New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Facebook and Russian Meddling: Why is anyone Surprised?

By Gordon Hull

Facebook’s opaque advertising practices are in the news (again) because it was apparently the vehicle through which some of the Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 election were routed.  This piece by Sam Biddle on The Intercept is well worth the read, as it makes the case that the public needs to know more about Facebook’s advertising practices. On the one hand, the company has admitted to a little of what happened.  But it studiously has failed to answer most of the relevant questions, hiding behind vague, well-lawyered blog posts. Biddle concludes:

“It’s reassuring that Facebook is cooperating with the ongoing Russia-related probes. But this is bigger than Russia, bigger than Hillary Clinton, and bigger than 2016. Should Facebook continue to simply allude to its ominous potential rather than sharing it in full, there’s only one good option left: Bring in Mark Zuckerberg and have him sworn in live on C-SPAN. No spokespeople required.”

This is not a new issue; what Facebook does to your news feed is a paradigmatic example of the black box society at work. Worried? Facebook routinely publishes research designed to exonerate itself from whatever concerns its black box might engender; for example, it published papers in both 2015 and 2012 purporting to prove that it did not contribute to the development of online echo chambers.  As I argued at the time, these results are not just misleading for reasons internal to the research, but because they spread the myth that anything involving big data, machine learning, or a humongous N= figure somehow produces unvarnished, self-interpreting truth.  This serves to insulate companies like Facebook from the scrutiny that accompanies what Tarleton Gillespie identified as the “politics of platforms” back in 2010 and what Helen Nissenbaum and Lucas Introna identified as an analogous issue with portal sites all the way back in 2000.  When a company is the means through which people experience the Internet or their social interactions with other users, how that company curates its data matters.  But two things are certain: the data is carefully curated, and the companies curating the data aren’t talking.  This isn’t to say that they don’t say things indicating what they might be up to; under the guise of proving that the emotional contagion effect could work across remote networks (and did not require face-to-face interaction), Facebook basically telegraphed that it manipulates users’ news feeds to elicit (presumably positive) emotional states.  danah boyd captured a lot of what is at stake, pointing out (again, a while ago) that Facebook presents itself like a public utility, but demands that it be free from the regulations that guarantee that utilities serve the public interest.

Is Intellectual Property actually Property?

By Gordon Hull

This sounds like a trick question, but it’s not.  It’s also currently before the Supreme Court, about which more in a moment.  First, however, let me summarize the case for why IP isn’t really “property” in the ordinary sense, even if we use the word.  In a paper from a little more than ten years ago, Michael Carrier proposed that although we claim that IP is a “property,” and treat IP as property in some respects, we do not actually treat it as we do other forms of property.  In the first step, we have come to treat IP as property “not only in the essentially unlimited scope and duration of its initial rights but also in the ubiquitous assertions that IP is absolute property” (12).  This is evident, Carrier suggests, in a number of ways.  In copyright, for example, term length, scope, and subject matter are all increasing.  In patents, enforcement is increasing (especially with the creation of the Federal Circuit, which stopped a lot of forum shopping, although the Eastern District of Texas until very recently functioned as a favored forum of so-called “patent trolls”), and patent rights are more and more viewed not just as innovations, but as investments.  The result should be familiar to anyone familiar with discussions of neoliberal financialization:

Radical White Terrorism as State Policy: Trump, Sovereign Decision and homo sacer

By Gordon Hull

As our tin-pot “President” continues his inexorable slide into narcissistic authoritarianism, it is worth noting recent events that establish beyond any residual doubt that radical white terrorism is now official policy.  When historians look at the Trump presidency, assuming we all survive long enough for there to be historians, I suspect last week is going to be a significant one.  It began with Trumps’s remarks after Charlottesville, in which he managed to say that counterprotestors shared in the blame for neo-Nazi violence and that there were many “fine people” hiding in the mob of white supremacists.  These made his own views clear (as though they weren’t already).  But they did not establish state policy.  Events Friday did: the pardoning of former Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the border patrol’s decision to keep inland border patrol checkpoints open during the evacuation from Hurricane Harvey, and Trump’s apparent decision to end the DACA program.  Together these say: radical white terrorism is above the law, and the undocumented are homines sacri. Foucault remarked at one point that in a biopolitical state “it’s impossible to reconcile law and order because when you try to do so it is only in the form of an integration of law into the state’s [administrative] order” (Power, 117).  In Trump’s America, you get neither law nor order: Trump despises both the rule of law, as evidenced Friday, and the administrative state, as evidenced by his repeated appointment of incompetent, unqualified partisan hacks to head regulatory agencies the very existence of which they oppose.  The theoretical framework through which all of this behavior is intelligible finds its expression in the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

Radical White Terrorism

By Gordon Hull

Although they murdered one person, injured 19 others, and celebrated two governments, one of which systematically exterminated over 6 million people in the name of white supremacy, and another that systematically murdered and enslaved millions more, also in the name of white supremacy, members of the far right somehow managed to proudly act like newly liberated victims of something or another (“cultural Marxism?”).    It’s not like Charlottesville should have been a surprise; the FBI and DHS warned about the threat from white supremacists months ago.  White supremacists had been nursing fantasies of running over liberals with cars for quite some time, and racist hate crimes – including, as in Portland, the murder of those who try to stop racist hate crimes – have (unsurprisingly) been on the rise since Trump came to power.  Moreover, what happened last weekend was not about free speech and marches.  It was much more about political violence and intimidation: they showed up in Charlottesville looking for a fight, toting semi-automatic weapons and militia groups so that they might not just exercise their First Amendment rights, but deprive others of their First Amendment rights.

Limitless Home Surveillance by your Vacuum Cleaner

By Gordon  Hull

The expansion of the Internet of Things is going to provide a lot playspace for highly intensive and granular corporate surveillance – which is to say it’s going to be a catastrophe for privacy.  Sure, sure, everything will come with a “click here to accept” or comparable “notice and consent” privacy policy that “empowers” individuals to make a rational decision about whether their fridge should communicate with their grocery store when they are running low on milk.  But as Allesandro Acquisti and coauthors note:

“Uncertainty and context-dependence imply that people cannot always be counted on to navigate the complex trade-offs involving privacy in a self-interested fashion. People are often unaware of the information they are sharing, unaware of how it can be used, and even in the rare situations when they have full knowledge of the consequences of sharing, uncertain about their own preferences. Malleability, in turn, implies that people are easily influenced in what and how much they disclose. Moreover, what they share can be used to influence their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in many aspects of their lives, as individuals, consumers, and citizens. Although such influence is not always or necessarily malevolent or dangerous, relinquishing control over one’s personal data and over one’s privacy alters the balance of power between those holding the data and those who are the subjects of that data.”

Indeed, one strongly suspects that’s the point.

In the meantime, Burger King ran an ad that tried to trick Google Home into running a search for the Whopper.  And now there’s this:

“High-end models of Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum, collect data as they clean, identifying the locations of your walls and furniture. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that iRobot is considering selling to Amazon, Apple or Google.”

That’s right: if you have one of those robot vacuum cleaners, it might very well be constructing a highly granular map of your home that will be able to interpret things like what kinds of furniture you have and whether (and how many) kids you have, and so forth.  Expect targeted ads to follow if the data leaves the Roomba.

Oh, and depending on how courts interpret third party doctrine, that detailed interior map of your home may be freely available to law enforcement. As Justice Sotomayor warns, “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties” in the “digital age.”

In the meantime, I recommend a broom.

Intellectual Property Theory Wars (Part 2): IP as social power

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I introduced the exchange between Mark Lemley and Robert Merges on IP theory, and made the initial case that Lemley is essentially arguing for the theoretical primacy of neoliberal biopower in intellectual property.  Merges, as will hopefully become evident below, is more interested in grounding IP in juridical notions of rights-bearing subjects.  Lemley finds such grounding not just wrong but incoherent and irrational, on the grounds that it is a refusal to use empirical evidence.  What I want to do here is dig out some of the textual evidence to support my argument, specifically by looking at some of the work Lemley puts in the “faith-based” camp.  That is, the way Lemley critiques other efforts at IP theory seems to me to exemplify the hold that Chicago has on IP scholarship.  I want to look at his treatment of three such competing views: he finds them completely unintelligible when they use a non-utilitarian form of reason (Merges), he ignores it when they argue from an economic perspective that rejects the basic assumptions of the Chicago school’s development of IP (Amy Kapczynski), and he contorts them into an unpersuasive utilitarian frame when they challenge wealth aggregation as the appropriate standard for evaluation (Madhavi Sunder).  Let’s look at these in reverse order.

Intellectual Property Theory Wars (Part 1)

By Gordon Hull

A couple of years ago, Mark Lemley, one of the most influential and prolific of intellectual property scholars, published his “Faith-Based Intellectual Property,” a manifesto against what he characterizes as non-utilitarian or non-empirical theories of intellectual property.  In other words, “participants on both sides of the IP debates are increasingly staking out positions that simply do not depend on evidence at all” (1336).  He adds, “I call this retreat from evidence faith-based IP, both because adherents are taking the validity of the IP system on faith, and because the rationale for doing so is a form of religious belief” (1337).  He treats Robert Merges’ Justifying Intellectual Property (2012) as the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon, though he cites others.  A couple of months ago, Merges’ response, “Against Utilitarian Fundamentalism” appeared, arguing that it was the militant utilitarian position – which as Merges reads it assumes that “to abandon the solid world of empirical foundations is to automatically commit to a stubbornly irrational set of foundations” – that “commits precisely the error that [it] attributes to others” which “takes an extreme position, cutting off conversation and debate” (n5)

The point I want to make here (in this post and a follow-up) – and I should say that I absolutely agree with Lemley both that IP protections are too strong now, and that there is a good-sized body of evidence that supports this proposition – is that Lemley’s argument presupposes that IP is a form of biopower (or perhaps biopolitical governmentality) insofar as it sets policy, the aim of which is to optimize the welfare of the bios by pushing the “conduct of the conduct” of individuals within it toward higher levels of creative productivity (if you are uncomfortable calling that “biopower,” then it’s fine to stick with “governmentality” here – the point is the contrast with other kinds of thought).  I would also argue, though again not a lot hangs on the distinction here, that Lemley’s framework is almost entirely dependent on law and economics, as it developed out of the University of Chicago from the 1960’s onward.  In this, he is accepting what one might call a neoliberal understanding of intellectual property (on the move to law and economics, see especially William Davies).

More self-promotion: "Toward a critical theory of corporate wellness"

By Gordon Hull

Frank Pasquale and I have a new paper forthcoming in Biosocieties, "Toward a critical theory of corporate wellness."  Here is the abstract:

In the U.S., “employee wellness” programs are increasingly attached to employer-provided health insurance.  These programs attempt to nudge employees, sometimes quite forcefully, into healthy behaviors such as smoking cessation and exercise routines.  Despite being widely promoted as saving on healthcare costs, numerous studies undermine this rationale.  After documenting the programs’ failure to deliver a positive return on investment, we analyze them as instead providing an opportunity for employers to exercise increasing control over their employees. Based on human capital theory and neoliberal models of subjectivity that emphasize personal control and responsibility, these programs treat wellness as a lifestyle that employees must be cajoled into adopting, extending the workplace not just into the home but into the bodies of workers and entrenching the view that one belongs to one’s workplace.  At the same time, their selective endorsement of health programs (many scientifically unsupported) produce a social truth of wellness framed as fitness for work.  We conclude by arguing that the public health initiatives occluded by the private sector’s promotion of wellness programs would be a much better investment of resources.

Springer puts an embargo on the final version of the paper so it can't go up on SSRN yet, but they do invite authors to share a link to the final version  on their site.  Apparently you can read it there for free, and can download if you have institutional access.  The Biosocieties link is here, if you're using a connection with institutional access.

Shameless Self-Promotion: "The Subject and Power of Bioethics"

By Gordon Hull

I have a new paper up on SSRN, "The Subject and Power of Bioethics," which was invited to a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Ethics, Medicine and Public Health.  The abstract is:

The present paper argues that late work of Michel Foucault is helpful in understanding contemporary bioethics.  Specifically, Foucault’s writings on biopower and subjectivity are increasingly relevant as we consider the intersection of public policy and clinical ethics in a socio-political context increasingly structured by the demands of neoliberalism.  Although Foucault’s earlier work on the clinical gaze has been important to bioethics, that is no longer as important as his later, incomplete research into power and subjectivity. 

The paper develops this argument in four steps.  In the first, I look at a classic phenomenological approach to clinical bioethics by Richard Zaner, starting from which I develop a Foucauldian perspective.  In that section I also offer a basic outline of what I take Foucault’s primary theoretical contributions to be by way of an initial explication of the biopower-subjectification nexus.  The following two sections of the paper present exemplary applications of Foucauldian theory to two areas at the intersection of public policy and clinical bioethics.  The first is the procedure for testing women for the BRCA1/2 mutations, mutations that impose on carriers a significant risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.  A comparison between American and Dutch practices underscores not only the new ways that genetic testing interpret the body, but also the importance of local political and cultural contexts for understanding how the test is presented, administered and managed.  The second is a consideration of the intersection of employee wellness programs and wearable technologies.  In it, I develop Foucault’s thought that subjects in the Christian West have long been encouraged to understand themselves confessionally, offering to authority figures the “truth” about themselves.  I then interpret the compulsory use of wearables as a verification strategy for compliance with wellness programs as exemplary of such confessional strategies.  The final section ties the discussion back to the clinical encounter as Zaner formulates it as an inherently moral encounter structured by vulnerabilities that matter for understanding the selfhood of patients.  Based on the preceding examples, I make the case that American understandings of selfhood are increasingly separated from any sense of publicness, and that this structuring of selfhood is of increasing importance in framing and adequately understanding bioethics today.

Travel Ban 2.5, the Camp, and the Airport

by Gordon Hull

On Wednesday night, the Trump administration implemented as much of its long promised Muslim Ban as it thought the Supreme Court would allow.  Travelers from a list of six countries who did not have a “bona fide” connection or “close familial relationship” to someone in the U.S. would be banned.  The administration interpreted the Supreme Court’s ruling as restrictively as possible – the Court said that a mother-in-law would be an example of a close familial relationship, but didn’t mention grandparents – so having a grandparent here (or being a grandparent there) isn’t a close familial relationship.  The ruling smacks of arbitrariness and was rolled out as secretly as possible, and it’s not even clear that it actually does much at all. Then again, the original ban also was a poorly-worded, arbitrary mockery of the rule of law.  For example, the “policy” began with zero warning, leaving travelers stranded in airports with no legal options.  So too, the six countries were allegedly named because of their propensity to breed terrorists, but no one from any of them has committed a terrorist act in the U.S. since 2001.  Countries from which terrorists have come – Saudi Arabia – are not on the list.  Some of the countries have no functioning governments, but Iran does.  And so it goes.  That’s what happens when you promise to get rid of Muslims and then realize that you can’t get away with just making that so by campaign promise.

In Homo Sacer, Agamben declares that the camp (the paradigmatic case of which is the Nazi concentration camp) is the archetype of modern power, suggesting that “the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living” (175).  He proposes that the model of the camp can be seen in all sorts of institutions: the stadium at Bari where the Italians herded Albanian immigrants, the track where the Vichy herded the Jews before deporting them, and the halls at airports where foreigners asking for refugee status are detained, “all equally [are] camps” (174).  As someone who has read a lot of Adorno, I found this assimilation of airport waiting halls and the Holocaust somewhere between uncomfortable and offensive.  I am still uncomfortable with the comparison, but I do think some of the logic that Agamben is identifying is at work here.  That logic is one in which “the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (174).

Another week, another unanimous SCOTUS IP Decision – this time, disparaging Trademarks

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today (well, an opinion and a concurrence) that a provision in the Lanham Act banning “disparaging” trademarks violated the First Amendment. In the case in question, an Asian-American musician named Simon Tam had attempted to register his band’s name, “The Slants,” in a clear effort to reclaim the slur.  The PTO had refused the registration, on the grounds that it was a disparaging term. The Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Tam (my thoughts on that decision are here).  Writing for the Supreme Court, Justice Alito declined to resolve whether the case required strict or intermediate scrutiny, on the grounds that the disparagement clause failed the weaker, intermediate scrutiny standard.  Alito found two asserted government interests: one was protecting against speech that offends, and he dismissed that argument on the grounds that the “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate’” (citing a 1929 dissent by Justice Holmes).  The second interest was in the protection of the orderly flow of commerce.  Here, he pointed out that the statute was in no way narrowly-drawn, as intermediate scrutiny would require.  In the first of a series of reductios, he argued that:

“The clause reaches any trademark that disparages any person, group, or institution [emphasis original; he is quoting statutory text]. It applies to trademarks like the following: “Down with racists,” “Down with sexists,” “Down with homophobes.” It is not an anti-discrimination clause; it is a happy-talk clause. In this way, it goes much further than is necessary to serve the interest asserted.”

Exhausting Patents

In another chapter of its ongoing battle with the Federal Circuit (and the second in a week), the Supreme Court (SCOTUS, I will refer to the Federal Circuit as the CAFC) ruled last Tuesday in Impression Products v. Lexmark International that the sale of a patented product “exhausts” the patent-holder’s claim to derive patent revenue from that particular article.  First, a brief background.  Printer toner is like razor blades: companies charge extravagant prices for the toner without which their printers will not operate, while selling the printer itself fairly cheaply.  Such a strategy creates secondary markets in toner, either in third party cartridges that are designed to be compatible with the printer, or in strategies for refilling used cartridges.  Naturally, printer companies hate this, and so engage in all sorts of strategies to stop it.  They warn consumers that using non-proprietary cartridges will cause poor print quality and void their warranty.  They design their devices to try to detect off-brand toner, and refuse to operate if one is installed. These strategies tend to fail in court.  In 2004, the 6^th Circuit ruled that efforts to circumvent the cartridge-detection system did not violate the DMCA (= copyright law).

In last Tuesday’s case, Lexmark had sued a manufacturer of aftermarket ink cartridges, which had been taking used cartridges from either overseas markets or from consumers who had emptied them, refilling them, and then selling them.  Lexmark argued that its exclusive rights should extend to the resold cartridges.  The SCOTUS threw cold water on that argument, citing settled common law on property: when you sell something, you don’t get to derive revenue from subsequent sales.  If Lexmark wanted to try to extend its patent rights, the company could contractually forbid users to give their spent cartridges to companies like Impression, for example, but that would be a matter of contract law, not property.  But patents are a species of property, and patent rights are “exhausted” – i.e., end – when the patented product is sold.

Biopower, Juridical Power, and Patent Trolls

Patent law seems like an easy place to talk about biopower.  After all, it has been possible to patent life forms for some time now, and large numbers of patents are issued for products that directly affect life, as in the case of pharmaceuticals and other medical innovations.  Biopolitical implications of patent law are thus easy enough to adumbrate, even if one wants to construe “life” in narrow, biological terms.   There is, however, another angle that needs to be considered, which is the institutional structure of patent law.  If one effect of the emergence of biopolitics is the rise of the regulatory state and the decline of judicial power, we see in the case of patent law an ongoing struggle between institutions representative of those forms of power.  Two Supreme Court decisions in the past week illustrate this conflict; this post will deal with the first (TC Heartland) and I will have something to say about the second in a follow-up post.

Kant on Big Data?

A recent paper by Ermanno Bencivenga in Philosophical Forum argues that it’s “time for philosophy to step into the conversation” (135) about big data, in particular to refute the thesis, which the article identifies in a 2008 piece in Wired, that big data will mean that we no longer need theory: “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves” (qt. on 135).  The paper draws on concerns about spurious correlations: to demonstrate that a correlation is legitimate, it “must be shown to manifest a lawlike regularity; there must be a theoretical account of it,” that laws have to cohere with one another, and so on (139).  In other words, “knowledge is constitutionally dependent on theory” (ibid.).   Bencivenga concludes:

“Big Data enthusiasts are (unwittingly advocating a new definition of what it is to know.  Their agenda is (unwittingly) semantical.  Except that it is not worked out, and any attempt at developing it in the semantical terms that have been current (and antagonistic) for the past two millennia is hopeless.  I will not rule out that a new set of terms might be forthcoming, but the burden is / on those enthusiasts to provide it; simply piling up data and being awed by them will not do.  What would be needed, ironically, is a new theory of knowledge, which so far I have not seen.  This is the reason why I have made an effort to get clearer about the claims being made, so that we can have a more orderly discussion of them and what it would take to make progress in it” (141-2).

Fair enough, though I do want to note that the paper does not engage with any literature about big data other than the dated piece from Wired; and to hear enthusiastic techno-babble from Wired is not surprising.  That’s what they do.

It’s also worth pointing out that these sorts of concerns have been expressed before.  Here are danah boyd and Kate Crawford from a widely-cited paper in 2012.  After noting that “Big data reframes key questions about the constitution of knowledge, the processes of research, how we should engage with information, and the nature and categorization of reality” (665), they caution that:

“Interpretation is at the center of data analysis. Regardless of the size of a data, it is subject to limitation and bias. Without those biases and limitations being understood and outlined, misinterpretation is the result. Data analysis is most effective when researchers take account of the complex methodological processes that underlie the analysis of that data” (668)

These are cherry-picked quotes – arguably, the entire paper is a response to the sort of enthusiasm in the Wired piece, and the focus on our hidden rules for interpretation is clearly directed at the view that somehow data self-interprets.  And there are certainly more papers that bring up this and analogous topics; Luciano Floridi raises similar ones here (Floridi’s worries resonate well with Amoore’s, discussed below).  That said, I think there’s something to be said for speaking of big data in Kantian terms, though not perhaps for the reasons Bencivenga advances.

Republican Thanatopolitics

Foucault reminds us that biopolitics is describes a kind of power structure according to which some will be compelled to live (or have their lives as members of a favored population optimized), while others will be allowed to die.  As he puts it, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (HS1, 138).  Although much work has focused on techniques by which biopower works to optimize a population, it is worth attending to the disallowance of life, the thanatopolitics that is the other half of biopower, because the Republican party is engaged in producing a very effective case study.

As Foucault says a few pages later, “a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms.  It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility” (HS1, 144).  Those who are deemed to be without sufficient value or utility are allowed to die.  Much attention here has focused on Foucault’s brief remarks on “race” war in Society must be Defended, where he proposes that biopower creates a “race” of those who must die, so that “we” can live.  He is thinking of Nazi Germany and the logic of cold war deterrence, but  current Republican policies show that thanatopolitics can operate at a much more granular and subtle level.

I am of course talking about the AHCA, the mean-spirited tax cut for the wealthy, sponsored by gutting the (limited) ability of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to provide for the needy.  Various theorists after Foucault – François Ewald in particular – have emphasized the role of insurance in biopolitics as it comes to regulate and define acceptable behaviors according to actuarial risk.  Here we see its role in thanatopolitics.  There’s a good analysis of the AHCA’s evolution and structure here; suffice it to say that the law, if enacted, would end up in at least 24 million people losing access to insurance (largely by gutting Medicaid and ending the mandate that people have insurance. Republicans are flatly lying about this).  It also allows states to scale back guarantees for coverage of those with pre-existing conditions, and allow states to scale back what services have to be included in health insurance; the primary target appears to be maternity and contraceptive coverage.  Apparently the old, white men who are behind this forgot that they had mothers who required medical care.  There’s a fig leaf $8 billion to fund high-risk pools, which no one qualified thinks comes near to the cost of funding those pools.  It’s not a full regress to pre-ACA levels, but it’s about as far as things can go without requiring enough votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster.

Trump Administration Hypocrisy of the Day: What Should Local Cops be Doing?

I know there’s a lot of material to pick from here, but the following two positions are hard to reconcile with a straight face.  Since Trump’s and his surrogates’ big mouths have been used against him before in Court, perhaps some court will see this one.  On the one hand, the mass deportation program is demanding that local law enforcement help federal immigration officials out.  Although (surprise!) the term has no clear meaning, Trump has targeted “sanctuary cities” for federal punishment.  The cities, like San Francisco, are fighting back, arguing (apparently with good precedent, though I stress that I don’t know much about this area of the law. For a decent discussion, start here) that it’s unconstitutional to force local law enforcement to do the work of the feds.  The entire state of California is joining in.  The substantive argument is that local law enforcement needs immigrant communities to be willing to help deal with crime, and that people will be justifiably terrified to come forth if they fear deportation.  So local complicity in mass deportation will make local crime-fighting much more difficult.  California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on his Facebook page that “on average, 35.5 fewer crimes are committed per 10,000 people in sanctuary counties, the median household annual income is $4,353 higher, the poverty rate is 2.3% lower, and unemployment is 1.1% lower. Before you take away our funds, I suggest you take a look at the facts, Mr. Attorney General.”  The status of all of this is up in the air; San Francisco is reporting that the administration is backing down considerably from its earlier bluster.  But the bluster is quite clear: local law enforcement is to be part of the deportation effort.

On the other hand, the Jeff Sessions Justice Department has decided to throw away everything that’s ever been done by the DOJ to deal with police violence in inner cities, trying especially to nullify existing consent decrees in places like Baltimore.  Local police, says the Sessions DOJ, should be allowed, even encouraged, to resume racist stop-and-frisk policies and the like.  Why? In a memo to DOJ employees, there were several bullet points, including that “the safety and the protection of the public is the paramount duty and concern of law enforcement officers;” and that “local control and local accountability are necessary for effective local policing.  It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.”  There is a further bullet point that says cooperation with the federal government is important, and that local authorities need to comply with DOJ grant conditions and federal law.  But the direction of the memo is clearly to say that the feds should butt out of local law enforcement.

Maybe he should copy ICE on that one.

Today in Creepy Privacy Invasions: Burger King

Apparently Burger King ran an ad that attempted to trigger Google Home by having a Burger King employee say “OK, Google: What is the Whopper burger?”  First the ad was up, then it was down, now BK says that it might come back.  The ad was supposed to trigger Google Home to read the first line of the Wikipedia definition of the Whopper. Annoyed Google customers promptly changed the line to say the burger contained cyanide.  A handle that looked suspiciously like a BK executive then changed it back into effusive praise.  As of this moment, the Wikipedia front page reads much more neutrally.  So apparently it’s been reverted, or the BK sock puppet isn’t at work yet.

We don’t have a good regulatory strategy for this one.  The only one that comes immediately to mind is some sort of creative deployment of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which essentially criminalizes accessing a computer beyond authorization.  But there are reasons to be very concerned with this strategy.  The CFAA was used in an ill-conceived federal cyberbullying case, where the problem was not that the bullying, which resulted in a teenager committing suicide, was not bad (cyberbullying is epidemic, usually misogynistic and generally awful), but that the CFAA interpretation advocated in the case would have legitimated the idea that using a fake name or email address online was a federal crime.  That said, the CFAA might put a stop to this sort of saturation of all of life with advertising.  You probably did not authorize Burger King to access your home system, although I wouldn’t be surprised if terms of service didn’t start taking that sort of complaint off the table very soon.  In any case, don’t expect the current government to help: while the Republicans were involved in their circular firing squad trying to destroy the ACA, they did pass legislation blocking impending regulations protecting the privacy of ISP-collected data.

North Carolina Repeals and Replaces HB 2

As you probably have heard, in a flurry of activity yesterday, the North Carolina legislature repealed and replaced its omnibus LGBT-hate law, HB 2.  The state was clearly moved to act by an NCAA deadline (repeal by Thursday, or no championships until 22) and an AP report earlier in the week that said the law would cost the state $3.7 billion over ten years.  Almost no one is happy with the new measure, particularly LGBTQ advocates.  The replacement law indeed eliminates the restriction on trans bathroom access, though it allows harassment of trans people under “indecency” laws.  It does not, however, as many of its advocates (who are being parroted by national media like NPR as I type this) claim “reset” the state to its pre-HB 2 status.  The replacement bill also locks into place an explicit refusal to offer employment and other civil rights protections to LGBTQ individuals in state law, and it forbids other governmental entities in the state (cities, schools, universities) from going further either on bathroom access or other employment laws.  Two clauses of the very short bill accomplish this.  Section 2 says:

"State agencies, boards, offices, departments, institutions, branches of government, including The University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Community College System, and political subdivisions of the State, including local boards of education, are preempted from regulation of access to multiple occupancy restrooms, showers, or changing facilities, except in accordance with an act of the General Assembly.”

Section 3, which is staggeringly broad if you read it literally (the literal read was apparently not intended by those who  wrote it) says that “No local government in this State may enact or amend an ordinance regulating private employment practices or regulating public accommodations.”  At the very least, cities like Charlotte are prohibited from enacting LGBTQ protective ordinances like the one HB 2 struck down.  Hence we have not returned to the status quo.  The law does sunset in 2020, but of course the legislature would be free to push that into the indefinite future.

I don’t have a lot to say here on the bill itself, because it clearly does not put the state where it ought to be.  Refusing to protect gender non-conforming individuals from discrimination is a disgrace.  It’s also bad policy to ban municipalities from raising the minimum wage (an aspect of all this that was explicitly in HB 2 and which remains under section 3, despite it getting almost no media attention), though I won’t make that case here.  It might or might not even bring the NCAA back.  I also am still not sure that it would survive a Romer-based challenge, since the clear intent is to freeze-out employment discrimination protection for LGBTQ people. 

I do want to note one thing that’s not getting a lot of press.  In signing the bill, Democratic Governor Cooper said that “In a perfect world, with a good General Assembly, we would have repealed HB2 fully today, and added full statewide protections for L.G.B.T. North Carolinians.”  In this he is absolutely right.  The NC legislature has been on a far right crusade for years and is desperate to hang on to political power as a way to continue that process.  They do that through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and efforts to control local election boards.  As I noted in the linked post above, more people voted Democrat than Republican in North Carolina in both 2012 and 2014.  And yet somehow the Republicans have veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature.  That outcome ought to be unacceptable because it says quite clearly that the legislature lacks democratic legitimacy.  A lot of December’s attempt to make election boards Republican has been struck down.  There is litigation pending, including a 4^th Circuit decision that said the most recent legislative maps target minority voters with “surgical precision,” and a pending order to have statewide elections in 2017 under new maps (the state has appealed this to the Supreme Court).  If the Courts get around to striking down all of this, things might get better.  But in many respects, the HB 2 debacle is also a symptom of a deeper failure of governance and democratic legitimacy.

Do Brands Produce Value? Thoughts on de-fetishizing use value

Brands are of increasing importance to capitalism.  As an insightful book by Franck Cochoy argues, this is part of the logic of commodification, which generates a perpetual demand for product differentiation.  At the point that a product becomes a commodity – i.e., at the point that it leaves the bazaar, where individual vendors measure out products like food in bulk to individual customers, and enters the process of circulation in a capitalist market – it becomes necessary to distinguish commodities from one another.  This is because the initial process of commodification first produces a necessary standardization (where weights, notions of what a given product name signifies, etc. become more uniform – in Marxian terms, where exchange value becomes measurable and money becomes the primary way by which one measures equivalence between commodities whose use value is presumed equivalent), from which producers then have to distinguish their commodities.  This demand for differentiation generates packaging, brands, trademark, and the final detachment of commodities from brands, such that brands have value that can be applied to other commodities.  A good literature from anthropology and cultural studies illustrates this process with such products as “quality” salmon, canola oil, and teak.

There is currently a lively debate in the context of the internet about whether brands actually produce (surplus) value in the Marxian sense.  The pro side is represented in a recent piece by Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni, who argue that standard Marxian notions of labor apply poorly to the generation of value in places like social media, because the Marxian notion of labor is too tightly connected to time spent laboring.  Instead, and following Negri specifically and autonomist Marxism more generally, they claim that “in effect, social media platforms like Facebook function as channels by means of which affective investments on the part of the multitude can be translated into objectified forms of abstract affect that support financial valuations” (146).  That is, prosumers produce surplus value by means of affective investment in brands (it is perhaps worth pointing out that this argument is not confined to theories about information; for a similar argument from the anthropology literature, see this piece), and this unremunerated attachment is harvested by social media companies as surplus value.

In a critique of Arvidsson and Colleoni’s claim that brands produce value, Jakob Rigi and Robert Prey argue that affect “does not produce new value but instead helps the owner of the brand to appropriate a larger portion of the surplus value produced by workers in the realm of production” (400).  They identify three primary ways this happens: (1) by allowing brand owners to increase demand for their commodity at the expense of other commodities, enabling them to sell their commodities at prices above their value; (2) by allowing brand owners to extract monopoly rents in the form of intellectual property licensing; and (3) by allowing speculative value and what Marx calls “fictitious capital” to attach to the brand via the stock market.  I want to take a closer look at the first claim here, because it comes across to me as mistaken.  At the very least, it seems to me to require more argument than Rigi and Prey supply to defeat the supposition that brands create value, even if Arvidsson and Colleoni aren’t quite right to speak in terms of affective labor (though I’m going to defend at least a version of that claim below; part of my goal here is to be able to define it more precisely.  As I’ve suggested in the context of big data (see also here), I think that the surplus value discussion here is incomplete without reference to primitive accumulation).

Squaring the Circle on Big Data, Class, Value and Primitive Accumulation

A recent paper by Hamid Ekbia presents an interesting Marxian theory of the relation between exploitation and computer networks.   The paper is intended as an intervention in to discussions of the accumulation of value in what is now called cognitive capitalism (I’ve attempted to synthesize some of that literature here).  The most interesting part of the Ekbia’s paper seems to me that he’s able to construct a coherent notion of class (or close to class – he acknowledges that it’s not quite a class in the strict Marxian sense) within those who are part of the networked economy.  In particular, he is able to locate those who are exploited and to roughly define them as a group: the “condensers.”  The problem of locating a specific exploited class is important and salient partly because there is no way for a Marxian theory of value to work unless somebody is exploited, but also because the behavior of prosumers in particular has been the subject of intense controversy, particularly on the subject of whether they produce value.  Ekbia’s contribution, it seems to me, is to show how and why some prosumers manage to be exploited.