Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
thanks felix, very interesting! but you are not entirely correct on this: Fast forward 30 years. Many countries, including Germany, no longer conduct national censuses because the data has already been collected and can be aggregated flexibly from the various databases at the heart of government. it is true that there is no classic census anymore with people ringing at your door, asking questions about the number of people in the household. but there will be quite soon a census in germany as part of the eu-wide census: record day is 4th of May 2011. but of course your main point is true: despite of some control samples the data will be mainly taken from existing communal records. nevertheless german scientists have already complained that some decisive information will not be gathered by this census: for example which languages are being spoken in a respective household. so obviously we have not yet arrived in cybernetic society which is controlled and regulated in real time, although a merger of google and germany might produce some synergy here. best, ulrich # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
Le 6 juil. 10, à 14:33, Prem Chandavarkar a écrit : The Sarko (he who possesses).too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore... Jean Baudrillard: The Ecstasy of Communication in Post Modern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
The schizo (he who possesses).too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore. The schizo is berefit of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity. What characterises him is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said, but very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defence, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparency of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play or stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only pure screen, a switching centre for the networks of influence. Jean Baudrillard: The Ecstasy of Communication in Post Modern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. On 5 July 2010 19:21, Armin Medosch ar...@easynet.co.uk wrote: To be free in 1968 is to participate. (Graffiti in Paris 1968, quoted by Merrifield 2002) To be free in 2010 is not to participate. Me with best regards Armin # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
The opiate of the intellectual elite is to know it all, all being the drug of desire to be deity with a god's eye brimming with what is worth knowing, the rest insignificantly contemptuous. Having it all varies as the total, the comprehensive, the summation, the fully embracing scheme to replicate, plagiarize, ape, the giants of deep and vast thinking who have had no raison d'etre except to imagine the whole, entire, give or take 99% of humankind, shebang of their times. No matter each is later ridiculed, or more often valorized and hyped and taught unreflectively, for vainglorizing, in our day resume inflating, the futile effort to oversee a chimera confected to banish fear of the incomprehensible, i.e., to have no compensable employment. For every dietic, heroic, grand aggregation of the day's best visions of being and time, there is a countervailing destruction, debunking, of the compulsion, even insane, to hold it all in a mind drunk on pretentiousness. Adherents, believers, naysayers, bloom for both pathologies. The 99.9% are ignorant of all this, meaning it couldn't give a shit that a tiny priesthood is determined to think it all through once and for all, goddam it, listen up. So what do you think about this, any chance of it snagging a paid invite? Another asshole, huh? # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
To be free in 1968 is to participate. (Graffiti in Paris 1968, quoted by Merrifield 2002) To be free in 2010 is not to participate. Me with best regards Armin On Sun, 2010-07-04 at 13:18 +0200, Felix Stalder wrote: ...in the spirit of 'slow media', a delayed response Hi Nick, thanks a lot for your thoughtful reading of the text. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
Thanks alot for forwarding the essay Felix, it was good to think about with. There were a few bits I'm not sure I understood, which I wanted to ask you about if you have time. When you write about new subjectivities, you point out that the meaning of privacy changes, due in part to the reduction in differentiation of inner and outer worlds. You then state that privacy becomes more the danger of disconnection from a world in which sociability is tenuous and needs to be actively maintained all of the time. I don't really understand this. I see that disconnection from fragile social networks is an issue, but am having trouble connecting this up with privacy. And second, you mention that new ways of constructing and taking part in voluntary networks can increase the real autonomy of people, because it is focused on creating inter-personal worlds in which autonomy can be lived on a daily basis. This too I'm struggling to mentally connect. I see that a wider range of social interactions, and personally tailor one's communication web, is in some sense increasing one's autonomy, but to me it doesn't seem all that significant. Is there more to this that I'm missing? In reply to Elloi's first problem with the paper, that it ignores ownership of the wire, I somewhat disagree. It is mentioned in the last paragraph, talking about the need to modulat[e] what the providers of the infrastructure can see of the sociability they enable. For some infrastructures this is of course more technically feasible than others (e.g. P2P vs web-based). The second issue, of homogeneity caused by over-availability, is really important, though I'm not sure it's essential to the argument in the paper. It's an issue I have a really hard time thinking about solutions to. More transparency of search engines (as alluded to at the end of the essay) helps a little, and an ability to personally tweak or reengineer algorithms would help more (ignoring the problems of how to implement such a system), but even these don't really go a long way in addressing it. Anyone else want to weigh in (or suggest places to read more) on the problem? Thanks, Nick -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.15 (GNU/Linux) iEYEABECAAYFAkwt0bUACgkQH0hWdATkZT/lbwCgxS4jNHRndXrsLk9p9GjG9TUb NSEAnjPd8l2Q/FJXPwMoIVT6G00Y5sBt =OXIO -END PGP SIGNATURE- # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
[This is my contribution to the current issue (#19) of 'open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain.' which focuses on 'Beyond Privacy. New Notions of the Private and Public Domains.' In this text, I try to analyze why the notion of privacy seems to be loosing its capacity to function as a political category, despite all the privacy commissioners and NGOs fighting to protext privacy. Felix] http://www.skor.nl/artefact-4808-en.html One way to characterize Western modernity, the period we are just leaving, is by its particular structure of control and autonomy. It emerged as the result of two historic developments – one leading to large, hierarchic bureaucracies as the dominant form of organization, the other to the (bourgeois, male) citizen as the main political subject. Privacy played a key role in maintaining a balance between the two. Today, this arrangement is unraveling. In the process, privacy loses (some of) its social functions. Post-privacy, then, points to a transformation in how people create autonomy and how control permeates their lives. Bureaucracies and Citizens, 1700-1950 -- The first of these developments was the expansion of large-scale institutions, first state bureaucracies, then, since the late nineteenth century, commercial corporations.1 Their attempts to organize social processes on a previously unimaginable scale – in terms of space, time and complexity – required vast amounts of information about the world, most importantly about the subjects in their domain. In 1686, the Marquis de Vauban proposed to Louis XIV a yearly census of the entire population, so that the king would be ‘able, in his own office, to review in an hour’s time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths.’2 At the time, such an endeavour could not be conducted for practical reasons, but the vision spawned an entire range of new theoretical approaches to render the world available in such a way. In 1749, the German political scientist Gottfried Achenwall (1719-1772) brought them together under the term ‘statistics’, defined as the ‘science dealing with data about the condition of a state or community’. Yet, handling such data became ever more difficult as the drive to collect intensified. In the late nineteenth century, the US census, held once a decade, reached a critical juncture when the processing of the data amassed could not be finished before the next census was to be held. The historian James Beniger put this ‘control crisis’ at the beginning of the computer revolution and the information age enabled by it.3 Without the systematic gathering of standardized information and its processing into actionable knowledge, none of the functions of the modern state, or the modern economy, could have developed, beginning with centralized taxation, standing armies, social welfare provisions, or international trade and production of complex goods and services. Thus, modernity, and particularly high modernity, was characterized by an expansion of control by large bureaucracies based on massive amounts of information, conceptualizing people as standardized data-points to be manipulated for their own, or someone else’s, good. But as long as life was lived in a largely analogue environment, the comprehensive gathering of data remained such an extremely labour-intensive affair that only massive bureaucracies were capable of conducting it, and even highly developed states could do it only once every ten years. Under such conditions of limited information processing capacity (as we can see now), the drive to scale up these bureaucracies created strategies to radically reduce complexity, rendering them rigid and impersonal. Yet, during the same period of expanding centralized control, new spaces of autonomy were created. People, or, more precisely, educated townsmen, forged a new type of subjectivity. They began to think of themselves less as members of larger collectives (the guild, the church) and more as persons individually endowed with capacities, self-responsibility and, thus, a certain freedom from these collective entities. Central to this new sense of individuality was the secular notion of an inner life.4 It was characterized by the innate capacity to reflect and reason. This is, perhaps, the central notion of the enlightenment which celebrated the ability ‘to use one’s understanding without guidance from another’, to use Immanuel Kant’s famous definition (1784). While these capacities were located in the inner world of the individual, the enlightenment thought of them as universal. In principle, every man (though not necessarily women) should reach the same reasoned conclusion, if presented with the same evidence. Based on this universality of reason, the subject could
Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy [Re: Contents of nettime-l digest - Felix Stalder]
Dear Felix, I opened the net-time email this morning and found particular joy in reading your article 'Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy.' The article reaches into a continual dialogue we have with ourselves every time we are required to send info before accessing an online app., which is to decide whether privacy matters, especially since data-collection and surveillance are ubiquitous. It goes back to the idea of communities deciding to 'come out' rather than remain hidden, to develop within the public sphere rather than to remain static and 'in the closet.' Thanks very much for posting your article! Cecilia Dougherty Bard College, NY On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:18 AM, nettime-l-requ...@kein.org wrote: Today's Topics: 1. Middlesex philosophy moves to Kingston (university, not Jamaica ; -) (Patrice Riemens) 2. Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy (Felix Stalder) ... -- Cecilia Dougherty http://www.ceciliadougherty.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
There are two premises which appear to be ignored: 1. ownership of the wire. While most people do actually own their synapses, very few own the physical links that support assisted communication. It's easy to forget this, but if you've ever sat at the other side of log acquisition and content filtering whether in corporate or government sector, you'll never think of the Networked World as of anything else as an experimental ant colony where you get to define the ground rules. This is important in a purely entropy (or originality) creation sense: today there are orders of magnitude fewer creators of the mental landscape, compared to the times when one could sit processing a small amount of data gathered during the day with own wetware. Think of this as braincycles/bit of data ratio. It has changed. Society is going back to mainframe computing. 2. Number of data sources. With increased connectivity, ratio of cumulative braincycles/data source has dramatically increased for those who get to publish. As number of braincycles is limited, this necessarily depletes processing services for other. less popular data sources. Sort of DoS attack (not even DDoS). This in turn, results in increased homogenization of the thinking and monoculture that everyone bitches about. Why are these two points important? Because affecting one or both is the only way to introduce a change. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
