Gone, but not forgotten.

Wal-Mart can catch you (wants to catch you!) missing your secret lover & the NYTimes will run the “embarrasing email.” & I’ll spread the love.

“I miss you ridiculously,” began one of the e-mail messages from Ms. Roehm to Mr. Womack. “I hate not being able to call you or write you. I think about us together all the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me.”

(Bare-Knuckle Enforcement for Wal-Mart’s Rules)

EP

This entry features the grand-daddy of American privacy, Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’ “The Right to Privacy.”

Today, this defense of privacy is in the public domain. You can read it here. You can read of it here, here, or, well, everywhere.

Given that this is a well-researched and frequently discussed law document, I’ll keep my comments here to a minimum.

Firstly, it came to me as something of a surprise that Warren and Brandeis’ defense of privacy is based not on the (familiar) fear of a police-state (see Big Brother State). Instead, Warren and Brandeis center their discussion on something a bit more subtle, but, now, a bit more urgent, the challenge that technological development pose to “private and domestic life.”

Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right “to be let alone.” Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that “what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed form the house-tops.”

(Prescient, huh?)

Developments to the camera, for example, render impotent the legal conception of privacy as centered on a notion of contract. Warren and Brandeis note that

While, for instance, the state of the photographic art was such that one’s picture could seldom be taken without his consciously “sitting” for the purpose, the law of contract or of trust might afford the prudent man sufficient safeguards against the improper circulation of his portrait; but since the latest advances in photographic art have rendered it possible to take pictures surreptitiously, the doctrines of contract and of trust are inadequate to support the required protection.

So, if not a contractual or property based right, what is the right to privacy? For the writers, as near as this non-law student can tell, it is the right to “an inviolate personality,” or “the belief that a human being’s innermost convictions, communications and tastes were private, to be protected from monarchs and governments as well as prying gossip.”

So, as near as I can tell, that’s it.   Except, well, when thinking about the Web & privacy : “the right to privacy ceases upon the publication of the facts by the individual, or with his consent.”

It is fairly clear that we can extrapolate an argument for Warren and Brandeis’ “The Right to Privacy” against the infiltration of other people’s digital cameras and camera phones into our daily lives.  But when we put something online, in a FaceBook profile, for example, are we publishing our inviolate personalities?  And what to do we do with all those other breaches of privacy, the one’s not put to use to gossip about us (Warren and Brandeis rail against gossip!) or publicize us, but to get to know us … our habits … for the sake of selling to us better?

A) Dunno
B) Dunno
C) Dunno

Today’s entry on privacy features Bruce Schneier’s article “The Eternal Value of Privacy,” which ran in Wired News in May of 2006.

I said in my last entry that I am going to withhold critical commentary on these different figurations of privacy.  I am forcing myself to stick to that promise.  Well, I’m saying that out one side of my mouth, but out of the other I’m saying that Schneir’s article contains a number of alarm-inducing words, phrases, & claims :  “inherent human right,” “human condition,” &, especially when referring to lives the framers of our Constitution lived, “You ruled your own home. It’s intrinsic to the concept of liberty.”

I’ll leave it at that; you can let your own, lil’ imagination run wild with sociologically informed critiques of Schneier’s logic.

That said, Schneier’s article is interesting in that it offers no explanation or justification for the use of surveillance.  The Big Brother State video begins with the logic of those who use (& celebrate) strategies & technologies of surveillance.  Schneier does not entertain that logic.

Moreover, Schneier quickly dismisses the notion that the protection of privacy is about “hiding a wrong.”  No, privacy is an inherent human right; the dignity of the human condition is dependent on the protection of privacy.

Schneier attempts to situate the debate about privacy within American Constitutional history.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It’s intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

Does the historicization of privacy contradict Schneier’s claim that privacy is inherent or intrinsic to anything?  Perhaps, but that’s another post.

I think that the important development in Schneier’s article is in his concluding remarks.  The debate about privacy should not be had in terms of security versus privacy, but privacy versus control.  Why?  Well, this gets to the heart of why Schneier believes privacy matters.

Without privacy, individuals become

children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

The surveyed individual, or the potentially-surveyed individual, becomes compliant - first, briefly halting & considering whether there was somebody there, watching, but then quickly laughing about his paranoia.  Later, though, perhaps our demeanor changes.  & then freedom flees . . .

Convinced?

A) Yes
B) No
C) Maybe so

Please circle one and then discuss.

EP

“In a state of constant distraction, the consciousness
of the collective acts like a shock bsorber, registering
sense impressions without really experiencing them:
Shocks are”intercepted, parried by conscoiusness, ‘ in
order to prevent a traumatic effect. [Montage] provides
the audience with a new capacity to study this modern
existence reflectively, from ‘the position of a expert.’”
(Buck-Morss 1995:268)

“… collage writing may reveal the artificial character of social
identities and the cultural constructs we take to be most real
(Pfohl 1992:97-101). As Jackie Orr suggests, ‘performing sociology’
[as collage …] is ‘also and most immediately about critical, creative
responses to struggles over what gets to count as, and who gets to
make, public knowledge and collective memory’ (2006:27).”
(Pfohl 2006)

“BUSH WARFARE 2006 is militant cut’n paste soundklash,
the bastard child of the war against piracy and the war
against terror. In 80 minutes the mix samples more
than 320 sources, most of them protests against the
new age of war and its most prominent leader.”
(liberation chabalala versus the war on terror)

liberation chabala’s 79 minute and 32 second BUSH WARFARE 2006 mix has kept me company for days. The audio-collage of Presidential misfires and hip-hop heavy artillery fulfills the “healing potential” of montage/collage, namely to construct “synthetic realities” in which “fragmented images” - or, in this case, fragmented language & sound - is brought together “according to a new law” (Buck-Morss 1995:268). The track’s 79 minutes and 32 seconds establish the laws of skepticism, protest, and radical consciousness and synthesize from them a reality for our President’s unreal justifications of and promises for this war.

“You’re free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it’ll take time to restore chaos and order …”

Download!
EP

We can measure the time by $ or tragedy or tragedy : this is another kind of counter

We have been at war against the people of Iraq since I was in the fourth grade.

We have been at war against the people of Iraq since my youngest brother - now eighteen, the same age as the youngest soldiers serving today - was two.

My baby brother. Those baby soldiers.

We have been at war against the people of Iraq for sixteen years.

When I was a senior in high school, a half-year before I graduated, a few months before I turned eighteen, President Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox.

(But there was “no evidence of civilian casualties.” Or, if there was, “only Saddam and his brutally destructive regime [were] to blame” (Mother Jones; Navy League).)

We have been at war against the people of Iraq since I was in the fourth grade, but when I was a senior in college, on the day that I turned twenty-two, two weeks before I graduated from that university, the mission was accomplished.

In a month and a half from today, on my twenty-sixth birthday, the mission will have been accomplished for four years. And we will still be at war against the people of Iraq.

This is another kind of counter : the timeline superimposed over youth. But the tragedy is not mine. I am not of a war cohort.

While we have been at war against the people of Iraq,
(grief, grief, grief)
since my youngest brother was a baby,
(grief, grief, grief)
the infant mortality rate in that country has doubled or tripled (BBC; NEJM)
(grief, grief, grief.)

& while we have been at war against the people of Iraq,
(grief, grief, grief)
since I was in the fourth grade,
(grief, grief, grief)
since I was a senior in high school,
(grief, grief, grief)
since I was a senior in college,
(grief, grief, grief)
… while we are at war against the people of Iraq now, as I complete my third year of graduate study … ,
(grief, grief, grief)
Iraqi schools - &, in turn, students - have been targets (Seattlepi.com; UNICEF; BBC; VFA)
(grief, grief, grief).

Recently, a friend asked me to explain why privacy matters. That’s the question, right, on which a critique of surveillance must be built?

In response to that question, I intend to use the next few entries here to offer a (non-critical, at least initially) summation of what others out there, including bloggers, journalists, and a few wayward Supreme Court Justices, have to say about privacy & surveillance.

I start with Big Brother State’s well produced, though largely atheoretical, animation on surveillance.

In the video, surveillance is explained in two ways.

The first figuration is associated with politicians “assigned to security matters today,” who might, if you’d ask them, justify surveillance technologies and techniques as integral strategies of crime deterrence and prevention. Closed circuit camera systems, it seems, win over the hearts and minds of would-be criminals. Trusted computing keeps the nasty internet-transmitted-diseases off your computer. And police surveillance of emails and phone calls allows the cops to catch the bad guys.

“It would probably all sound great, because the idea is that you should start thinking of these techniques as cream of the crop. But let’s face the not quite so obvious, but nonetheless omnipresent downside of all this.”

Public cameras allow police to keep a database of “all of your” (read: anyone’s) movements.

Airline securities - record keeping on passengers & biometrics - allow the secret services of many nations to produce records of all passengers. These records could potentially include “explicit” information, including eye color, fingerprints, and a “high-resolution picture of your face,” all of which is “information you would usually expect to be taken from suspected criminals.” (You’re not a suspected criminal, are you? Because if you are…)

Trusted computing prevents the computer user from deciding what programs should be installed on their own machine.

Finally, and most dramatically, the police could potentially access your emails and phone calls to obtain information … that you, well, might not just want them to access, namely your sexual relations. (The sexual relations are left unspoken, but implied through animation.)

In the film’s conclusion, these forms of repressive law, justified by the “public fear of terror,” are symptomatic of Western society’s transformation into a police state.

Convinced?

(a) Yes
(b) No
(c) Maybe so

Please circle only one, then discuss.

Note : What follows should NOT be considered a definitive or accurate depiction of ANT.  I finished reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social today and am still ruminating on it.

What can ANTs tell us about online surveillance?

Literally, nothing.  In a stylized dialog with a graduate student, Bruno Latour tells the confused, probably overworked graduate researcher that actor-network-theory (ANT) does not apply to any case study or research site or sociological concern.  Later, Professor Latour comments

Surely you’d agree that drawing with a pencil is not the same thing as drawing the shape of a pencil.  It’s the same with this ambiguous word: network.  With Actor-Network you may describe something that doesn’t at all look like a network – an individual state of mind, a piece of machinery, a fictional character; conversely, you may describe a network – subways, sewages, telephones- which is not all drawn in an ‘Actor-Networky’ way.  You are simply confusing the object with the method.  ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that; it says nothing about the shape of what is being described with it.  (Latour 2005:142)

Latour’s introduction to ANT, Reassembling the Social, contributes to social theory and to method, but at the end of the (occasionally baffling, occasionally brilliant) text I know nothing substantive about what world the ANT researcher should constuct.  This is what Latour means when he says that ANT is “mostly a negative” method.  ANT’s concepts are socially voided; though agent and network and “plug-in” mean something within the method they are not (supposed to be) maps of the social world. For example, (and to brutalize ANT), a network is as big or small as it is.  This approach forgoes a priori definitions of group size or micro and macro “forces.”

What I find most useful about ANT is that it vacuums up the social; in other words, it offers an alternative method of sociology that does not assume that social structures, social constructs, or social forces dilly-dally behind interactions.  It is strange for me to celebrate a sociological method that kills off the social.  After all, I just spent days on an email conversation with friends arguing about the social construction of knowledge and perception. 

Thing is, I largely agree with Latour when he writes that the mobilization of a social explanation of a phenomena largely obscures that actual practices involved in the making of that phenomena. 

This does not mean that we are all free, rational individuals radically uninvolved with this thing that used to be called the social.  Latour actually describes us as puppets, but he means it in the best of ways.  Actors – which are both human and non-human – are involved (caught?) in a web of relations with other actors.

It is all very interesting and I’d like to get to know ANT better, but I want to focus on in this entry is a exchange between the Professor of ANT (P) and the graduate student (S) on the topic of the visible and invisible.

S : But what about invisible entities acting in some hidden ways?
P : If they act, they leave some trace.  And then you will have some information, then you can talk about them.  If not, just shut up.
S : But what if they are repressed, denied, silenced?
P : Nothing on earth allows you to say they are there without brining in proof of their presence.  That proof might be indirect, farfetched, complicated, but you need it.  Invisible things are invisible.  Period.  If they make things move, and you can document those moves, then they are visible.
S : Proof?  What is a proof anyway?  Isn’t that terribly positivistic?
P : I hope so, yes. What’s so great about saying that things are acting whose existence you can’t prove?  I am afraid you are confusing social theory with conspiracy theory – although these days most of critical social science comes down to that.  (2005:150)

To be clear, Latour does not deny the existence of ghosts and their brethren.  He implores social scientists to count an actor’s accounts of events, actions, motives, including those informed by spectral forces … say God or the ghost of some influential theorist.  The catch is that that ghostly actor has to leave a trace.  Sociologists are not allowed, when using ANT, to presume the presence of a structure, a false consciousness, etc., that hides behind the actor.

Which brings me to surveillance.  As I note in my previous entry, I’m beginning to consider the questions and sites and methods with which I can construct a dissertation.  I like what ANT does to the social, would like to know it better, &, perhaps, would like to use it in (not apply it to!) my research. 

In The Simulation of Surveillance, William Bogard writes that

Since earliest times, the exercise of surveillance has been dependent on masking. […] At the same time, masks are precisely what surveillance strips from its object.  Surveillance, we shall see, is all about breaking through surfaces of appearance, closing gaps between appearance and reality, practices which themselves demand stealth, deception, and attention to controlling appearances.  (1996:20)

So what can ANT do with actors who, by definition, mask, if not actually erase, the proof of their presence? 

All I can come up with so far is :

Beginning with the actors - FaceBook users or bloggers, for examples – the ANT researcher can initially ignore the question of what the surveyor is doing.  However, rather than assume that the invisible presence of a marketer, or the invisible presence of a university administrator, is internalized by the web user, who reflexively acts in accordance with that internalized observer, the ANT researcher can pay attention to how that web user acts within a collective of blogs and bloggers, computers, private and public spaces, articles that s/he does or doesn’t read on internet privacy, knowledge of those surveyors, etc. 

The ANT researcher might find … and if s/he does find it, is forced to accept that … the observers out there, even if nefarious or authoritative, are not part of certain web users’ collectives.

If that is the case, does that mean surveillance is impotent or doesn’t matter?  No, but it would mean that we cannot assume, despite coming-to-age with Foucault’s panopticon or Orwell’s Big Brother, or, even, Goffman’s presentation of self, how surveillance matters.

Maybe.  I think I have probably fumbled ANT & its concepts pretty badly.  But it’s a start, huh?

EP

This week, Boston gave up on the charade it calls Winter ’06-’07.  But I do not feel betrayed,   even if our collective conscious demands boots and wool accessories : I swear I saw the winter fashion out yesterday, though the thermometer read balmy! : even if our inner curmudgeons, all clam-chowder and dirty New England looks, still hallucinate slush and muck.

Today, I ran.  (It was a pleasant run.  Thanks for asking!)  At the end of the run, I walked through the alley between my apartment and another.  The walking was to let my legs recover, but it allowed me to take in the spread of graffiti-covered brick on the side of my building.  The wall presents nothing major, nothing that impressive, but I noticed that the graffiti starts slowly.  As you walk into the alley, leaving the busy street, you notice a few tags on the wall.  But it isn’t until you come to a small crevice, produced by a wall of brick that juts out from the building, that you find the painted words piled on top of each other.

The jutting break, which only peaks a foot or so from the building, isn’t enough to hide the graffiti artist from a passerby, but it is enough to provide a cover and to obscure the vision of a curious pedestrian or commuter. 

I thought about that during my walk.  I don’t know who the graffiti artists’ audiences are.  I don’t know how they matter either.  Does what the wall holds before s/he gets there effect the art?  If they’re hiding out behind crevices, what kind of pressure of passing gazes do they feel?  Are their hands shakey?

Or is it that a tag is a tag is a tag […] objectively, almost, if I could use that word.

And here, I am, thinking about writing on the wall.  Wishing that writing in a blog was a little easier.  I don’t know for whom I’m writing and how they matter.  If I wrote for myself, this blog would make a little less sense.  So there is someone, are some bodies out there, and I’m addressing you.

 This is important to me because I have been thinking about my dissertation.  Well, I haven’t really been thinking about “my dissertation,” but the questions and research sites that might help me produce it.

I’ve been thinking about lurkers and all the problems they caused social scientists when they made their way to the Web.  A good portion of early sociological Web research was devoted to proving that the Web was a valid field site.  One strategy to accomplish that was to claim that Web communities were real communities.  Lurkers posed a problem because they frolicked at the virtual border of those communities, making the definition of a member of it considerably more ambiguous than a researcher might like. 

 Now, though, few talk about lurkers.  This is partially because online communities are so 1990.  They remain, of course, but social networking has largely replaced them.  I’m not sure if lurkers have a significant role in how researchers conceptualize participation at FaceBook or MySpace, but what I think is more interesting is that in other Web 2.0 sites – blogs, especially – the lurker (1) transforms into a reader or audience member  and (2) becomes a critical participant in how this Web activity is defined.  Whereas lurkers were annoying, but accepted, participants in web communities and usenet groups, the number of readers … or the size of one’s audience (which is different from the number of links one has received or the number of comments one’s blog entries generate) is now one of the most important ways that we filter Web content.  “Most popular” videos or images are typically those viewed or downloaded the most often.  Readership is one measure of the authority of a blog.

The online audience might constitute a new, panoptic architecture.  But, despite the title of this blog, I’m not ready for that.  Right now, I just wonder who this audience is.  It is not homogonous nor are its members united in their intentions.  We have professors and parents and peers and digital friends and people who see us around campus and anonymous Web users and marketers Googling us.  And many of us know that.  So, I wonder […] how they are reading and why?  And, more importantly, what does their reading do?  And I wonder […] what do the content-generators, the FaceBookers, and MySpacers, and YouTubers, and bloggers do given their presence?

Hmm.  Just hmm.

EP

Today, as the T took me from the edge of the city to the edge of the suburbs, I quit reading about The Simulation of Surveillance and visually loafed with the cityscape. Even as I passed through, no matter the train’s speed, Allston/Brighton kept still.

The snow had that effect. All morning, sticky flakes came down; by the time that I took my ride to campus, those flakes aligned themselves and produced a layer of Winter over the apartments and parked cars and skeletons of trees.

Typically, these T rides are harrowing. Cars & pedestrians test the patience of overworked conductors; in response, the conductors work the train’s horn into a nasty howl. And the rest of us, with our fragile Boston-pedestrian psyches, suffer.

But today, with the snow turning the surface of the city into a Polaroid of itself, with the hustle buried, the ride kept calm and quiet.

Thing is, from behind the window of the train, I recalled the logic of Robert D. Romanyshyn’s Technology as Symptom & Dream.

In the seventeenth century Descartes laid the philosophical groundwork for a change in consciousness which began approximately in the fifteenth century with the artistic invention of linear perspective drawing. Linear perspective drawing is a technique for representing three dimensional space on a two dimensional plane which imagines the self to be a spectator behind a window who takes the world’s measure with the eye and with the eye alone. Keeping an eye upon the world, the spectator now makes sense of the world as a spectacle for observation, measurement, and calculation. Quantity now eclipses quality as the world becomes increasingly mapped by the equations of mathematics.

Moreover, compared with other senses like touch, taste, or smell, the eye favors distance over intimacy. The spectator behind the window, therefore, begins to lose touch with the world and is increasingly unmoved by it. In fact, the body’s sensuous entanglements with the world become an obstacle to this vision which favors neutrality and detachment. Thus the animate body, like the natural world which now matters only as a spectacle, now matters only as a specimen. For the spectator on the other side of the window, this specimen body is well on its way to becoming an anatomical object on the dissecting table.

Behind the window, I enjoyed the vision but kept remembering how goddamn awful it was to trudge through the slush to go grocery shopping earlier in the day. The walk took nearly twice as long as it usually does, mainly because I had to dodge and jump cold puddles and wet snow. I got home with wet socks, wet pants, cursing myself for not remembering to wear boots.

It’s a different kind of relationship, a different kind of knowledge, but even on days like today, even when the world gets hostile, I wouldn’t trade those sopping socks for the T’s moving window image. No, I’ll take the snow, take the cold, and let me senses go ringing.

And then I’ll complain about it, and, as another graduate student put, carry myself … contort my face … maybe even mumble and grunt like every other bitter New Englander in the winter.

So it goes.
EP