New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On the Political Economy of Social Media: Dispossession of the Other

By Gordon Hull

 

The Washington Post has a disturbing story about how “lies become truth in online America.”  It narrates the story of two individuals.  One spends his time in Maine, dishing out deliberately fake news stories designed to troll those on the right by saying completely absurd things and then watching them blindly repeat them as truths.  Christopher Blair and his friends then occasionally wade into comments sections to chastise the vulnerable, as well as baiting people into saying racist things and getting their social media accounts removed and so on.  “Nothing on this page is real” says one of the apparently fourteen (!) disclaimers on his site; he gets up to 6 million hits from believers a month.  Blair would make up pretty much anything that aligns with stuff circulating on the far right:

“In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55”

The Internet of Prison People

By Gordon Hull

In what seems like a distant, more innocent time in surveillance (viz. 2003), Andy Clark was able  to use as an example in his Natural Born Cyborgs an implanted tracking chip for pets.  Does your cat tend to wander off?  Now you can know where Whiskers is at all times! (no doubt taking a nap in the sun, and not earning his keep catching mice)  Clark’s point was to argue that we are all tool-using creatures by nature, to the point that when we speak of our “minds,” that term really needs to include at least some of the tools we use.  So the extended mind hypothesis was the point of the book, and pet-tracking an example, but Clark’s optimism was evidenced in the way that he dumped concerns like privacy together into a final chapter.  It's that ability to put the worries in the last chapter that seems dated now.

Of course, these days RFID chips are everywhere – now, apparently, in the bodies of employees (h/t dmf).  The story needs to be read, but basically an entrepreneur named Tim Westby started out by marketing RFID vending machines to prisons because prison administrators liked convenience in their contracts and because the machines could operate with a high markup (what are the inmates going to do, choose a different supplier of soda?).  Twenty years later, the business has grown to putting RFID tags on its employees and marketing smart phone apps that utilize “ping notifications and geo-fences that keep kids from leaving pre-defined areas”

Becker, Irrationality and Neoliberal Biopower

By Gordon Hull

In Sleights of Reason, Mary Beth Mader makes the point that there is an ontological distinction between the members of a normalized “population” and the individuals they represent.  Mader is talking about statistics and bell curves; as she summarizes the part of her argument that’s relevant here, “statistical social measurement is ontologically problematic on the very level of the conceptual composites expressed in statistical measures and distributions and not only on an allegedly duplicitous subsequent prescriptive application of an allegedly descriptive conceptual instrument” (45).  In other words, it’s not just that we get told that we’re “abnormal” or not living up to the norm; it’s that the way the norm is constructed also needs scrutiny.

The connection between neoliberalism and biopower – the one that Foucault seems to make in Birth of Biopolitics, but then doesn’t exactly spell out – is made crystal clear in a piece by Gary Becker that makes precisely this move in declaring that accounts of human behavior based on human rationality can nonetheless apply to irrational behavior as well.  The piece is cited often enough for the temerity of the claim that economic rationality can be applied to irrational behavior, and it clearly evidences Foucault’s claim that “American neo-liberalism still involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market.  It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges “ (BB 243; Becker elsewhere claims that  “the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior, although I recognize, of course, that much behavior is not yet understood” (Essence of Becker, 13, emphasis original)).  That said, what is actually going on in the discussion of irrationality becomes substantially more interesting when read in light of Mader’s point about norms and populations.

New Paper on Foucault and Parrhesia

By Gordon Hull

I'm happy to announce (shamelessly!) that my article, "The Banality of Cynicism: Foucault and Limits of Authentic Parrhesia" is now out in Foucault Studies (open access).

The abstract is:

Foucault’s discussion of parrhēsia – frank speech – in his last two Collège de France lecture courses has led many to wonder if Foucault is pursuing parrhēsia as a contemporary strategy for resistance.  This essay argues that ethical parrhēsia on either the Socratic or Cynical model would have little critical traction today because the current environment is plagued by problems analogous to those Plato thought plagued Athenian democracy. Specifically, authentication of parrhesiasts as a technique for authenticating their speech – the specific problem that the move to ethical parrhēsia in ancient Greece was designed to solve – becomes intractable in a social media environment, even with the added Cynical move to pure visibility. The problem is that contemporary society overproduces visibility as a condition for participation, which means that the context for authenticating parrhesiastic speech is one in which visibility is banalized and in which there is a surplus of speech which presents as parrhesiastic. The problem of authentication is thus a serious one, one which social media makes particularly intractable.

There's lots of papers in this issue, and I of course haven't read them yet - but they look good.

 

More on Facebook and Mental Health Privacy

By Gordon Hull

It’s not news that Facebook generates a lot of privacy concerns.  But it’s nonetheless worth keeping up a little, just to indicate how seriously we need to be concerned about the connection between Facebook and data analytics.  We’ve known for a while that automated analysis of Facebook likes can predict basic personality type.  A 2017 paper showed that targeting of advertising based on personality type was highly effective, as measured by clicks and purchases.  Facebook appears to be marketing predictive-advertising (so an advertiser can know to send you a nudge if FB software predicts you may be about to switch brands of something).

Now there’s this: an individual’s Facebook posts can apparently predict depression independently of subjective reporting (discussion here). From the study:

“Each year, 7–26% of the US population experiences depression, of whom only 13–49% receive minimally adequate treatment. By 2030, unipolar depressive disorders are predicted to be the leading cause of disability in high-income countries. The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends screening adults for depression in circumstances in which accurate diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up can be offered. These high rates of underdiagnosis and undertreatment suggest that existing procedures for screening and identifying depressed patients are inadequate. Novel methods are needed to identify and treat patients with depression.

By using Facebook language data from a sample of consenting patients who presented to a single emergency department, we built a method to predict the first documentation of a diagnosis of depression in the electronic medical record (EMR). Previous research has demonstrated the feasibility of using Twitter and Facebook language and activity data to predict depression, postpartum depression, suicidality, and posttraumatic stress disorder, relying on self-report of diagnoses on Twitter or the participants’ responses to screening surveys to establish participants’ mental health status. In contrast to this prior work relying on self-report, we established a depression diagnosis by using medical codes from an EMR.”

It seems to me that these paragraphs speak to why this technology can be so difficult to wrap one’s head around.  On the one hand, it is really important to take mental health seriously, and we live in a neoliberal society that both generates mental health problems and offers problematic band-aids to solve them, including moves by Pharma to drum up purchases of drugs with dubious clinical efficacy.  The study is classic big data: by looking at actual EMR records and correlated FB posts, the authors were able to train the algorithms with existing known cases of depression.  What it discovered was that certain words in posts predict a future diagnosis of depression pretty well, better as you get closer to the diagnosis.  And it doesn’t rely on self-reporting. Nor does it rely on a primary care physician spotting the problem, which the study suggests is part of why depression is so under-diagnosed.  As the authors put it, “the potential exists to develop burdenless indicators of mental illness that precede the medical documentation of depression (which may often be delayed) and which, as a result, could reduce the total extent of functional impairment experienced during the depressive episode.” There’s a chance here to do some real good for public health at a relatively low cost (though one should raise a digital divide worry: those who do not leave a sufficient social media trail – say, the homeless, who are at very high risk for mental health issues – will fall further through the cracks).

On the other hand, want to buy a list of depressed patients to sell those dubious remedies to?

Capitalism's Headache

By Gordon Hull

I mean the title of this post literally. A recent study that surveyed global neurological disease incidence concluded that neurological disorders now are the leading global cause of disability, and that their rates are rapidly rising.  A substantial portion of this is due to increasing rates of Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s and other dementias; as the study concludes, “the most striking change has been the more than doubling of people in the world who die or are disabled from Alzheimer's disease and other dementias over the past 25 years.”  The primary risk factor for these conditions is age, and the increase is clearly tied to increasing life expectancies.  It may also in part explain why women (who generally have higher life expectancies than men) have a 22% higher burden from these diseases than men.  Other results were similarly expected: the global rates of communicable neurological conditions like meningitis were declining due to vaccination programs; their burden was highest in low-income regions.  The study concludes:

“In conclusion, we have shown that neurological disorders are a large cause of disability and death worldwide. Globally, the burden of neurological disorders has increased substantially over the past 25 years because of population ageing, despite substantial decreases in mortality rates from stroke and communicable neurological disorders. Because low-income and middle-income countries still have a long way to go through the demographic transition of reductions in child mortality and population ageing, the number of patients who will need neurological care will continue to grow in the coming decades. It is important that policy makers and health-care providers are aware of these past trends to be able to provide adequate services for the growing numbers of patients with neurological disorders”

This sort of headline, especially about the staggering burden that Alzheimer’s is going to place on the U.S. healthcare  system as baby boomers enter old age, is relatively common.  Buried in the headline-grabbing statistics, though, is a somewhat alarming data point: the rise in headaches.  Between 1990 and 2015, the global prevalence of migraines shot up 49.6%, tension-type headaches 49.2%, and of medication-overdose headaches by 57.8% (table 1 in the linked article).  The highest rates of headaches were in high-income regions. There is also a fairly sharp drop in the rate of headaches at around age 65 in the table accompanying the graph.

One hesitates to interpret too much on a quick read (there is a lot of data; the article is open access, so those with better quantitative skills should dive in!), but it’s hard not to notice that the years from 1990 to 2015 are also the years that global capitalism took its victory lap over communism, and celebrated with a neoliberal intensification of staggering proportions.   It is also hard not to notice that 65 is retirement age.

Franco (“Bifo”) Berardi has  been saying for a long time that the rise in global mental health disorders needs to be read as a symptom of capitalism’s intensification, a point on which Will Davies concurs (I intend to do a post on this at some  point).  In Berardi’s case, though, the argument has the feel of speculation.  But here we have a data point that is difficult to explain otherwise: quite independently of how long one lives, life today, as Lenin once said of Hegel’s Logic, seems to be “a best means for getting a headache.”

Bakhtin’s Carnival, Genealogy, History

By Gordon Hull

Foucault’s use of Nietzsche to make the distinction between history and genealogy in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” is well-known.  What is less well-known, I think (perhaps I am projecting again, but I had forgotten this passage until I saw a note I’d made to it the other day), is a very clear presentation of the distinction in Society must be Defended.  Here I want to tentatively suggest some connections between the language of SMD and some of Foucault’s other writings.  The SMD context is a discussion of state historiography and archiving in the 18^th Century.  Foucault announces “another new excursus,” and writes:

“The difference between what might be called the history of the sciences and the genealogy of knowledges is that the history of sciences is essentially located on an axis that is, roughly speaking, the cognition-truth axis, or at least the axis that goes from the structure of cognition to the demand for truth. Unlike the history of the sciences, the genealogy of knowledges is located on a different axis, namely the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive practice-clash of power axis” (SMD 178).

He then suggests that if one is to do a genealogy of knowledges of the 18^th Century, the first thing one needs to do is to “outwit the problematic of the Enlightenment” (ibid.), which is to say that one has to avoid the urge to talk about the emergence of reason, the fading of ignorance, and so forth.  In other words, one has to avoid the era’s framing of itself.  Instead, one should see:

“an immense and multiple battle, but not one between knowledge and ignorance, but an immense and multiple battle between knowledges in the plural—knowledges that are in conflict because of their very morphology, because they are in the possession of enemies, and because they have intrinsic power-effects” (SMD 179).

I want to flag the text here because it helps to illuminate the political stakes of genealogy, and thus of writing history, quite clear.  This is of course also in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” especially when he talks at the end about what genealogy might do.  I want to focus on the first, which is parodic or carnivalesque.  Foucault comes across there as somewhat cryptic; the genealogist “will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing” and so “genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival” (Foucault Reader, 94).

Return to “What is an Author”

By Gordon Hull

I’m teaching a Foucault seminar this term, and one of the things I’m trying to do is get better on the doxography of his essays.  That led me to a discovery about “What is an Author” that I’m going to share on the (hopefully not hubristic) assumption that other folks didn’t know it either.  The essay has been of interest to me for a while, largely because of my work on intellectual property.  There, the link between copyright and the juridico-political function of authorship Foucault identifies is fairly clear, and has been ably explored in the context of trademark by Laura Heymann.

What I didn’t know is that Foucault’s essay was originally presented as a seminar (Feb. 1969) – with responses from the likes of Lucien Goldmann and Lacan.  The version translated into English and that makes its way into the Rabinow-edited Foucault Reader and subsequent English editions is based on a revised version that Foucault gave the following year in Buffalo.  As a result, we don’t get the commentaries.  The version in Dits & Écrits I (#69) is thus worth a look for a few reasons.

Big Data + Health Insurance = Bad

Big data can - and very often is - used to discriminate.  It was only a matter of time before health insurers started using it to predict who might be more likely to get sick, and to charge them more (yes, they've figured out how to circumvent the ACA).  ProPublica has the story here.

Be very afraid, especially if you recently moved to a smaller house or lived on a poor street growing up.  And remember that automated analysis of Facebook likes indicates that if you like hello Kitty, you're more likely to be depressed.  And that can be $$$.

Chicago Antitrust and Neoliberalism’s Blindspots

By Gordon Hull

As Foucault emphasizes in Birth of Biopolitics, one of the signal moves in American neoliberalism is the extension of economic analysis into all aspects of life.  As he puts it, the American neoliberals “try to use the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but what we call social phenomena” (BB 239-40).  This “absolute generalization” of the market form “functions … as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior,” enabling a “sort of economic analysis of the non-economic” (BB 243).  Foucault uses the neoliberal analysis of crime as exemplary.  Rather than pursuing the panoptic dream of zero-crime, or earlier theories about “the delinquent” as a character type, the neoliberal treats crime as an economic activity: we are all potential criminals; the key to lowering crime is to raise its cost.  This has sometimes surprising results, one of the most important of which is that one should not spend more social resources on combatting crime than the crime costs.

For example, Jeff Sessions and his stupid “zero-tolerance” policy are not just barbaric: they are economically irrational.  Tinpot Dictator must have an inkling of this, which is why he tries to say that all immigrants are gang members, so as to make them look more costly than they are. Sort of like ticking-time-bomb scenarios try to make torture look efficient. Yes, I know he is motivated by racism. Posner & co. never let conscious motives get in the way of a good description.  You just assume that Tinpot has stable preferences (racism and narcissism and more racism), and then “all human behavior can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility from a stable set of preferences” (Essence of Becker, 13).

Foucault’s “Analytic Philosophy of Politics”

By Gordon Hull

The current issue of Foucault Studies contains the first English translation of a lecture Foucault gave in Japan in 1978.  This “Analytic Philosophy of Politics” is essential reading if you have an interest in the transition between Foucault’s “power” and “ethics” work and/or his later understanding of power and resistance.  The Tokyo lecture underscores a profound continuity in his thought along a number of lines. Here are a few things that emerged for me on a first reading (there are also references to Confucianism that I am totally unqualified to address, so I will simply note that they are present):

(1) Foucault proposes that the question of power emerges in the wake of fascism and Stalinism, which he treats as both singular but as tied to “a whole series of mechanisms that already existed within social and political systems” (189).  That is, movements now challenge “this overproduction of power that Stalinism and fascism clearly manifested in its stark and monstrous state” (189).  The emphasis on Stalinism and fascism corresponds to the lectures that bookend Society must be Defended a few years prior, where Foucault begins by critiquing “totalitarian” discourses in the form of orthodox Marxism and closes with an analysis of state racism (exemplified by the Nazis) as a form of biopower.  So too, at the beginning of SMD, he refers to some of the same movements – anti-psychiatry, the recovery of “subjugated knowledges” that are the examples in the Tokyo lecture.

(2) Second, Foucault is interested in the role of the philosopher and philosophy.  This is not a surprise given his other interviews and essays on the topic, but it’s worth mentioning that he explicitly poses as a problem that philosophies of liberation presented during the 19c have become tools of oppression in the 20^th.  As he puts it, “each and every time these philosophies of freedom gave birth to forms of power that, whether in the guise of terror, bureaucracy, or even bureaucratic terror, were the very opposite of the regime of freedom, the very opposite of freedom as history” (191).  As with the critique of Marxism and Freudianism at the start of SMD, the text here underscores why Foucault is skeptical of revolutionary discourses and thinks they may be a part of the problem, not the solution.  Thus, “one should no longer imagine that one can escape relations of power all at once, globally, massively, through a sort of radical rupture or a flight without return” (193).

In this, Foucault is on a page very similar to Deleuze, at least on this point.  A moment in an interview of Deleuze by Antonio Negri is instructive. In it, Negri asks about a “tragic note” he detects in Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze responds with a gesture to Primo Levi and a “shame at being human,” of being tainted with what people have done. “This,” he adds, “is one of the most powerful incentives toward philosophy, and it’s what makes all philosophy political…. What’s so shameful is that we’ve no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves” (Negotiations, 171-3).

Instead of wanting to know if power is good or bad, etc., “one should simply try to relieve the question of power of all the moral and juridical overloads that one has placed on it, and ask the following naïve question, which has not been posed so often … what do power relations fundamentally consist in?”  In so doing, the job of the philosopher is to “make visible what precisely is visible, which is to say to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately connected with ourselves that we cannot perceive it” (192).  The remark certainly recalls the early Heidegger on the question of Being, but it’s here put in service of understanding power as a form of subjectification: the later part of the Tokyo lecture is precisely interested in pastoral power as a technique of individuation.

Huuuge Win for Privacy

By Gordon Hull

Santa Claus knows when you’ve been sleeping, knows when you’re awake, and knows if you’ve been bad or good.  Your phone knows all of that too, because it knows exactly where you are.  It then sends all that information to your carrier, which keeps it in its logs for five years.  Stay out late drinking last night?  Your phone knows. Had an affair a couple of years ago? Your phone knows that, too. Get up early for a workout and then work?  Yep, your phone knows that too.  Up until today, it was pretty easy for the police to know it as well, as they were able to subpoena your phone’s geolocation records from your phone carrier.  Under the “third party doctrine” as articulated primarily in Smith v. Maryland (1978), you lose any expectation of privacy over information that you "voluntarily" hand over to someone else – this this case, your phone carrier.  In a 5-4 opinion today, Chief Justice Roberts and the four liberals on the Court refused to apply third party doctrine to phone location data.  Justice Roberts writes:

“We decline to extend Smith and Miller [a case where the government subpoenaed bank records- GH] to cover these novel circumstances. Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user’s claim to Fourth Amendment protection. Whether the Government employs its own surveillance technology as in Jones or leverages the technology of a wireless carrier, we hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through CSLI. The location information obtained from Carpenter’s wireless carriers was the product of a search”

As Roberts noted at the start of the opinion (which, btw, is a model of legal writing), the Fourth Amendment was originally motivated in substantial part by concern over generalized warrants.  His conclusion is therefore not a surprise.  Indeed, tapping phone records pretty much achieves everything a general warrant hoped for; as Roberts notes, “a cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales. Accordingly, when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user” (internal citations omitted).  And of course it does so with absolutely zero police effort.  When the GDR Stasi wanted to track your every move, they at least had to assign an officer to do it.  Here, the data is collected automatically and without human intervention.

The Big Data Train Chugs On, Predictive Personality Edition

By Gordon Hull

One of the things that marketers like about big data is that they can personalize ads.  That operation is getting increasingly sophisticated.  We’ve known for a while that basic personality traits (like introversion/extraversion) can be predicted from Facebook likes.  I missed this paper when it came out, but some of the same authors as the initial Facebook “likes” paper have now done the inevitable follow-up.  By targeting Facebook ads on the basis of openness and extraversion (where the correlation with likes is fairly robust), they were able to make users 1.54 times more likely to make a purchase (thus about 40% more likely) than with non-“psychologically-tailored” advertising.  The study size, as with most research on FB, is enormous – the study reached some 3.5 million users (a point the authors use to try to defuse some objections).  The authors duly note the murky ethical issues that emerge: on the one hand, you could proactively try to assist people who show signs of depression; on the other hand, weaknesses like susceptibility to addictive gambling or dubious political targeting could be exploited.  That observation is pretty obvious now, in the wake of Cambridge Analytics.  Two other takeaways stood out more to me.  First, the study predicted personality on the basis of only one like.  As the authors note, that means the study likely underestimates the potential effect of psychological targeting.  Second, the authors emphasize that a point that a lot of us have been trying to make for a while: that these results undermine a lot of the current regulatory strategy for privacy. I’ll let them speak:

Malthus’ Marshmallow

By Gordon Hull

We’ve all heard of a version of the experiment: you set a kid down with a marshmallow, and tell him that if he can sit there and not eat it for a while, he can have two.  Some kids can do it, and others can’t.  A famous paper suggests that whether the child has the willpower to wait is predictive of his future success in life.  Apparently, not so much.  According to a piece by Jessica McCrory Calarco in the Atlantic, new research casts this finding into doubt.  It seems that the original study enrolled fewer than 90 children, all of them selected from Stanford’s lab school.  Let’s just call that an unrepresentative sample.  A new, larger and more representative study concludes that willpower isn’t what’s driving the result; it’s socioeconomic status.  As Calarco puts it, “the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.”  For example, once you factor in whether the mother has a college degree or not, the children’s ability to wait wasn’t predictive:

Hypernudges as Subjectification

By Gordon Hull

In a recent paper, Karen Yeung introduces the concept of a ‘hypernudge’ as a way to capture the way Big Data intensifies design-based ‘nudges’ as a form of regulation.  Yeung’s discussion draws partly from discussions of Internet regulation, partly from literature on design, and partly from legal literature around privacy and big data.  Yeung’s basic argument is that, in the context of big data:

“Despite the complexity and sophistication of their underlying algorithmic processes, these applications ultimately rely on a deceptively simple design-based mechanism of influence – ‘nudge.’ By configuring and thereby personalizing the user’s informational choice context, typically through algorithmic analysis of data streams from multiple sources claiming to offer predictive insights concerning the habits, preferences and interests of targeted individuals (such as those used by online consumer product recommendation engines), these nudges channel user choices in directions preferred by the choice architect through processes that are subtle, unobtrusive, yet extraordinarily powerful” (119)

Ordinary nudging technologies – she cites the humble speed bump – are static.  In contrast, the sorts of nudges provided by data analytics are dynamic, continuously and invisibly updating the choices a user sees.  They work both to make decisions automatically based on what users have done or can be predicted to do, and by guiding decision-making by influencing what choices are available (and how they are presented).  Because of both the dynamism and invisibility, data-driven nudges can be incredibly powerful in comparison to their static cousins. 

Yeung’s paper also enables one to advance a couple of points in the context of information ethics.

Charlotte/Mecklenburg votes against 287(g)

Yesterday was a big news day.  The biggest story was probably our Tinpot Dictator’s decision to unilaterally violate the Iranian nuclear deal.  In addition to alienating almost everyone not named Bibi Netanyahu or John Bolton, and making the world less safe, the main thing this proves is that Trump can’t see more than ten minutes into the future: very soon, he will supposedly be sitting down with North Korea’s Kim Kong Un to… negotiate a nuclear deal.  What a wonderful time to petulantly scream that the U.S. does not abide by its nuclear deals!  Back home, if you pay attention to local elections, you’ll have heard that in the Republican primary that includes a sizable part of Charlotte, U.S. House incumbent Robert Pittinger narrowly lost to Rev. Mark Harris, a far right preacher who led the state’s 2012 anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment.  Conventional wisdom is that Harris will be easier for Democratic nominee McReady to challenge in the fall.

The news that I suspect didn’t make it out of the local area is that Mecklenburg County’s Sheriff Irwin Carmichael just lost – badly – his re-election bid.  There were three candidates in the Democratic primary, and nobody on the Republican ticket, so the winner last night won the office.  Carmichael had defended the County’s use of 287(g) rules that allowed the ICE agents access to those detained in Mecklenburg County (which includes Charlotte; Charlotte police do not participate in  287(g)) jails.  His support for that program is, by all accounts, why he lost. Both of his opponents came out against it, and there was a strong grass-roots mobilization campaign.  The winner also plans to roll back two of Carmichael’s ending in-person visits with inmates and condoning the use of solitary confinement. 

That’s a good day for those of us who care about criminal justice reform and a reminder that local politics can matter.

Are Patents Property? Depends on what you mean…

By Gordon Hull

The Supreme Court issued a landmark patent ruling yesterday in Oil States v. Greene.  The most recent major revision to the Patent statute specifies that the validity of patents – in terms of whether they meet conditions of patentability (utility, non-obviousness and novelty - the opinion does not directly specify whether questions about patentable subject matters are included here, but it cites §101, so I think that’s probably covered too)  – can be challenged and resolved through an administrative inter partes review.  This review process has a number of procedural requirements, but at the end of the day the decision reached can result in a patent revocation and is conducted entirely within the administrative apparatus of the PTO.  The question posed is therefore whether the government can revoke a patent without going through the courts.  The answer delivered in a 7-2 opinion by Justice Thomas, is yes.  I haven’t digested the opinion fully, and there was another, somewhat related case yesterday that I haven’t even started on.  That said, Oil States is a very interesting decision, including the dissent authored by Justice Gorsuch.  Here’s some initial reflections on it (I did some context-setting earlier: see here).  I’ll first talk about the opinion, and then end with a thought about the underlying policy problem, for which inter partes review is basically a band-aid solution.

The basic argument of the opinion is that patents aren’t private property so much as they are a public franchise, and as such aren’t the sort of thing the Constitution is talking about when it says property claims have to run through the judicial branch.  As Thomas argues, “the decision to grant a patent is a matter involving public rights—specifically, the grant of a public franchise” (op. slip, 7, his emphasis).  As 19c case law establishes, a patent “take[s] from the public rights of immense value, and bestow[s] them upon the patentee” (op slip, 8), by granting a right of exclusion (traditionally the core of property).  It does so to incentivize invention.  It then follows logically that the decision to remove a patent is also a matter of public franchise.  Thomas cites a 1966 ruling that administrative review covers the “issuance of patents whose effects are to remove existent knowledge from the public domain” (8-9).  In other words, if the patent doesn’t cover something novel, it takes knowledge that was available to the public and privatizes it.

The ruling strikes me as exemplifying what I call “public biopolitics,” which is basically the pre-neoliberal version that Foucault identifies (especially in Security, Territory, Population and Birth of Biopolitics) with classic liberalism.  They don’t quote Mill, but the opinion is the sort of thing that the Mill of the Principles of Political Economy could get on board with. For example, Mill justifies the departure from laissez faire on the grounds that inventions are of tremendous public value, but require nurturing by the state. Similar instances of justified state intervention include public funding of things like universities (p. 968).  He also explains what happens in terms of a publicly-granted patent license: “this is not making the commodity dear for [the inventor’s] benefit, but merely postponing a part of the increased cheapness which the public owe to the inventor, in order to compensate and reward him for the service” (p. 928). Thus, even in the case of patents, Mill conceives of the production of knowledge as the production of something that benefits the public generally, and which the application of laissez-faire will not supply. The point is not to internalize externalities for the sake of the inventor.  This sense of knowledge as a public good is specific to modern liberalism.  As Foucault puts is, “activity that may go beyond this pure and simple subsistence will in fact be produced, distributed, divided up, and put in circulation in such a way that the state really can draw its strength from it” (STP 326).

Facebook and the Dispossession of Preferences

By Gordon Hull

A little more than a year ago, I floated a version of the thesis that Big Data functions as a form of capitalist accumulation by dispossession.  “Accumulation by Dispossession” is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” and the basic idea is that capital has to extract value from individuals in a way that pushes them into its system of value extraction.  It does that by depriving them of other sources of value.  For example, the enclosure laws in 16^th-Century England served to dispossess commoners and small-scale farmers of the ability to subsist off the land, and so thrust them, “free” into the urban labor pool.  Absent this initial dispossession, the formation of the urban market in “free labor” would have been impossible.  My argument focused on the dispossession of preferences, and was that data analytics function to deprive us of the capacity to form and express preferences outside of the logic of capitalist markets.  That is significant because the more our “preferences” are restricted to those things that we can buy, the more our lives are determined by market logic – and the more things that exceed market logic become invisible.  We are dispossessed of the ability to imagine life differently.

So.  Back to Facebook.  A recent piece by Sam Biddle in the Intercept, based on a leaked internal FB document, suggests that Facebook is deeply engaged in exactly this process.  According to Biddle:

Hostile Information Architecture

By Gordon Hull

Surprise! Facebook is back in the news and the doghouse, this time for allowing vast amounts of user data to find its way to Cambridge Analytica, which then used it to try to elect Donald Trump.  The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.  I’ll review why that is first, then offer a term that gets at what I take to be the real problem: we live in a deliberately-created hostile information architecture.  Let’s first rehearse why the FB-Cambridge Analytica nexus is not a surprise.

Property as Juridical and Biopower (part 3, with a little bit about subjectification)

By Gordon Hull

In the two previous posts, I first suggested that Thomas Merrill’s logical argument for why the right to exclude was the sine qua non of any conception of property was inconclusive.  I then offered a brief reading of the Foucauldian distinction between juridical and biopower, applying it to Locke to suggest that in Locke’s case, both aspects of power were present, but juridical was dominant.  In what follows, I want to argue that the opposite is the case with the contemporary Demsetzian account: here, biopower is dominant.  In other words, a look at endpoint historical instances of property theory suggests that the view of power underlying them has changed from Locke’s time to ours, even as the (quasi-juridical) right to exclude remains a common thread.

To return to Merrill’s thoughts on exclusion, how might we combine exclusion with Foucauldian theories of power?  An initial argument is straightforward, and goes something like this: any conception of property that says the right to exclude is essential retains at the very least that much of a juridical understanding of property.  Since rights are an aspect of juridical power, and since juridical power is about the right to repress and to prevent, it’s easy enough to see the exclusionary right as juridical.  Merrill’s arguments about the priority of the right to exclude over the right to use and develop suggests that any biopolitical emphasis on optimization is ultimately secondary to a basic ability to repress.  Importantly, Merrill extends his argument to commons-based regimes: any internal use privileges are secondary to the initial ability of the villagers to exclude non-members.  In short, even as we increasingly live by biopolitical regimes, juridical power retains its force at the very core of those regimes: the property right which has been the central feature of capitalism.