New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Philip Agre on Privacy and Big Data (part 1)

By Gordon Hull

A current paper by Mireille Hildebrandt sent me to a paper from 1994 that I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t read before: Philip Agre’s “Surveillance and Capture.”  Agre’s paper has been cited over 300 times, but it’s missing in a lot of the privacy literature I know.  After reading it, I’ve decided that’s a mistake, and it’s time to make amends.  I’ll begin by saying why I think Hildebrandt is exactly right to bring the paper up in a context of big data.

Agre starts with quotidian examples of tracking, things like employee ID cards that let systems know where they are, to UPS package tracking.  The core argument of Agre’s paper is that there’s two conceptual models of privacy that need to be distinguished in making sense of phenomena like these: one, the one that we all talk about all the time, is surveillance.  The surveillance model grew out of experience with state bureaucracies, particularly in the Soviet bloc, and features visual metaphors (typically Orwell and Bentham); assumes that the watching is nondisruptive and secret; involves territorial metaphors like invasion of space, which tend to then lead to a dichotomy between coercion and consent; involves centralized orchestration; and is identified with the state.  This model, though ubiquitous, isn’t the only or even the best one.  Agre spends most of his time developing the alternative model, though he notes that “when applied as the sole framework of computing and privacy, the surveillance model can lead to oversimplified analysis” and suggests that it lends itself to caricature and easy dismissals such that “genuinely worrisome developments can be seen as ‘not so bad’ simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia” (116).   It’s not hard to say that Agre got this one right: whether it’s the well-trodden problems with notice-and-consent or the stubborn persistence of the “I’ve got nothing to hide” deflection, the surveillance model isn’t adequate to privacy worries now.

The second model, which Agre ties to computer science and information systems management, is built around the idea of “capture.”  The capture model also has five characteristics, which Agre develops as a contrast with surveillance.  Capture: uses linguistic metaphors for human activities; assumes that linguistic parsing of activities is active intervention; defaults to structural metaphors; is decentralized; and is driven by to reconstruct human activity “through [its] assimilation to a transcendent (‘virtual’) order of mathematical formalism” (107).  The core concept here is grammar: the basic mechanism of capture is to pick a set of atomic elements (people, UPS packages) and to then develop a grammar that describes their possible movements or changes.  This model is then imposed – sometimes coercively – on the activities it purports to describe, mechanisms are used to then track and measure the activity according to the grammar; the system can then be further calibrated.

Our Corrupt Carneades, or the Citizenship Question

The Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is a farce attempting to be a tragedy.  The initial claim – that the question was needed to enforce the Voting rights Act – was so obviously pretextual that Justice Roberts had to join the Court’s liberals to strike it down (even though, as Adam Serwer points out, four justices don’t seem to care that they were being lied to).  Printing of the forms commenced, and everybody thought the case was dead, until Trump tweeted new policy and forced the Justice Department attorneys to humiliate themselves in court.  The DOJ then attempted to replace all the attorneys on the case without specifying why – though most informed commentators assumed that this was because the original attorneys felt ethically uncomfortable with whatever they were about to be asked to do, such as reverse themselves on positions that they had insisted upon before.  A federal judge rejected that request today.  There is supposedly a new rationale coming for the question, maybe by way of an unconstitutional executive order, because William Barr says so.  Any minute now.  The difference is that this new rationale will be delivered for self-evidently pretextual reasons, rather than just evidently pretextual ones (Joseph Fishkin outlines what he thinks is wrong with the best argument the DOJ can likely produce here).

Another development that has gotten less attention is perhaps particularly intriguing.  The government has insisted over and over and over that the census had to be at the printer’s by June 30.  The ACLU has now asked the court system to enforce those words, effectively closing the case.  As Marty Lederman usefully summarizes:

Lockean Data Rhetoric

One of the standard talking points about data gets summed up in the “data imperative:” that the drive to accumulate data seems insatiable, and that firms will pursue accumulating it well beyond and definable economic end.  There’s a lot of literature on why this might be; I’ve tended to approach the question with the resources of Marx in hand: data is amenable to commodification, and tends to function as a form of primitive accumulation.  One might also argue that data functions as a form of capital.  Undoubtedly there is a case of overdetermination here, and trying to disentangle the reasons why the universe of data (broadly conceived) so readily interacts with capital is worth further reflection.

In that regard, I’ve been reading David Beer’s excellent new Data Gaze, which looks to develop an understanding of “how data are seen,” with attention to “the implicit limits and parameters that are being set into data before or whilst they are utilized” (6).  In other words, we need to think about what data is, which is to say (following the same sort of path as the Leonelli paper I discussed, but from a different angle), we need to know what data does.  And what data is/does is heavily influenced by how it’s presented in the marketing and other apparatuses of the data industry.  “Data analytics are almost always part of the operation of capitalism and should be seen through the lens of political economy” (14).  Following Foucault’s lead about the “clinical gaze” and how it developed institutionally, Beer proposes of the “data gaze” that:

The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property

I'm very pleased to be able to say that my new book, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, now has a publisher's webpage on Cambridge UP!

It's currently in production, and should be coming out this winter.  Here's the blurb from the site:

"As a central part of the regulation of contemporary economies, intellectual property (IP) is central to all aspects of our lives. It matters for the works we create, the brands we identify and the medicines we consume. But if IP is power, what kind of power is it, and what does it do? Building on the work of Michel Foucault, Gordon Hull examines different ways of understanding power in copyright, trademark and patent policy: as law, as promotion of public welfare, and as promotion of neoliberal privatization. He argues that intellectual property policy is moving toward neoliberalism, even as that move is broadly contested in everything from resistance movements to Supreme Court decisions. This work should be read by anyone interested in understanding why the struggle to conceptualize IP matters."

Gun Profit Litany

A week ago, two people were killed in a mass shooting at UNC Charlotte that was only one of several shootings in Charlotte that week.

Yesterday, one student was killed and several injured in a mass shooting at a high school in the Denver suburbs.

As of now (5/8), there have been 118 mass shootings in 2019.  There have been eleven since the UNC Charlotte shooting.

In 2018, the gun manufacturing industry made a profit of $1.5 billion.  Gun and ammunition stores made a profit of nearly $500 million.

Guns killed nearly 40,000 Americans last year.  Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, makes more than $1 million per year, sometimes as much as $5 million.  The CEO’s of gun companies all make millions of dollars a year.  For example, Christopher J. Killoy, president, CEO & director, Sturm, Ruger & Company, received $2.5 million in total compensation in 2016.  P. James Debney, CEO & president, American Outdoor Brands Corporation (formerly Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation) received $5.3 million in 2017.

Laurence D. Fink, CEO & chairman, Blackrock Inc., the largest institutional shareholder of American Outdoor Brands Corporation, said this in his letter to shareholders in 2018:

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”

Fink’s total compensation in 2016 was $25.5 million.

The reference in the title of this post is to Allen Ginsberg.

Run, Hide, Fight

On April 30, a man shot and killed two students in a classroom at my university, UNC Charlotte.  He injured four others.

On May 1, the day after the mass shooting at UNC Charlotte, a man was shot and killed in an apartment complex near the university.  On April 30, the day of the mass shooting at UNC Charlotte, a man was shot and killed outside a Charlotte restaurant.  On the weekend before the mass shooting at UNC Charlotte, three people in Charlotte were shot and killed in separate shootings.   Also on the weekend before the mass shooting at UNC Charlotte, a man walked into a synagogue near San Diego full of people praying.  He shot four people and killed one person before his gun malfunctioned.  He had over 50 rounds of ammunition.  During the week of April 27-May 3, 238 Americans were shot and killed.

As of May 3, there have been at least 109 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2019.  May 3 is the 123rd day of 2019.

In 2018, more than 14,000 Americans were shot and killed by someone else.

Over 22,000 people a year in the U.S. commit suicide with a gun.

As of May 3, the NRA (I will not link to the NRA, for the same reason that I have not named the shooter at UNC Charlotte) had not tweeted anything about the mass shooting at the university.  On April 29, the day of the mass shooting, the NRA did tweet the speech of Candace Owens of Turning Point USA, complaining (according to the headline) about “leftist and Democrat politicians” who say that “you are responsible when something horrific happens.”

The gun industry has spent between $19 and $60 million since 2005 funding the NRA.  Many of the nation’s largest gun manufacturers are “corporate partners of the NRA.”  The gun industry spent $3.3 million in lobbying in 2017.  The NRA spends much more than that.

The gun industry sells between 1 million and 1.5 million guns per month, or 12 to 18 million guns per year.  30% of Americans own a gun, a number which is declining slowly, but 29% of those own five or more.  The gun industry is marketing increasingly lethal products to repeat customers. 

Gun deaths in 2017 were the highest in at least fifty years by total number, and the highest since the mid-1990s by rate.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005 shielded gun manufacturers from liability in most cases when people used their increasingly lethal products to shoot and kill other people.  This disastrous example of regulatory capture must immediately be repealed, in order to force gun manufacturers to design their products to minimize the risk to the thousands of innocent people shot and killed by them every year.  Since they apparently won’t do this on their own, they should be forced to make it a priority.

Last week, Insys Therapeutics executives were found guilty of criminal conspiracy to profit by getting doctors to prescribe opioid drugs to patients who did not need them, and who would be far more likely to be harmed than helped.  There should be analogous criminal trials for gun industry executives.  It would be a start.

Privacy, Obscurity and Keeping Economics Where it Belongs

By Gordon Hull

In the New York Times last week, Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger underscore the importance of obscurity to privacy.  They begin with an easy example: most of us do not remember the faces or names of those who stood in line with us the last time we purchased medicine at the drug store.  Presumably, they don’t remember our faces either.  Yet purchasing the drugs was done in full visibility (and invariably recorded on surveillance devices).  Hartzog and Selinger note:

“Obscurity bridges this privacy gap with the idea that the parts of our lives that are hard or unlikely to be found or understood are relatively safe. It is a combination of the privacy you have in public and the privacy you have in groups. Obscurity is a barrier that can shield you from government, corporate and social snoops. And until lawmakers, corporate leaders and citizens embrace obscurity and move to protect it, your freedom and opportunities to flourish will be in jeopardy.”

They then adduce several advantages to obscurity: it gives us breathing room to live without fear of intrusion by advertising and the like; it makes intimate relations possible by allowing us to choose with whom to share information; it gives us the space to grow as individuals without surveillance; it protects us from pressures to be conventional; and it fosters civic participation by removing the fear of being on government watch lists.

The attentive reader will notice – and I assume this Hartzog and Selinger’s point – that obscurity is shown to do a lot of the work that privacy is often said to do.  For example, Julie Cohen argued in an early copyright paper that the “right to read anonymously” is important to civil society and democratic participation because it enables the space to explore different opinions and views without fear of governmental repression.  More generally, she has argued more recently that privacy is necessary as an aspect of subjectivity; as she puts it “privacy is shorthand for breathing room to engage in the processes of boundary management that enable and constitute self-development” (1907).  Accordingly:

“But here we must come back to privacy, for the development of critical subjectivity is a realistic goal only to the extent that privacy comes into play. Subjectivity is a function of the interplay between emergent selfhood and social shaping; privacy, which inheres in the interstices of social shaping, is what permits that interplay to occur. Privacy is not a fixed condition that can be distilled to an essential core …. It enables situated subjects to navigate within preexisting cultural and social matrices, creating spaces for the play and the work of self-making.” (1911)

If this is what privacy is for, then why might obscurity help attain that?  A central problem is that privacy is poorly understood by policymakers, being generally defined in terms of whether someone has chosen to reveal information publicly.  This construction of privacy as an individual right is unfortunate at best.  Companies want our data, and so privacy doctrine construes data as something of value that we then trade for someething else we want – say access to a web service.  The model is congruent with market norms that push toward ever more disclosure and tends to lead to a market failure to meet consumer preferences. Consumers are completely unable to effectuate their preferences, and the model subtly teaches us that this is the right way to view privacy.

What I want to emphasize here is a point behind this: the construal of privacy as a market transaction pushes toward contracts as a method of enforcement because, as we have known since Hobbes, enforceable contracts are how you overcome the irrationality of trusting those with whom you may not have future interactions.*  Contracts successfully protect rights when the terms are fully disclosed and freely agreed to, and when there is recourse to the state for enforcement when private parties violate those terms.  Viewing privacy through the lens of contract inevitably pushes toward openness: as Judge Posner concluded in an influential economically-based reading, a claim to privacy is likely an effort to withhold information that would make a transaction more efficient.

Why is Data so Easily Commodified (with a detour into fish)?

By Gordon Hull

Surely one of the more striking features of the rise of data science is how readily it can be incorporated into processes of capitalist valuation, to the point that data may not just be a commodity - it may also be capital.  At one level, this sounds intuitive enough: one might suggest that data presents information about the world, and that knowledge is valuable.  But this view encounters an immediate limitation in that firms seem to want to accumulate data far beyond their ability to value it.  According to this “data imperative,” data is something to be accumulated, even if one has no clear use for it.  An additional problem is that the companies that accumulate all of this data are generally not so interested in whether it represents the world accurately.  They want it because they want to influence behaviors.

So what is going on, and is there something about data itself that makes it particularly suitable for capitalist accumulation?  To answer that question, one needs to have a handle on what data is.  Here, a recent paper by Sabina Leonelli is particularly helpful.  Lenoelli defines data as follows:

“I define ‘data’ as a relational category applied to research outputs that are taken, at specific moments of inquiry, to provide evidence for knowledge claims of interest to the researchers involved. Data thus consist of a specific way of expressing and presenting information, which is produced and/or incorporated in research practices so as to be available as a source of evidence, and whose scientific significance depends on the situation in which it is used. In this view, data do not have truth-value in and of themselves, nor can they be seen as straightforward representations of given phenomena. Rather, data are essentially fungible objects, which are defined by their portability and their prospective usefulness as evidence” (811)

Leonelli is writing from the perspective of the philosophy of science, and her paper is especially useful in that regard because she is able to embed the definition in recent work in the sociology of science and STS, such as Latour. The key takeaway is that data needs to be defined pragmatically – not what it is, but what it does.  And the key implication of that is that we need to stop thinking of data as representative.  Data is generated for a purpose, and in science, a central purpose is portability:

Big Data: From Human Capital to Fridge Capital

By Gordon Hull

In a new paper in Big Data and Society, Jathan Sadowski argues for a shift in how we conceive data.  Typically, it’s viewed as a commodity.  Better, Sadowski argues, to view it as capital.  Following Marx (who offers a basic formula for capital) and Bourdieu (who extends it to cultural and social capital), Sadowski proposes: “Data capital is more than knowledge about the world, it is discrete bits of information that are digitally recorded, machine processable, easily agglomerated, and highly mobile. Like social and cultural capital, data capital is convertible, in certain conditions, to economic capital” (4)  The importance of the formulation is that it allows us to understand why companies spend all their time collecting data even for which they have no planned use: data is subject to the logic of capital accumulation.  Like money, data becomes something the accumulation of which is its own object.  Sadowski: “the imperative, then, is to constantly collect and circulate data by producing commodities that create more data and building infrastructure to manage data. The stream of data must keep flowing and growing.” (4)  That is, “the capitalist is not concerned with the immediate use of a data point or with any single collection, but rather the unceasing flow of data-creating. This point is illustrated by the fact that data is very often collected without specific uses in mind.” (4)

From Marx to Foucault, via Althusser

By Gordon Hull

As is well-known, Foucault pretty-much detested orthodox Marxism and the PCF.  At the same time, his relation to Marx’s own thought, and that of Marx’s better commentators, is more complex.  One way to approach this topic is via primitive accumulation (recall here).  Another is by way of intermediaries.  Here I’d like to consider what is, as far as I know, an undiscussed connection in a late essay of Althusser’s (as always, I welcome references).  In a paper in the recent Marx & Foucault anthology, Julien Pallotta outlines what he takes to be evidence that Foucault is responding to Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) in his Punitive Society lectures (1973).  In particular, Foucault wants to argue that: Althusser doesn’t realize power is constitutive rather than reproductive/productive; that you need to look at more than wage relations to understand the reproduction of capital, and what you’ll discover is a whole process of moralization and control of the worker so that he’s reproduced and ready to work (capital thus needs workers to save against unemployment or disease etc., even as it works to “free” the worker); and there’s thus a process of subjectification which Foucault pursues in a lot more detail than Althusser.

It seems to me that we have something like an Althusserian response in his later “Marx in his Limits” ([ML] 1978; published in Philosophy of the Encounter, references to this edition).  No, I’m not claiming that Althusser had access to Foucault’s lectures.  In any event, Althusser’s essay is a long and rambling piece, addressing the general idea of a crisis in Marxism.  It also does not reference Foucault directly.  What I am claiming, and what legitimates reading this essay as partly a response to Foucault, is that it seems to move in a Foucauldian direction on the points Pallotta emphasizes.

On the Neoliberal Subjectification of Children

If you're raising kids now, this won't surprise you.  But it's still depressing.  Basically, the more income inequality a country has, the more intensive parenting is - the more kids are taught that "hard work" is important, and the less that they are taught that "imagination" is.  This holds true between countries (the U.S. and China are more intensive than Sweden and Japan) and within countries over time (the U.S. has been getting worse since the 1980s, and Spain better).

Biometeric Chicanery

Let’s say the state passes a law that says that restaurants may not put worms in hamburgers, and that customers can sue those that do. Your kids eat at the local Annelids franchise on the way home from school, and you later discover that the burgers contain worms. You sue the restaurant, and in response, it says that since your kids didn’t get sick from the experience, it only “technically” violated the law, and you therefore have no basis to either collect damages or force them to stop. That is, on the face of it, a pretty stupid construction of the law, since it would make it totally unenforceable. It is also, more or less, how Facebook, Google, and Six Flags Great America think you should read the Illinois Biometric Privacy Information Act (BIPA).

In a unanimous ruling yesterday, the Illinois Supreme Court said otherwise. The Act regulates companies that collect biometric information like fingerprints and face scans. In the case at hand, the amusement park used thumbprints to identify customers who had bought a season pass, in order to admit them quickly and to stop people from sharing passes (you know the second reason is the real one; since when do amusement parks worry about long lines?). If the company wants to collect such information, it has to inform customers what they’re doing in writing, and get affirmative consent. In particular, the company must “inform[] the subject or the subject’s legally authorized representative in writing of the specific purpose and length of term for which a biometric identifier or biometric information is being collected, stored, and used” (cited in para 20).

This is notice and consent privacy as it should be! There’s a lot of reasons why I don’t think notice and consent privacy actually works – I called it a “successful failure” because the main effect is to teach us that privacy is something we should sell off but without actually protecting privacy. Nobody knows what they’re consenting to, the privacy notices are impossible and long and incomprehensible, and so on. Six Flags et al don’t even get that far: they argue that they don’t actually have to follow the law. So for them, privacy should just be a failure.

A Mysterious Scandal

By Gordon Hull

The Supreme Court just granted cert in an important trademark case, in re Brunetti.  The case concerns whether Eric Brunetti can get federal trademark registration for his FUCT line of clothing.  Although Brunetti can of course market the clothing in any case, and can claim common law trademark rights, federal registration confers a number of benefits, especially if the owner ends up litigating the mark.  A little background.

Section 2 of the Lanham Act specifies a few things that are not eligible for registration, such as official insignia of governmental entities and the identifying name, signature or portrait of a living person without their consent.  The statute also prohibits registration of a mark which:

Consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute (15 USC 1052(a)).

In denying registration to scandalous or disparaging material, the Lanham Act seems to be generally biopolitical in that it is concerned with optimizing the population: independently of its viability in commerce, putting governmental imprimatur on a scandalous or disparaging mark is viewed as bad for the polity.  In the case of disparaging marks, the idea is that the use of the mark would be damaging to those targeted by the mark in question.  The First Amendment means that the government cannot stop such use, but it is also not required to reward the use with the benefits of trademark registration, and so the policy explicitly values a vision of civil discourse over commercial benefit.

Various marks were denied registration under the disparagement clause, including both those that repeat slurs assumed to disparage others (the NFL’s Washington “Redskins”) and those where members of targeted groups intend to reappropriate the terms, as in “Dykes on Bikes.”  In Matal v. Tam (2017), the Supreme Court ruled on First Amendment grounds that the government did not have the right to refuse registration to disparaging marks.  The case pitted Simon Tam, an Asian-American who wanted to register the name of his band – the “Slants” – in order to reclaim a racial slur, against the PTO, which argued that the term disparaged Asian-Americans, many of whom would find it offensive.  After the decision, Tam got his band name and the Redskins got their registration back.

Citing the Tam decision, the Federal Circuit ruled at the end of 2017 in Brunetti that the ban on scandalous marks also violated the First Amendment.

A Note on Derrida and Law (and Drucilla Cornell)

By Gordon Hull

I pass along the following with minimal additional comment, as it fills in a historical detail that I’d not known.  It’s from Peter Goodrich, a very prominent critical legal theorist at Cardozo Law School, on “the role that Derrida played at Cardozo, and less expectedly the part played by the Law School in radicalizing Derrida:”

“It was after becoming a Fellow at Cardozo that he shifted to a more political trajectory and engaged with the fight to free Mandela and end apartheid. I think he would have been surprised to learn that Cardozo radicalized him but why not? It was a two-way street, and recollecting the atmosphere and passions that circumambulated 55 Fifth Avenue back then, I think it is fair to say that Drucilla Cornell who was here at the time was a political powerhouse that few could avoid if they walked through the corridors where the faculty live” (603)

The Derrida piece that emerges from the symposium is “Force of Law,” which appeared in the (1990) issue of the Cardozo Law Review to emerge from the symposium.  Derrida’s piece revolves around his reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”  It emphasizes a central point also found in CLS: that law is power.  Here is Derrida: “the word “enforceability” reminds us that there is no such thing as law that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being ‘enforced,’ applied by force” (925)

How we are to understand Derrida as a political writer is of course a big topic; in a late interview, he distinguishes his own work in “deconstruction” from a tradition running from Luther to Heidegger, suggesting that “the ‘deconstruction’ I attempt is not that deconstruction, it’s definitely more ‘political’ too, differently political; but it would take too many words to explain this” (Paper Machine, 115).  He elsewhere insists that a “political dimension” was “decipherable in all my texts, even the oldest ones’ (Paper Machine, 152).  I’ve tried to argue that this is true for his 1968 “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and that there is a specific politics involved in ratcheting him to phenomenology.  Still, it’s hard to miss that his writings from the early 1990s forward are more obviously political than the earlier ones.  In any case, these connections can be complex; if American CLS nudged Derrida toward a more direct engagement with politics, that potentiality had to be there in the first place.

Goodrich closes with an anecdote:

“Back in 1987 I was in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, in Russian occupied Budapest. I had been invited to lecture but when the Marxist professoriate of Etvos Lorand University Law School met me and discussed my planned lecture, they rapidly realized that this was not a good idea and cancelled the class. Sensible folks. I had a day free and decided to travel to Sopron, a city on the border with Austria where my host had a sister willing to show me round. I took the train and a copy of Jacques Derrida, The Postcard, as my reading. It did not occur to me that I needed a passport to travel inside the country but close to Sopron the police entered the train and asked for ID. My only document was The Postcard, which they scrutinized, discussed and then shaking their heads indicated that it was not enough and arrested me for a while until my host came and vouched for me. When I was next on a panel with Derrida, I told him the story. He paused and pondered for a moment and then said “I am sorry that my book was of no help.” And of course it was useless, but in the best of senses. It gave no comfort to the authorities. It provided no identification of me. It made no demand. And yet I read it on the train, I read it in the police cell. I finished it on my return. Socrates and Freud were comfortingly to hand. At random, though I am fond of quoting it: “In history, this is my hypothesis, epistolary fictions multiply with each new crisis of destination.””

 

 

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.”