises, both satisfying business market demand for ways to obey the letter of the GDPR while violating its spirit. Power is moving to the edge. That's us. Yes, there is massive concentration of power and money in the hands of giant companies on which we have become terribly dependent. But there are operative failure modes in all those companies, and digital tech remains ours no less than theirs. I could make that list a lot longer, but that's enough for my main purpose here, which is to raise the topic of research. ProjectVRM was conceived in the first place as a development and research effort. As a Berkman Klein Center project, in fact, it has something of an obligation to either do research, or to participate in it. We've encouraged development for thirteen years. Now some of that work is drifting over to the Me2B Alliance <https://www.me2balliance.org/> which has good leadership, funding and participation. There is also good energy in the IEEE 7012 working group <https://standards.ieee.org/project/7012.html> and Customer Commons <http://customercommons.org/>, both of which owe much to ProjectVRM. So perhaps now is a good time to start at least start talking about research. Two possible topics: facial recognition and smart homes. Anyone game? Doc > On Nov 11, 2019, at 7:16 AM, Yosem Companys <[email protected]> wrote: > > In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our > rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for > how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the > emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and > social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing > personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. > This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational person” and the > “informational power” we are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital > technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is > shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. > Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in > conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and > Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we > have come to think of our personhood—and how we can resist it. > > Colin Koopman is associate professor of philosophy and director of the New > Media & Culture Program at the University of Oregon. His books include: > Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty > (2009); Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (2013); > and How We Become Our Date: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (2019). > His published articles on pragmatism have appeared in Journal of the History > of Philosophy, diacritics, Metaphilosophy, Contemporary Pragmatism, > Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and elsewhere. > > https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo38181810.html > <https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo38181810.html>
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