Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Frédéric Neyrat]

"Everyone should know about your mobility": wow! Okay, I'm going to take a
ginger beer and to do some yoga. And think about a world in which
solidarity means tracking people.

Take care dear Brian,

Frédéric

__




On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 3:16 AM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

>  want to try another, simpler way to ask the question: Should I be
> terrified to see my personal dot on a public coronamap? Or is there a
> world in which individual freedoms cohere for a collective good?


<>




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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Brian Holmes]

 want to try another, simpler way to ask the question: Should I be
terrified to see my personal dot on a public coronamap? Or is there a
world in which individual freedoms cohere for a collective good?

Answering Frederic, I guess I am fatalistic about social change: far
as I can see, the neoliberal pattern of society has been shattered.
Not only current norms, but our own selves will undergo a gradual
metamorphosis. This has been underway since 2008, but there has been
no clear ask from the people, no unified demand. Today there is. The
issue is whether left/progressive forces can respond in constructive
ways to the huge demand for protection that's arising from global
populations.

In the wake of the quarantines, when technopolitical change begins
to fuel the recovery, very few will claim they don't need protection
from pandemics, or hurricanes, or food shortages or financial
crises. They're finally gonna understand the phrase *systemic risk*,
and they're gonna demand the build-out of protective machines and
institutions. That's what society did in South Korea after the MERS
epidemic in 2015 (same in Hong Kong and Singapore if I understand
right). And there's no reason to be fatalistic about it: we have
great concepts and practices on the left when it comes to protection,
we call that solidarity. Even in the US there's finally a big push
in that direction. But what does built solidarity look like on a
cybernetic earth populated by over 7 billion human beings?

For sure it could look like an authoritarian regime, what John talked
about. Especially because China is already starting to make a bid for
hegemony by displaying both its effective response to the epidemic
inside its borders (near eradication) plus its overwhelming capacity
to deliver the protective goods outside (masks, ventilators, etc). The
CCP runs the most populous country on earth as a command-and-control
system, in an integrally repressive way as the Uyghur camps show.
Frederic, on my view, that's the social structure that really
corresponds to first-order cybernetics. Such command-and-control
structures do exist in a parcellary way under democratic capitalism
(NSA etc). But what we have before our eyes is the dramatic decay and
breakdown of quite a different system.

China with its overpowering discipline now looks very powerful
in the face of the West, because it's relatively coherent and it
can act. By contrast in so-called Western countries (including a
lot of Asian ones btw) the steering functions are fulfilled in
multiple spheres by autonomous, self-reflexive organizations, with
an attendant load of chaos compounded by competition and corruption.
With its transnationalization of production and consumption, its
plethora of multilateral institutions and its massive build-out
of competing communications networks, the neoliberal society has
operated on second-order principles: observing systems observing other
observing systems. It's interesting to realize that the second-order
thinking emerged with Varela, Maturana and Von Foerster in 1968: it
was a breakthrough, a new possibility, but it became coextensive
to the neoliberal form of organization. Castells called that the
network society. At times it felt like a cultural utopia, and it
offered significant freedoms. Most of what I am comes from there.
But it has above all been a perfect system for hyper-competitive
capitalism, which long ago did away with everything good about it.
Capitalism unbound has wreaked havoc on territorial societies and
it has unleashed chaos at the heart of its own creation, the world
market. Right now as government after government botches its response
to the pandemic, this way of running things looks not just weak but
deadly. Terrifying in a word.

How to create an integrative, third-order
communication-and-coordination system that maintains the open space
of critical and existential difference, while overcoming the unwanted
consequences that arise from 7 billion technologically empowered and
chaotically interacting individuals - plus corporations, governments,
armies etc? What kind of public power would that take? What kind of
subject would create and inhabit such a system?

That's the ecological question, the Anthropocene question, which
ultimately applies to the species. But the pandemic panic is the
first event to bring this question to such a huge part of the
world's populations, through the peculiar stop that is imposed on
productive/consumptive activity. It's that dead stop in the face
of death that causes the present weird, roiling, immobile psychic
panic - the moment when calculable risk becomes sheer terrifying
uncertainty. And Andreas is right to ask exactly what the Don't_Panic
machine would look like, because in due order of logic, there have
to be pragmatically innovative devices before any larger structure
takes shape. Andreas is asking, how would a contact-tracing phone
app provide anything different from what the GAFAM surveillance
capitalists 

Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Frédéric Neyrat]

Dear Brian,

Would I be correct if I say that I see in the last paragraphs of your email
a form of fatalism! Not because you try to think - very well - the future,
but because of the alternative frame that you propose: either the defense
of the "autonomous individual" or the cybernetic being-in-common.

Let's be honest: I'm totally hopeless, so in this sense I'm even more than
fatalist. Yet when I try to imagine how the spirit - let's use an old, old
fashion concept! - can breathe, I see the spirit, that is to say the
possibility to think and not to calculate, the possibility of absolute
metaphors, of unknown affects, of "dialectic images," on a threshold, on
the line that divides your alternative. I see a being-in-common on the side
of the Great Refusal and the individual on the side of the cybernetic
society, that is to say a chiasma that recombines your alternative. I see a
second-order cybernetics that insists on the void around which negative
loops spiral, not the first-order one that helps the police. I see a
complete opposition between being-in-common and first-order cybernetics,
that is to say the annihilation of the common. And I see the possibility to
participate in the elaboration of a society in which technology will be
used for the common, not against it. I see, I see... But I'm blind of
course.

Take care,

Frederic

__




On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 6:31 AM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> There is an interview in today's Corriere della Sera describing the
> contact-tracing app that three Italian firms are developing for the
> Department of Civil Protection:



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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Brian Holmes]

There is an interview in today's Corriere della Sera describing the
contact-tracing app that three Italian firms are developing for the
Department of Civil Protection:

https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_marzo_18/coronavirus-pronta-app-italiana-tracciare-contagi-cosi-possiamo-fermare-l-epidemia-c6c31218-6919-11ea-913c-55c2df06d574.shtml

The coordinator of this project is a medical administrator. He only
describes the broad outlines:

"It is a downloadable application on the mobile that allows, once the
positives have been identified, to reconstruct all their movements in the
previous weeks and to send a message to those with whom they have come in
contact to signal that they are at risk and must start self quarantine.
Doing so stops the spread of the virus. It is the same approach
experimented in South Korea, Singapore and partly in China, which has
proved very effective."

Presumably the app connects the individual's phone account and all its
associated location info to a purpose-built database, while at the same
giving the state the legal authority to use the data. Some accuracy gain in
the geolocation is also claimed. The aim is to use the app after
full-population lockdown is over, in order to halt the formation of new
clusters. This would allow for the epidemiological management of individual
mobility over the 18th-month period before a vaccine can be rolled out
massively. Mobility-management enforced by the police, if you did not
gather that already. An additional function allows for real-time
identification of emerging outbreaks:

""The app also has a 'clinical diary' for early detection, early detection
of infections. A section where individual users can anonymously record any
symptoms. The data thus collected allow us to predict if there are areas in
which the infection is spreading. Today, however, we only test people who
get worse: it means that we detect cases when they are now at least ten
days old. And so they have already infected others. Knowing if today in
Milan, for example, there is a sudden increase in people with a fever means
being able to intervene immediately with quarantine and preventive
isolation."

In South Korea where this kind of app was first developed, all the
information is made public, apparently to promote public trust in
government (???). People have made map interfaces to visualize the data.
Check it out:

https://coronamap.site

Red dot means the infected person was at the marked location sometime
between now and 24 hrs ago; yellow, from 1 to 4 days ago; green, more than
4 days ago - so no problem with that particular bar/restaurant/shopping
center/apartment complex ...

The South Korean approach is described in an article in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00740-y

As David Lyons pointed out long ago, most new surveillance functions are
welcomed by the public, because of the security gains they offer. So in
South Korea:

"The public broadly supports the government publishing individuals’
movement, says Youngkee Ju, a researcher in health journalism at Hallym
University in Chuncheon. In 1,000-person surveys that he co-authored,
published in February and earlier this month, most respondents supported
the government sharing travel details of people with COVID-19. Furthermore,
most “preferred the public good to individual rights”, says Ju. He and his
colleagues intend to perform a follow-up survey to find out exactly how
much personal information the public supports disclosing."

If applied in the Western societies - as the Italians intend - this would
represent a fundamental change in the social contract. Combine it with
unlimited state intervention in the economy and the mobilization of
corporations and the military for production, health care and border
closure, and you're looking at social changes far beyond what happened
after 9/11.

It has been obvious for years that Anthropocene conditions were going to
force a transformation of the state, in order to deal with new problems
emerging at the level of the population, and ultimately, of the species.
Just as the neoliberal globalization paradigm is now clearly over, it seems
that political liberalism itself will now undergo a sea-change in terms of
the theoretical inviolability of individual rights. In the face of this,
there seem to be two broad options for civil society response:

-- Publicly refuse any infringement of previously existing rights, while
privately maintaining the psycho-philosophical stance of the autonomous
individual; or

-- Participate critically in the elaboration of new population- and
species-level norms for the being-in-common of a fully cybernetic society
-- but on the ethical basis of what kind of "general intellect"

If anyone is looking for a core problem in philosophy or political science
to work on over the next few months, maybe this is it. I reckon the
questions above are not exclusive alternatives. Instead they begin to mark
out the contested/consensual space 

Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Frédéric Neyrat]

Dear Felix,

I wonder if *focusing* on "mobile phone data to monitor public health
efforts" is not the best way to prepare, structure, what you call in your
email "the general state of emergency" - to technologically enable it to
last! Yes, "simply calling for the protection of personal privacy" is
meaningless, but we already know that, right? So, do we really want to
think, collectively, "to fine-tune mechanism for social distancing" that
technology will implement? Is it the new goal of the General Intellect? The
new trend in the post-human future?

I know that we're living in a nightmare, that we all have to be cautious,
to take care of the ones we love, to help people not getting the COVID-19,
and as everyone I think about that and I try to do my best. But we also
need to maintain some distancing vis-à-vis what seems to be the coming
technological annihilation of the being-in-common.

Best,

Frederic

__


__
 Literature and Materialisms

(Routledge, 2020)

Website: Atopies 



On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 4:26 AM Felix Stalder  wrote:

>
> Here in Austria, and in many other places as well, restrictions on
> personal mobility are quite severe. At the moment, we are told to
> stay at home, with exceptions only for a) going to work (where remote
> work is not possible), b) shopping for necessities (food, medicines,
> cigarettes, mobile phones) c) helping others do b) and going for walks
> (alone or with people with whom one shares the apartment).


<...>



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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[William Waites]

Felix Stalder  writes:

> So, is there a possibility to use this data without it turning
> it into an authoritarian power grab? I think there is, under the
> following guidelines:
>
> - Data needs to be deleted after immediate purpose of the analysis
> has been achieved.

The thing is these data are as much necessary for trying to do
immediate contract tracing as they are for post-hoc analysis and
development and validation of new analysis techniques. These are
very important. We can't just rely on non-reproducible analyses that
can't be checked because the data has been deleted. Some of this only
requires an anonymised version of the data, but we also know that
doing that right is very hard.

> - The analysis needs to be restricted to questions developed by
> an external team. So, no fishing simple because the data is now
> available. Mission creep is very often a problem.

For sure, but see above.

> - Questions, methods and results of the analysis need to be published
> after the fact. This will allow public appraisal of the legitimacy of
> the program.

Absolutely.

> - Data needs to be made available to at least two teams that are
> completely independent from one another. This will allow for the
> cross-examination of the quality of the different approaches.

Anonymised data, if we can make such a thing, should be made completely
open and then all the usual activity of analysing and modelling it in
different ways can happen.

For the personalised data, I agree with you, but it should be at least
three teams because if you have two analyses that disagree, it's hard to
tell which one is wrong.

Best wishes,
-w

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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Laura Chimera]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 at 10:25, Felix Stalder  wrote:

> A1, the largest mobile phone carrier, is providing data to public
> authorities in an effort to monitor these restrictions (contact
> tracing might come later).
>

What's your source on that? I'd love to read more about it

~ L

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Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Felix Stalder]

Here in Austria, and in many other places as well, restrictions on
personal mobility are quite severe. At the moment, we are told to
stay at home, with exceptions only for a) going to work (where remote
work is not possible), b) shopping for necessities (food, medicines,
cigarettes, mobile phones) c) helping others do b) and going for walks
(alone or with people with whom one shares the apartment).

A1, the largest mobile phone carrier, is providing data to public
authorities in an effort to monitor these restrictions (contact
tracing might come later). This is quite unprecedented and most people
who care about data privacy are rather uneasy about it, for very
obvious reasons.

But I think we need to think beyond the classic surveillance / privacy
dichotomy, because, clearly, social network analysis is what you
want to do in order to trace the spread of a virus and fine-tune
mechanism for social distancing. The traditional methods of calling up
all people an infected person remembers having had contact over the
preceding week is not very effective and doesn't scale.

So, is there a possibility to use this data without it turning it into
an authoritarian power grab? I think there is, under the following
guidelines:

- Data needs to be deleted after immediate purpose of the analysis has
been achieved.

- The analysis needs to be restricted to questions developed by
an external team. So, no fishing simple because the data is now
available. Mission creep very often a problem.

- Questions, methods and results of the analysis need to be published
after the fact. This will allow public appraisal of the legitimacy of
the program.

- Data needs to be made available to at least two teams that are
completely independent from one another. This will allow for the
cross-examination of the quality of the different approaches.

If we manage to develop such a framework, which both acknowledges the
public health crises AND the democratic character of our societies,
then we might have created something that will be very useful for
other big data question that will inevitably come up in the future.

Is it likely that we manage to enact these? No. But simply calling for
the protection of personal privacy, or accepting the general state of
emergency, will be even worse.







-- 
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