[-empyre-] surveillance and capitalism

Tue Feb 23 01:28:49 AEDT 2021

Thanks Jon & Alex,

I'm just paddling into philosophy with Graham Harman's Object Oriented
Ontology book, and it's providing me with an interesting reset to
viewing more-than-human/non-anthropocentric interactions. It may be some
time before I get my ducks in a row again!

BTW, the second file you shared, regarding Rrose Selavy is a copy of the
previous file. I'm intrigued with this Duchamp alter-ego.

As a final note, I'll share a thing that happened to me and the YouTube
algorithm the other day. I had been reading many papers that seemed to
refer to algorithms, AI and data-based systems interchangeably, and was
redefining my own distinct ideas of each. To me, an algorithm is
something that is static (of course it can be actively rewritten over
time), AI is dynamic and real-time, and data-driven systems are both
which read and write from the database. An AI can draw from a database
and rewrite the algorithm for effectiveness. AI is tweaked by humans,
and by itself.

Anyway, I use YT to follow a few folk who do metalwork, electronics, and
look at old computer hardware. I rarely click on suggested content and
avoid political content, except where I seek it out myself. YT doesn't
really seem to know what I want. On Friday night, I saw a suggested
video about making some very tasty looking bread. I clicked, watched,
vowed to try it at a later date and went to bed. In the morning, my feed
was filled with pastry-based content. Am I now radicalised by baked
goods? Time will tell... 
(https://twitter.com/robmakesthings/status/1362724899324887046)

Referring back to the brutal simplicity underneath Alex's example in
China, it's easy to see how radicalisation can happen online. First it
was ISIS, then the YouTube Kids debacle (James Bridle:
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2),
then QANON, and now bread. I'm wondering if the capitalistic idea of
doing something that costs the least with the biggest return is
resulting in dangerously simple algorithms, and does an increase in
complexity produce safer results? Will AI help with this, or can we
raise the standard of the algorithm to an ethical minimum.

These are just unfinished thoughts. Thank you for the week of Empyre. My
skin is noticeably softer.

Bake like the wind,

Rob

www.robbycollins.com [3]

On 19/02/2021 13:27, Jon McKenzie wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- 
> 
> Rob,  
> 
> The posture survelliance piece is very provocative from a performance perspective. Diana Taylor's work on repertoire and archive as the respective storehouses/langue for traditional oral and modern literary performance cultures--to which databases are not just the analogue but the repository for digitized repertoires and archives. Databases help produce the existential Foam/Froth of worlds bubbling up today, and your work reveals how State forms/walks capture-produce citizen forms/walks. Your note re: dystopia reveals a topos of critique itself, the flipside of its utopian drive. My work with civic storytelling supports the critical formation of citizens (eg GOTV) as well as creative mutation of forms, topos upon topos. 
> 
> In their Kafka book, DnG diagram two observational spaces, the ancient Chinese Panoptic Tower and the modern Office Passageway, roughly discipline and control (what I call performative power-knowledge). We live die in both, switching between their trees and rhizomes, methods and language games, modernities and postmodernities, Big Other and cops-in-the-heads, literacies and digitalities. One unsettling thing is that observing the observer triggers mise-en-abyme effects/affects whose mastery may be chance 'itself' as it reverbs across (as?) time and space, different worlds and cosmographies. 
> 
> An other/observer (or several) is always-already "watching" and "calling" us--the question is which/what O/other/s we respond with-to. Materialists (like me) follow physis, world, eg: rock flints form a machinic phylum that enters a double deterritorialization with hominoids that lasts centuries, millennia, in which flints-hominoids co-evolve, each becoming sharper and sharper, rock size, shape, and edges morphing as the complex interplay of eye gaze, hand gesture, and mouth utterances slowly, suddenly transmits logos "from" graphe, life "from" death, spirit "from" matter, triggering the history of organology, the bundling of organic and environmental processes atop a machinic Artemis largely unperturbed by our Actaeon complexes. She yawns at Anthropocene.... which doesn't mean we should, however. Rather, listen and respond differently, as this list affirms. 
> 
> To Be Done with the Judgment of God entails the death of the creation model upon which art is based for the Greeks and moderns. There is no off-switch because techne physis turns us on, much to Heidegger, Adorno, and Arendt's dismay. For me, Klossowski's transmedia work on Diana and her bath forms both the retrospeculative design and the living currency of poses and scenes that drove Foucault to the bathhouses and beyond. How to "return" signs to intensities not just for an evening or millennium but an eternity? How does one observe the observer observing observation 'itself'--and share the accursed share with--? 
> 
> Some thoughts on diagrammatic storytelling in algorithmic times of Anthropocence: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hokqfbzqgmj45xu/McKenzie-Diagrammatic-Storytelling.pdf?dl=0 
> Others on Artemis, art, and truth according to R'rose Selavy: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hokqfbzqgmj45xu/McKenzie-Diagrammatic-Storytelling.pdf?dl=0 
> 
> Jon 
> 
> On Feb 18, 2021, at 9:21 AM, <himself at robbycollins.com> <himself at robbycollins.com> wrote: 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- 
> 
> Hallo all, 
> 
> The mechanical surveillance that Alex describes strikes me as incredibly brutal and pervasive in its simplicity. It shows how the presence of cameras are so important. 
> 
> I often engage in a little retospeculative design when I hear of new applications of technology. Imagining how these systems might have been enacted in the past and how they would have been subverted or avoided: 
> 
> - A pile of books on an office chair that uses a switch to detect when someone is sitting in it, and apparently working. 
> 
> - The natural sense that workers develop for the presence of management on the 'shop floor and perform for the duration. 
> 
> - Homer Simpson's nodding bird pressing the big red button on his remote nuclear power station terminal... 
> 
> It's a strange non-linear surveillance with cameras in the workplace. No one is watching you in real time. There's no security guard looking at a screen. But, if you or anyone else does something that is deemed remarkable (for this AI), you are now being watched sometime now, in the past, or in the future. A Schrödinger's box of varying cats and radioactive sources that can be opened at any time. 
> 
> I wrote a little thought-piece, to myself, about a potential surveillance methodology called posture surveillance. [1] It imagined something beyond facial recognition and emotion tracking, which used our whole body as a data source through our stance, gait and the general way we hold ourselves and move through our environment. It's a clumsy thought experiment, but it made me think about how I have 'performed' (and still perform) in certain environments - my 15-year-old self confidently, but nonchalantly, walking up to the doorman of the nightclub I needed to get into, or the finely balanced confident/no-threat walk as I passed a gang of 'youths' on a dark street. Both unknown and unpredictable entities where I projected identities and desires and tried to be the thing that would get me through the gate. 
> 
> The more we know about the surveillance around us, the more we co-perform with it. In the posture tracking example, when we know that this aspect of ourselves is being monitored, how do we figure out the best "citizen posture", and where is it applicable? We also need to be deferential and humble at times. Do we all adopt a neutral walk to normalise this for the AI? But what happens when an individual adopts a new posture that resonates with his success at being a good citizen! How can such a system be gamed? 
> 
> I'll stop there before I go entirely overboard (I'll do that on my own) and see if anyone has more thoughts about this co-performance/entanglement [2] that we enact with technology and how it could be observed and weighed as a source for exposing these voids where resistance can be applied.
> 
> Rob
> 
> www.robbycollins.com [3]
> 
> On 16/02/2021 22:28, Simon wrote: 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- 
> 
> 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 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu [4]
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Links:
------
[1]
http://youarenotbeautiful.com/index.php/2021/01/24/walk-this-way-posture-surveillance/
[2]
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323869840_Co-performance_Conceptualizing_the_Role_of_Artificial_Agency_in_the_Design_of_Everyday_Life
[3] http://www.robbycollins.com
[4] http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
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