Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Geoffrey Goodell]

Hi Ana,

The problem with this proposal is that it focusses on the 'processing'
of personal data, when the focus should be on the 'collection' of
personal data instead.

There is no way to prove that data, once collected, have not been used
for malicious purposes or any purposes. There is no way to prove that
data have not been exposed to malicious insiders, business partners,
law enforcement, foreign governments, hackers, or indeed anyone.

In this environment, both before and after COVID-19, the prevailing
wisdom has been to 'collect all the data' with a justification that
the benefits of 'serendipity' will outweigh the human costs and that
it is a good idea to have the data 'just in case'. These arguments are
dangerous and wrong.

Any serious attempt to protect personal privacy must start with
privacy by design, and the first principle of privacy by design is not
to collect any data more than what is absolutely necessary to deliver
a service.

Best wishes --

Geoff

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 08:33:17PM +0100, Ana Peraica wrote:
> 
> Hi all, just a quick note, 

<>



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Fwd: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Joseph Rabie]

> Le 22 mars 2020 à 16:58, Richard Grusin  > a écrit :
> 
> Yes, as a friend said to me yesterday, COVID-19 is a shot across the bow of 
> the anthropocene.



Seriously? Epidemics such as this one have in all likelihood always been part 
of the world.

Indeed, the Anthropocene is the virus's worst enemy. Compare fatalities now 
with those before (Black Death, Spanish Flu). Modern medical technique is part 
and parcel of the Anthropocene. How many sicknesses have been eradicated by 
vaccination and other treatments?

One of the characteristics of the Anthropocene is wholesale biocide. The 
Coronavirus should not be seen as some sort of "revenge".

Joe.





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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Heiko Recktenwald]

Am 22/03/20 um 20:33 schrieb Ana Peraica:

> I can here imagine benefits in tracing victims in these unstable
> times (severe weather, earthquakes for example), but also at moment
> electronic monitoring of self-isolated COVID patients, not obeying
> the command to quarantine, but also migrant crisis I suppose?

Monitoring quarantine is special, it is more like catching thieves, you
may get punished, but here is what happens in Singapore as far as
tracing of. infections is concerned. They use an app and bluetooth.
Everybody who was within a distance of 5 meters will be notified:


https://www.axios.com/singapore-coronavirus-big-brother-bd7cec2b-eb47-4b49-a337-f4f4ecff57f2.html


H.























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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Ana Peraica]

Hi all, just a quick note, 

Croatia has, two days ago passed a Draft of proposal of Law on Additions to the 
Law on Electronic Communication with the Draft of the Final Proposal of Law, 
including the article 104 saying:
“processing of personal data should be legal if there is a need for the 
protection of interest which are
 vital to the protection of life of a person in question or another physical 
person. Processing of personal data on the basis of interests vital for life of 
other physical person under the assumption can be undertaken only if processing 
cannot be made on other legal basis. other types of procesing may be used for 
needs of public interests or vital interests of the person in question, as if 
the processing is in humanitarian purposes, as tracing epidemics, their 
spreading or humanitarian crisis, especially in cases caused by natural 
catastrophes or catastrophes caused by other people’s actions” (my quick 
translation). 
https://mmpi.gov.hr/vlada-rh-usvojen-nacrt-prijedloga-zakona-o-dopunama-zakona-o-elektronickim-komunikacijama-s-nacrtom-konacnog-prijedloga-zakona/22150?fbclid=IwAR1qXHYMzwv1Ig_m9RRB3ctRT0v9UNZ-E1MfZPoNm_pd6GaWyHy57ZF7YZ8
 


I can here imagine benefits in tracing victims in these unstable times (severe 
weather, earthquakes for example), but also at moment electronic monitoring of 
self-isolated COVID patients, not obeying the command to quarantine, but also 
migrant crisis I suppose? 

best, 

Ana 






 










> On 22 Mar 2020, at 16:58, Richard Grusin  > wrote:
> 
> 
> Yes, as a friend said to me yesterday, COVID-19 is a shot across the bow of 
> the anthropocene.
> 
>
>

<...>
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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Richard Grusin]

Yes, as a friend said to me yesterday, COVID-19 is a shot across the bow of the 
anthropocene.

Also, as to the ultra-rich: let’s start by taking half of their wealth and go 
from there.

Richard


> On Mar 22, 2020, at 1:07 AM, Sean Cubitt  wrote:
> 
> hi all
> 
> sorry for my poor joke about a cull of the ultra-rich: perhaps it's wrong to 
> invite the 8 men who Oxfam declared three years back owned as much as the the 
> poorer half of the world's population to join hospital porters in the world's 
> most understaffed hospitals - for the good of their souls?
> 


<>


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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Sean Cubitt]

hi all

sorry for my poor joke about a cull of the ultra-rich: perhaps it's wrong to 
invite the 8 men who Oxfam declared three years back owned as much as the the 
poorer half of the world's population to join hospital porters in the world's 
most understaffed hospitals - for the good of their souls?

But I hold to the point that capital is incapable of securing its own survival. 
This is how we know it is not human (and indeed not a life-form, since every 
life form will strive to ensure that it can continue living). Take the 
Athabasca tar sands: using intense energies to extract il gets very expensive 
ill which, however, does guarantee a supply should other regions take their cue 
from Saddam Hussein and cut out the middleman by setting fire to their own 
assets. But the other upshot is that the price of bitumen, which used to come 
from the same resource, skyrockets, making it too expensive to build new roads 
to run the cars on that are going to burn the oil for you.

The failure to rein in the derivatives market in the wake of the GFC is a prime 
example; as is the whole Anthopocene gamble that Xi, Trump, Modi et al are 
wagering.

More distressing is the opposite side of surveillant information economics. 
There is little value to be got from gathering data on predictable behaviours; 
interactions are of interest when they are unpredictable.But at the point when 
enough information has been gathered to make the vast majority (the logic of 
info-capital says 'all') of human behaviour predictable, then the function of 
human behaviours in information generation ends, and humans become redundant.

The risk under the virus situation is that unpredictable behaviours could be 
fatal, and not just to the perpetrators. I keep thinking of Thomas Ray who used 
to say that the largest under-inhabited bio-mass on Earth is the human 
population, and that as long as it is underpopulated, there will always be 
critters evolving to make their homes in it.

Enough apocalypse! Enough of the exceptional humans who think their system will 
prevail over the deaths of others. Enough of the human exception that thinks we 
should be able to do 'whatever it takes' to ensure our survival over the rest 
of the planet.

As Andreas says, the situation may not be revolutionary, but it has all the 
hallmarks of being evolutionary. So to Brian's initiating query: individualism 
or general intellect, the answer is of course the general intellect; but in a 
form that no longer severs humans from either the technical or natural 
environment. Resource and information extraction are both terminal 
trajectories; finding alliances with the repressed and oppressed world is 
intrinsic: dead labour is even more intrinsic to living than it was when Marx 
was writing Capital; the labours of Gaia ditto. An eco-technic commons is the 
means and the goal: the only question is how move it from some kind of ontology 
into practice


Sean


From: Andreas Broeckmann 
Sent: Friday, 20 March 2020 8:32 PM
To: Sean Cubitt ; nettime-l@mail.kein.org 

Subject: Re:  Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

Dear Sean, folks,

thanks for the useful historical references. I've already gone on record
here as being against speculations on who should die in what way.


<>





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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[William Waites]

James Wallbank  writes:

> And, shockingly, the value of a lawyer who is not working is,
> apparently, greater than the value of a waste disposal worker who is
> working!

Necessary to point out that, at least as of now, lawyers, especially
junior ones taking legal aid cases, are being required to keep working:

http://www.younglegalaidlawyers.org/COVID19pressrelease

Also the wage subsidy is capped at just above the median wage, so it's
not quite as wildly unequal as you suggest. Though I agree that it would
be better to just treat everyone who is not working equally.

Best wishes,
-w


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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[James Wallbank]

Hello Andreas,

Great questions!

I think it's interesting to see the reaction of the UK Regime (for
those of you who aren't clear, Johnson is a known deceptionist and
right-wing Trumpalike).

It seems that the challenge for conservatives is simply to maintain
society's current social hierarchies. Johnson has put forward an
extraordinary plan that subsidises 80% of all employees' wages
(notice that it leaves out people in precarious self-employment and
gig-economy work).

What the government has conspicuously NOT done is to introduce
Universal Basic Income. Instead, they have determined that the "value"
of, say, a lawyer who is not working, is much higher than the "value"
of a bricklayer who is not working. Both, in turn, are of higher
"value" than a childcare assistant who is not working.

And, shockingly, the value of a lawyer who is not working is,
apparently, greater than the value of a waste disposal worker who is
working!

So the choice has been to offer differential support to humans - to
freeze in place the inequalities of society in the perverse hope that
they'll be able to defrost it, unchanged, in a year.

Quite apart from the practical complexity of a differential subsidy
for non-workers' wages, I'm interested in the philosophy of inequity
that lies behind this. They are, quite clearly, going to some lengths
to preserve inequality as if it were a precious, vital feature of
society.

Best Regards,

James
=

On 20/03/2020 09:32, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:


Dear Sean, folks,

thanks for the useful historical references. I've already gone on
record here as being against speculations on who should die in what
way.



<>




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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Jan Groos]

Hi everybody,

following up on the nettime discussions about mobile phone data,
contact tracing and the political implications of the current
situation I did an Interview with Felix for my Podcast. We recorded
it on Thursday and it was published today. It's in German though, but
since it kind of started through a nettime debate I wanted to let
you know. You can find it on any of the bigger podcast platforms by
searching for Future Histories (name of the podcast) + Felix Stalder.
Or here on my website:

https://www.futurehistories.today/#episoden-rp

Let me know what you think.

Greetings

Jan


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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Sean Cubitt]

sorry for my poor joke about a cull of the ultra-rich: perhaps it's wrong to 
invite the 8 men who Oxfam declared three years back owned as much as the the 
poorer half of the world's population to join hospital porters in the world's 
most understaffed hospitals - for the good of their souls?

But I hold to the point that capital is incapable of securing its own survival. 
This is how we know it is not human (and indeed not a life-form, since every 
life form will strive to ensure that it can continue living). Take the 
Athabasca tar sands: using intense energies to extract il gets very expensive 
ill which, however, does guarantee a supply should other regions take their cue 
from Saddam Hussein and cut out the middleman by setting fire to their own 
assets. But the other upshot is that the price of bitumen, which used to come 
from the same resource, skyrockets, making it too expensive to build new roads 
to run the cars on that are going to burn the oil for you.

The failure to rein in the derivatives market in the wake of the GFC is a prime 
example; as is the whole Anthopocene gamble that Xi, Trump, Modi et al are 
wagering.

More distressing is the opposite side of surveillant information economics. 
There is little value to be got from gathering data on predictable behaviours; 
interactions are of interest when they are unpredictable.But at the point when 
enough information has been gathered to make the vast majority (the logic of 
info-capital says 'all') of human behaviour predictable, then the function of 
human behaviours in information generation ends, and humans become redundant.

The risk under the virus situation is that unpredictable behaviours could be 
fatal, and not just to the perpetrators. I keep thinking of Thomas Ray who used 
to say that the largest under-inhabited bio-mass on Earth is the human 
population, and that as long as it is underpopulated, there will always be 
critters evolving to make their homes in it.

Enough apocalypse! Enough of the exceptional humans who think their system will 
prevail over the deaths of others. Enough of the human exception that thinks we 
should be able to do 'whatever it takes' to ensure our survival over the rest 
of the planet.

As Andreas says, the situation may not be revolutionary, but it has all the 
hallmarks of being evolutionary. So to Brian's initiating query: individualism 
or general intellect, the answer is of course the general intellect; but in a 
form that no longer severs humans from either the technical or natural 
environment. Resource and information extraction are both terminal 
trajectories; finding alliances with the repressed and oppressed world is 
intrinsic: dead labour is even more intrinsic to living than it was when Marx 
was writing Capital; the labours of Gaia ditto. An eco-technic commons is the 
means and the goal: the only question is how move it from some kind of ontology 
into practice


Sean


From: Andreas Broeckmann 
Sent: Friday, 20 March 2020 8:32 PM
To: Sean Cubitt ; nettime-l@mail.kein.org 

Subject: Re:  Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

Dear Sean, folks,

thanks for the useful historical references. I've already gone on record
here as being against speculations on who should die in what way.


<>




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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

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Hey Felix,

thanks for describing the cascade... Since you do not address the
question, even though you quote it, I presume the implicit answer you
offer is that under the current regime "suspending these obligations"
is not an option, or unthinkable? (or taboo?)

How is that to be understood...? [please, reverse by 6 months, back to
autumn 2019, just for a moment] - Is the option of "suspending these
obligations" _more_ or is it _less_ "unthinkable" than, say, putting
half the global population under curfew for eight weeks, at the risk
of total economic breakdown?

Regards,
-a



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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Felix Stalder]

On 20.03.20 10:32, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

> But: if a major economic problem at the moment is that people have
> to pay their rent, or service the credits and mortgages they took
> out, why does the State, under these severe circumstances, currently
> make such an effort to help people pay tribute to capital, rather
> than suspend these obligations?

I think most of the current interventions are aimed at stabilizing
the system and preventing a cascade of breakdowns, but this requires
a cascade of interventions. So, the first intervention is to "flatten
the curve" by reducing social interaction.

The means to do so is to close venues, non-essential shops, introduce
restrictions on mobility etc. However, this starts a cascade of
economic breakdowns, with people losing jobs and other forms of
income. Pretty soon, businesses will go bankrupt because revenue dries
out. This will set in motion another set of breakdowns, as people and
companies are no longer capable of paying their rent, their utility
bills, their credit rates etc. This time, what breaks down is basic
infrastructure (imagine the utility company goes bankrupt), and
financial system (because of escalating bad debt).

So, the goal seems to be put the stop of this at the earliest possible
moment. Flatten the curve seems to be essential, that's the consensus
(even the US and the UK are doing this now), so the immediate knock-on
effects on businesses and incomes are unavoidable. The current
policies -- from extended forms of "Kurzarbeit" (does that exist
outside the German-speaking world?) to simplified unemployment
claims, direct payments to self-employed and gig-economy workers, to
"helicopter money" handed out everyone -- all seem to be designed to
protect these deeper infrastructural levels of the economy.

Of course, at these deeper levels, capital is concentrated heavily,
so there is class dimension to it, but I presume there is also a
recognition that the deeper you go, the more expensive it gets and the
more extensive the effects of a breakdown would be.

So, in my view, there is very little we can do about immediate crisis
policies -- anyway, they change extremely fast and largely without
public input -- but to prepare for the battle into what shape we want
together put the broken pieces once we reach this stage.

And there, in terms of economic and fiscal policy, the interest of
capital will be austerity, and the interest of the 99% will be new taxes
on the super rich and the financial markets.

All the best. Felix


-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |





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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Dear Sean, folks,

thanks for the useful historical references. I've already gone on
record here as being against speculations on who should die in what
way.

I do ask myself, though, about the role of capital, rent, and
interest, in the current crisis. There will be people, here and
elsewhere, in a much, much better position to reflect on this, so
take it as an idiot's question if you like. But: if a major economic
problem at the moment is that people have to pay their rent, or
service the credits and mortgages they took out, why does the State,
under these severe circumstances, currently make such an effort
to help people pay tribute to capital, rather than suspend these
obligations?

I presume that there are many reasonable answers to this, and maybe
it is really stupid and unpractical to even think in this direction,
at least in a situation like the current one which is neither
revolutionary, not truly catastrophic.

The reason why I think the question of private property is part
of the conversation is that my rent-paying yoga-teacher, Felix's
friend-to-hug, and the person lining up outside the gun store, - they
all form part of the cast of the social, psychological and political
scenarios that Felix and Brian are discussing. - I feel it might be
good to be very precise about people's specific interests in this
situation, what they have to lose or to win, and thus also what their
motivation might be for defending it. (And Felix, sorry, but just
because you say "good riddance" to Western individualism, it doesn't
mean that the queue outside the gun store will dissipate, nor will the
desires expressed there...)

Regards,
-a




Am 20.03.20 um 01:01 schrieb Sean Cubitt:







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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

[Sean Cubitt]

The term 'public health' has never quite gone away, even when privatised 
medicine pretended that private health could be purchased.
The Spanish flu of 1919 is often cited; more apposite perhaps were the great 
cholera epidemics of the latrer 19th century. The proximity of the underclass 
to the rulers, notably in Central London, is what drove the equivalent of 
hausmannisation - the destruction of the old slums ('rookeries') described by 
Dickens, extraordinary efforts to rehouse the poor (and to build aristocratic 
enclaves like Bloomsbury) to ensure a *public* hygiene.
The proximity of the homeless to the billionaire class in any major city today 
could lead to mass incarceration; but it just might lead to providing decent 
health and housing for those ejected by the existing system.Here the liberal 
quandary Brian notes is at its deepest. It is inhumane to sacrifice the public 
good to the survival of the private good; but to as with the economy, it has 
been clear since 2007/8 that the market is incapable of providing even for its 
own survival. And that the state has an essential role.
At the height of the potato famine Nassau Snr, a powerful politician, opined 
that there had not been nearly enough deaths, and that Ireland's population 
needed to decline far more. Radical ecologists and BoJo seem to agree on that 
perspective.

But there is only public health. And the best way to secure it, if deaths are 
required, would be the removal of that miniscule proportion of the population 
that has accrued all the money.

yours till the broadband gives out

sean





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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Lars Lehtonen]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 10:20:02AM +0100, 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). This is quite unprecedented and most
> people who care about data privacy are rather uneasy about it, for
> very obvious reasons.

The ease with which this firehose of data is "now" being shared with
government is telling. They've likely always done this.

American television is full of stories of psychics and forensic
minutae used to solve crimes. These story lines, to my thinking,
exist to prime public opinion and juries for outlandish tales from
law enforcement of how they were legally capable of solving difficult
crimes.

In reality, it's parallel construction to cover up for extralegal
means of investigation.

To the extent that this kind of surveillance is unprecedented, I'd
argue that the change is that they're admitting it.

In a public health crisis of this magnitude, using (or finally
acknowledging) these methods is sensical.

---
Lars Lehtonen




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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Joseph Rabie]

Dear all,

Continuing from Brian:

> 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 in which the new social paradigm will
> emerge. No ready-made answer on the basis of preexisting concepts and
> attitudes can fill that space.


In terms of the social paradigm that characterizes current individualist 
liberal society, here are three transformations that have contributed to it 
over the past several decades:

1) The end of obligatory military conscription:

In many countries, "manhood" began with military service. Beyond the particular 
defense needs of certain countries, this was seen as a "debt owed to society". 
Conscription ended, however, when military technology evolved from a "cannon 
fodder" mass army model to one based on highly trained and technologically 
equipped professionals. In France, for example, military service ended in 2002.

The correspondent mindset, the acceptance that one's country had the right to 
call upon you to renounce your individual autonomy, has faded.

2) Easy money:

I remember, as a child, going into a bank. There was a comic strip on the wall, 
inciting clients to parsimony: it patronizingly narrated how someone who wanted 
something should spendthriftingly save up until he (in a male dominated 
society) could afford it. Spending money one did not have was considered 
morally reprehensible.

Now people are pushed to take out loans to buy consumer goods, in the interests 
of corporate profit. One's social value as an individual is judged by one's 
capacity to consume.

3) A reversal in the family balance of power:

In the old days, children honored their parents (for better or for worse, one 
might add). This role has been reversed: the family unit revolves around the 
child's material needs well beyond food and lodging (for which parents expected 
respect and obedience in return). Perhaps this came about when advertisers 
realized that children constituted a bridgehead into their parents' wallets.

For many hyper-individualistic millennial children, parents appear to play the 
role of an "after sales service".

Perhaps the lesson this virus will teach, is the need to reassert the 
collective's prerogatives, certainly insofar as the coming fight against 
ecocide is concerned. Though this will in all likelihood be much more a 
question of the collective against the corporations, than the collective 
against the individual.

Stay safe (from locked down France) -
Joe.




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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Hey Brian, folks,

the question is well put - thanks for this.

One aspect to add is that most of these data are already available to 
the GAFAM complex, and (more or less) voluntarily delivered to them by 
smartphone users all the time; so one may want to ask just _how_ making 
them available to governments, or publishing them, is worse, or different.


I would say _that_ these are definitely different trajectories of 
subjectivation, not least in the politico-philosophical perspective that 
you suggest; but I also believe that it will be worth specifying _how_ 
they are different. (Something that will also have to factored in is 
that, for various reasons, people have more or less trust in their 
respective governments, and in their fellow citizens.)


A question regarding the described activities to "use mobile phone data 
to monitor public health efforts": would they be superfluous (and the 
necessary data readily available) if the GAFAM complex (at this point, 
against the rules) collaborated with the respective governments, or if 
their accumulated data were requisioned?


Just speculating about who knows what...

-a


Am 18.03.20 um 20:34 schrieb Brian Holmes:




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. 





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





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 in which the new social paradigm will
emerge. No ready-made answer on the basis of preexisting concepts and
attitudes can fill that space.

thoughtfully yours, Brian



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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

[Jean-Noël Montagné]

Individual health and public health are deeply monitored by Google,
Facebook and other big-brother companies since decennies, with
thousand algorithms spying our life in real time. They store huge
files about our intimate life, not only with what we say/search online
about the subject, with where we are ( geo-loc at doctors-hosp.), with
what we buy, or with emotion recognition on pictures, but also with
sensors like accelerometers on our smartphones, and also with a lot of
different connected objects around us. Theese datas are pure gold for
them.

Google and Facebook have hundreds top-level researchers working on
health only, in their special Health Divisions, because health is the
biggest of all markets, the best business. They have had organized
real time virus-flu surveys in the past ( there are some scientific
studies on this if you want to know more). And I suppose that our
actual behavioural changes with COvid are also pure gold for them,
because they give very good datas for further business plans in the
Health domain.

Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts ? I
would say: this period is a very good moment to switch off your
smartphone and digital devices... and say piss off to the Gafams

JN



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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

[Geoffrey Goodell]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 10:20:02AM +0100, Felix Stalder wrote:
> 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.

???If the ends don't justify the means, what does -- Robert Moses

There is a tendency for people to seek to wield exceptional power during a
crisis, perhaps because they fear regret or blame in the event that they defer
to the legitimately authorised limitations on their power.

But what good are controls if there is always a means to override them?  We
need mechanism, not just policy, to ensure that power is not abused.

In the case of mobile telephone data, if this means establishing a future
system that allows me to establish a virtual endpoint independently of my
carrier for the purpose of receiving calls, and a mechanism for providing
blinded tokens to cellular towers to demonstrate that I have paid, then so be
it.

The problem with the Internet protocols is that we designed them to expose too
much information to the network operators, in the expectation that they would
always act in the interests of their users.  That was a mistake, and abuses
like this show why, even if the intention in this case is benevolent.

Best wishes

Geoff



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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

This is an interesting discussion … 

I’d like to provide a link to a comment comparing the situation in Italy and 
South Korea which alludes to the possibility that in fact meticulous tracking 
of infected individuals from the very start of the outbreak *is* an effective 
way to contain the spread

https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/italy-and-south-korea-virus-outbreaks-reveal-disparity-in-deaths-and-tactics/



> On 18 Mar 2020, at 10:20, 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

[Patrice Riemens]

On 2020-03-18 10:38, mp wrote:

> On 18/03/2020 09:20, Felix Stalder wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Perhaps attempt to (re)generate trust, collective intelligence and
> solidarity, instead of outsourcing it to technology (in the hands of
> power) that cannot be trusted?
>
> This is a good time for some radical action, I should think.
>
> Make each other aware of what is going on. Talk to people. Give them
> the data, the numbers, the modelling results, the concepts and share
> the reasoning.
>


And for the global (out)look:

https://ncov2019.live/data

source (with ineterview):

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/13/meet_the_17_year_old_behind

Ciaoui,
p+2D!

Stay Safe Stay Home!




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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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Re: Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[mp]

On 18/03/2020 09:20, Felix Stalder wrote:

> 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.

Perhaps attempt to (re)generate trust, collective intelligence and
solidarity, instead of outsourcing it to technology (in the hands of
power) that cannot be trusted?

This is a good time for some radical action, I should think.

Make each other aware of what is going on. Talk to people. Give them the
data, the numbers, the modelling results, the concepts and share the
reasoning.




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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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