[-empyre-] surveillance and capitalism

[Simon]

On 17/02/21 9:32 am, Renate Ferro wrote:
> if you all think we can go back to before Covid existance without 
> webcams, zoom, and tracking surveillance. 

at the same time as we have seen the overthrow of 
capitalism--governments finding again that lever that was being hidden 
from them, that in large part they hid from themselves, and switching 
off the economy--we see an explosion of all sorts of data-gathering and 
surveillance. This is now seen as the ally of governmentality. And, it 
follows, financialising data is regarded as the basis for political 
economy. Newly, that is, paradigmatic.

At my own place of work, a public library, where I am a part-time 
worker, kiosks have been installed with finger-vein scanners, so that 
workers can clock-in, and -out.

The library is run by Auckland City Council and the new Time and 
Attendance model, as it is called, is being rolled out by a private 
company, HumanForce, who are charged with taking care of the biometric 
data gathered by their machines.

One detail is striking, considering the application of these kiosks at a 
library: subcutaneous finger-vein scanning is the preferred mode of 
identifying individuals /because workers hands can be dirty /making 
fingerprinting difficult.

It's all those dirty books!

Best,

Simon

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