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”
Sounds good! Who doesn’t want safe kids? Except that the technology had also already been used on prisoners. What’s more, the company reports that:
“representatives from organizations ranging from foreign governments to national health insurers have requested custom surveillance solutions. Three Square Chip plans to launch a new, body heat-powered chip featuring GPS and voice activation in 2019. Publicly, the company is developing systems for child care providers, healthcare systems, and city planners. Less publicly, it’s also building systems for prisons, gun manufacturers, and the military.”
The company rep calls this ubiquitous tagging of everyone an “Internet of People” (trademark application apparently pending) with analogy to the “Internet of Things” and outlines a vision:
“A future where doctors detect heart attacks 12 days in advance, kids safely travel alone, Alzheimer’s patients never get lost, and Wisconsinites never accidentally shovel their driveways before the snow-plow arrives”
All of that sounds fine… but what about workers running around with chips that tattle on their body temperatures all the time? In addition to fridges that can order their own water filters, the Internet of Things has already given us vacuum cleaners that can reconstruct the floor plans of our houses and advertising that tricks Google into thinking you want to eat at Burger King.
The Internet of People thus looks pretty inexorably tied to the expansion of what Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford, and Jason Schultz call “limitless worker surveillance” (no doubt with data shared to your wellness program). We also don’t often see such direct confirmation of the importance of Foucault’s rhetorical questions:
“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities or surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (Discipline and Punish, 227-8)
It's not just the diffusion or swarming of disciplinary technologies; it’s literally the same company.
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