[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Privacy Won't Help Us (Fight Surveillance)

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Thanks and praise to Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirst. This is a great 
and succinct_ paper, which puts together in a few pages some of the 
key issues that I developd in my absurdly long text on the "Flexible 
Personality".

I think the crux is this:

>Our physical bodies are being shadowed by an increasingly comprehensive
>"data body." However, this shadow body does more than follow us. It has
>also begun to precede us. Before we arrive somewhere, we have already been
>measured and classified. Thus, upon arrival, we're treated according to
>whatever criteria has been connected to the profile that represents us.

That's what the jargon-people call "simulational surveillance." 
Means, reality conforming to the image we make of it. But that in 
itself, Baudrillardean apocalypses aside, is just another way of 
saying that society actively reflects on itself, shapes itself 
through reflexive action. What is the principle guiding the reflexive 
action of the surveillance society?

The first answer today will be state control. And this is painfully 
the case. Snooping through Echelon, Carnivore, Visionics and related 
systems is real (even if one must remember that ballooning 
data-collection capacities don't necessarily imply effective 
data-analysis).

But equally important to the development of the surveillance society 
are issues of risk management (i.e. insurance contracts, which are 
always accompanied by demands for personal data) and targeted 
advertising (loyalty cards, direct mail, etc.). And both these issues 
focus on and reinforce the predominance of the individual, not just 
in his or her privacy, but above all in his or her isolated fear and 
desire.

Intimate fear for one's own health and safety, grasping desire for 
the possession of exclusive products: that is how the contemporary 
individual confronts the public realm. When you consider the relation 
today between acccess to superabundant wealth and maintenance of 
exclusionary borders, between personal, existential death-anxiety and 
the get-tough rhetoric of police and military solutions, then you see 
that the two sides of the surveillance society - the reinforcement of 
state control and the exaltation of the individual, contractual 
subject - go hand in hand. The reflexive action carried on through 
surveillance shapes a society which is at once jealously 
individualistic and increasingly authoritarian. This is what I call 
liberal fascism.

Now, if you think like that - I mean, if that particular form of 
pessimism and black foreboding afflicts you - then you don't just see 
every political issue in terms of heightened control or personal 
freedom. You begin to wonder about what kinds of collectivity could 
configure a different kind of state, a different, more democratic 
relation to the public realm. You begin to wonder look around for 
social experiments, new forms of political society.

Of course, Felix is a pragmatist and seemingly unafflicted by black 
forebodings. On the brighter side I note that the last brilliant text 
he and Jesse published here was called "Open Source Intelligence," 
and basically concerned the formation of communities of discourse - 
communities which, in the case of the No Logo site, clearly have a 
relation to political society. A question has been knocking around in 
my mind about this, which also concerns the model of hypertext 
generally. In the communities described, two basic strategies seemed 
to emerge as innovative (correct if I'm wrong, Felix). One is 
transparency: the ability to access different versions or states of a 
discussion, to see how it's being moderated, to connect directly to 
all the people involved. But the other (related to hypertext) seems 
to be just the capacity to opt out of one thread whenever you 
fundamentally disagree or get bored with what you see, and then join 
or create another one. This second capacity (a version of what A.O. 
Hirschman calls "exit") seems to be the fundamental strategy adopted 
in all networked communities, as a way to insure that at least some 
form of ongoing collaboration will survive in the face of the extreme 
individualism of contemporary society.

Felix and Jesse, none of the examples you dealt with in the "Open 
Source Intelligence" paper really showed individuals engaged in the 
reflexive action of attempting to surmount conflict within their own 
open communities. The possibility was suggested about nettime itself 
- that the ability to compare nettime bold with moderated nettime 
might lead to debates about moderation, or even the creation of new 
sublists - but as we know, these debates (instances of Hirschman's 
"voice") are pretty rare, and the new sublists haven't been created 
(we all seem to get a kick out of those occasional messages from 
people we love to hate). But let's face it: intermittent community is 
great for fun, fantasy, inspired polemics, making friends and enemies 
and boosting your ego - but it doesn't really foreshadow new forms of 
political society.

Or does it?

What are the social forms today that go beyond the dilemma of voice or exit?
Can hypertext communications lead further than to love on a beach, 
brief flashes of dionysian protest, or just life in one's own 
narcissistic corner?
Are the social forums and global days of action - basically 
constructed of these easily bifurcating communities - ever going to 
be a match for the discipline and disappointments of organized 
parties and parliaments?

Is there politics on the Internet?

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