AMONG CRITICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL SURVEILLANCE, there are two allusions so commonplace they have crossed into the realm of cliché. One, as you have probably already guessed, is George Orwell’s Big Brother, from 1984. The other is Michel Foucault’s panopticon — a vision, adapted from Jeremy Bentham, of a prison in which captives cannot tell if or when they are being watched. Today, both of these touchstones are considered chillingly prophetic. But in Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt has another suggestion: Both of them are insufficient.
1984, Harcourt acknowledges, was an astoundingly farsighted text, but Orwell failed to anticipate the role pleasure would come to play in our culture of surveillance — specifically, the way it could be harnessed, as opposed to suppressed, by powerful interests. Oceania’s “Hate Week” is nowhere to be found; instead, we live in a world of likes, favorites, and friending. Foucault’s panopticon, in turn, needs a similar update; mass incarceration aside, the panopticon — for the rest of us — has become participatory, more of an amusement park or shopping mall than a penal institution. Rather than being coerced to reveal secrets, today we seem to enjoy self-exposure, giving away “our most intimate information and whereabouts so willingly and passionately — so voluntarily.”
Exposed is a welcome addition to the current spate of books about technology and surveillance. While it covers familiar ground — it opens with brief accounts of Facebook’s methods of tracking users, USAID’s establishment of ZunZuneo (a Twitter-like social network) in Cuba, and Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s PRISM program — Harcourt’s contribution is uniquely indebted to critical theory. Riffing on the work of another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his evocative 1992 fragment “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Harcourt settles upon the phrase “Expository Society” to describe our current situation, one in which we “have become dulled to the perils of digital transparence” and enamored of exposure. This new form of expository power, Harcourt explains, “embeds punitive transparence into our hedonist indulgences and inserts the power to punish in our daily pleasures.”
The expository society has been long in the making. Its roots are in ancient Greece and Rome, where the “age of the spectacle” commenced and began its evolution. It is worth quoting Harcourt’s summary of this history at length:
To render something public was expensive, and so the ancients would gather together, amass themselves to watch, to share, to partake in a public act of entertainment. There was no replay button, nor were there any video feeds and no mechanical arts of reproduction. The modern era of surveillance, on the other hand, gave proof of the cost of security. To render secure was expensive, and so the moderns discovered ways to surveil more efficiently, to see everyone from a single gaze, to turn the arena inside out, to imagine the panopticon. In the digital age today, publicity has become virtually costless and surveillance practically free of charge.
And yet, while spectacles and surveillance may be “costless” and “practically free,” the expository society is fundamentally about profit. On the corporate side, the business models of companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Uber, and Amazon are based on the principle of user enjoyment. Social media, we all know from experience, is addictive; our pleasure is habit-forming by design.
This is the first crux of Harcourt’s argument: The expository society exploits, rather than represses, our desires. The second crux is his observation that government and commercial surveillance infrastructures have wholly merged.
One of the book’s more important chapters takes on the seemingly self-evident nature of the term “surveillance state,” which Harcourt argues is misleading. What we have, instead, is an “amalgam of the intelligence community, retailers, Silicon Valley, military interests, social media, the Inner Beltway, multinational corporations, midtown Manhattan, and Wall Street” that “forms an oligarchic concentration that defies any such reductionism.” Citing Glenn Greenwald, he notes that 70 percent of the United States’ national intelligence budget is spent on the private sector. “Whatever it is that is surveilling us, then, is not simply ‘the state,’” he writes. A more accurate image, he suggests, is a “tenticular oligarchy” — a “large oligopolistic octopus” enveloping the world, neither fully public nor fully private but both.
The expository society is indeed a paradoxical beast. Punishment and pleasure have fused, and commerce and surveillance are now one and the same (the convenience of GrubHub, Lyft, Paypal, Instagram, and AT&T is irresistible despite the troubling data-trails). Still, Exposed occasionally collapses categories and situations that are, despite their similarities, crucially distinct. For example, at multiple points Harcourt compares the Apple Watch to an ankle bracelet used for monitoring parolees: “The Apple Watch begins to function as the ankle bracelet. All is seen, all can be seen, all can be monitored — inside or out, where we are, free or supervised, we are permanently surveilled.” It may be true that these tracking devices exist on a data-collection continuum. But the experiences of their respective users could not be more different — and this matters. A person wearing an Apple Watch may be transmitting information, including heart rate and location, that should give them pause, but they are not subjected to the same punitive gaze as a parolee or a prisoner under correctional supervision — or, for that matter, a laborer whose every movement on the job is tracked, or a welfare recipient whose purchases are assessed by a prying social worker. “Privacy,” Harcourt himself writes, “has been privatized.” It is becoming a luxury good, available only to those who can afford it.
Harcourt’s analysis hinges on desire: We want to participate, we are impelled to do so, and we like it. But it seems to me we are as much compelled as we are impelled. In my own work on new media, I have described this as a shift from the old model of “manufacturing consent,” where traditional broadcasters molded public opinion from on high, to one of “manufacturing compulsion,” where we are, at least superficially, in charge of our media destinies, clicking on whatever we choose.
In reality things aren’t so simple: Recommendation algorithms, advertising, and addictive interfaces all chip away at our autonomy in different manners. What’s more, we are forced to participate in online life in myriad ways. Students are advised to manage their social media profiles so they can get into a good college; adults are compelled to groom their LinkedIn profiles in order to secure employment; journalists and other creative professionals are told they must join Twitter to promote their work; and so on. Credit scores are a prime example of this logic of compulsion. We don’t manage our scores for fun but under threat of penalty, in the form of higher interest rates or fees. With a bevy of start-ups innovating new modes of consumer scoring — many of which use information from data brokers in ways that shrewdly bypass inadequate consumer protections — we may soon be induced to adapt our online behavior to accommodate them (for example, by not being “friends” with people the algorithms deem credit risks).
Understanding the degree to which we are compelled to participate, as opposed to lamenting the degree to which we desire our own oppression, is important if we want to devise strategies for resistance. Movements derive more energy from tapping into people’s grievances than chastising them for complacency.
The challenge — and this brings us to the book’s concluding section — is how the “disobedience” of Harcourt’s subtitle can effectively push back against expository power. Exposed closes on a hopeful note, pointing to pockets of resistance and successful rebels, all people worth celebrating: Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks, artists like Trevor Paglen and Laura Poitras, free software advocates such as Eben Moglen. But Harcourt’s proposed solutions are not entirely satisfying. He considers boycotting Facebook a radical act, and I disagree. If our goal is to build a robust movement capable of taking on the new power structure he describes, we will have to meet people, at least initially, where they are. More than 1 billion of them are on Facebook. A movement made up only of those savvy enough to congregate on more obscure and secure corners of the internet is destined to remain small. Mass mobilization is an important component of any serious strategy for social change.
On the final page of the book, Harcourt praises Occupy Wall Street, not for its mission but for its supposedly leaderless form. (Some of us who were involved in Occupy might challenge that characterization.) The better lesson to take from Occupy is not its approach, which was imperfectly implemented and produced mixed results, but its willingness to challenge capitalism and inequality directly. Ultimately, the society of exposure that Harcourt criticizes is a symptom of the oligarchy’s escalating attack on democracy. The best solution may not be to combat surveillance directly, but to attack the disease: the arrangements that have allowed an unaccountable political and economic elite to emerge.
It is true, as Harcourt writes, that the “customary lines between politics, economics, and society are rapidly vanishing and melding into one”; it is true that the state has merged with corporate interests. But it is also true that the state remains one of the public’s most powerful weapons. If compelled by a powerful social movement, the state could aggressively enforce anti-trust regulations, pass a baseline cross-sector privacy law, enforce labor rights for employees of digital disruptors such as Uber, rein in the financial apparatus that has abetted the latest tech bubble with its massively inflated start-up valuations, and invest in public options such as municipal broadband (paid for, perhaps, with the taxes tech companies are currently dodging by sheltering assets overseas). Instead of merely hiding from the oligopolistic octopus, we should strive to free ourselves from its grip.
This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
… what Orwell and Huxley both failed to predict was the two-way street the surveillance state would, and did, become. Orwell’s telescreen also offers unprecedented public scrutiny of the Inner Beltway, among other cadres. The NSA gets to read my shopping lists; I get to read Hillary’s emails about the Bengazi attack. A fair trade; more than fair in fact.
Great article. RE this line: Oceania’s “Hate Week” is nowhere to be found… Really? Seems to me that this is on display nearly every day. Maybe that is the problem… it is Hate Week non stop. Maybe we are so inured to the ubiquity of it that we have forgotten what the world sounds like without it.
A longer post/comment would go into details and examples. For now I hope that the posts on the intercept itself are example enough.
@thelastnamechosen – your comments about The Intercept are cogent, and they reach toward the root of the matter. The issue isn’t just that Big Media or Big Business or Capitalism is corrupt; it’s more fundamental than that. We’ve reached the point where science itself has become disreputable. With so much concentration of wealth determining the direction of research, you reach the point where it simply becomes “common sense” that every site keeps logs, and comes up with fancy ways to spy on visitors, even though they didn’t do it as recently as the 90s. And across the whole spectrum of research, we keep seeing this pressure of industry and “national security” pushing harder and harder. I mean, I remember a time when you opened an issue of Nature and every story in it was like Wow, that’s so cool, think of what you could do with this, isn’t this awesome! Now you open it and as often as not you just wince and wish that the bastards had never invented whatever injected tracking device or brain-altering interface they came up with last week.
There is a resolution for this — the resolution is that civilization goes into a Dark Age. It’s happened before … it will happen again. Eventually a society simply gets to the point where their philosophy can’t support their technology, like the Romans unable to embrace steam power when power meant having slaves to order around. We’re not quite ripe for that yet — for example, we would bitterly miss the loss of modern medicine because many of us still have access to it. Yet somehow it becomes less and less affordable for the lower classes every year. Eventually you get to the point where there you are on some post-apocalyptic farm plot, and as long as your tribe has a couple of nukes and bioweapons set aside to keep respect, and you have some shaman to come around and scan your vegetables with a Geiger counter, you don’t want to hear some witch talking about how he might be able to get a hard drive working and tap into an archive of Wikipedia. Every sane voice in the tribe is going to yell out Spyware! Tracking! Drones! Killer AIs! You’ll kill us all! and the only reason why they won’t burn the witch is because they can’t keep him alive long enough to get the fire started.
Hmm……..We wonder how recently Astra has read the “Art of War”..? One can decide to “walk” in the light and bask…or…….cower in the taxing fear of darkness. Obviously, Astra has no fear to attach her name to this article, so should others fear to expose themselves? One could wonder how she benefits from a weekly or monthly reader interaction matrix via the Intercept Server Admin report..? It would be really interesting to understand and cheer for the Intercept writer with the greater “reach”..!
Hmm…….Watch their game play out or participate or avoid like the plague that it has become. The choice is yours, Mr. Branton.
@the_intercept https://www.psychologytoday.com/comment/765253#comment-765253
I am not and I am unsure that anyone else is a match for the NSA or even advertisers. I do not do much social media and save my time and company for friends and true face to face time. My solution to surveillance is over exposure. This does not have to be in a big way, just create an alter ego and let “their” fingers do some walking on the internet. If everyone does this no one will be able to figure out what is real and what is for show and tell. Do I like do wear my girlfriend’s underwear? Keep the bastards guessing?
Lol, you’re right. I use to do the same. I have such as 4 persona and none of them is the real me. Keep guessing, bastards.
Harcourt writes, that the “customary lines between politics, economics, and society are rapidly vanishing and melding into one”
Thomas Paine wrote similarly in Common Sense: that society and government have been confused to be the same… something like that anyway.
He also said that defense and commerce should be interwoven; if we applied that idea today it would mean Facism for America.
Reading Common Sense gives one a good sense just how far we’ve gone in the wrong direction.
Great insight!
Super Snakes And The Truth Behind Them
http://englishbookgeorgia.com/blogebg/super-snakes-and-the-truth-behind-them/
Mon Jan 25, 2016 | 9:39 AM EST
Obama: Sanders has ‘luxury’ of being long shot in Democratic race
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has had the “luxury of being a complete long shot” so far in the race to be the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, President Barack Obama said in an interview published by Politico on Monday.
(cont.)
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSKCN0V31J1
QUESTION: WHO ARE THE MOST VULNERABLE?
The Executive Summary:
Neuropsychological and Electronic
No-Touch Torture Report
Based on “The Torture Memos” and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Declassified “Torture Report”
By Robert Duncan, A.B., S.M., M.B.A., Ph.D.
04/2015
http://www.drrobertduncan.com/dr-robert-duncans-neuropsychological-and-electronic-no-touch-torture-report.html
Mutant Humans Beneath The Planet of the Apes ? Richard Caldwell
Jan. 9 2016, 4:31 p.m.
“We reveal ourselves unto our God…”
Joanne Susan Hosea ? Mutant Humans Beneath The Planet of the Apes
Jan. 9 2016, 9:29 p.m.
Some people, such as myself, are being facetious while speaking in terms of making a confession. Just this past evening, I “confessed out loud” why I found it necessary to purchase (Aug 2005) and read my family Bible. For years I couldn’t understand why I was being persecuted; covertly stalked; psychologically tortured and taunted by certain political elites and their corporate media counterparts. Grr!
Joanne Susan Hosea ? Mutant Humans Beneath The Planet of the Apes
Jan. 9 2016, 9:34 p.m.
These Programs Were Never About Terrorism. They’re About Economic Spying, Social Control, and Diplomatic Manipulation. They’re About Power. ~ Edward Snowden
I still think people like Foucault and Deleuze were spot on – what they describe plays at another level.
On the Corrupting Influence of Money in Politics, Bernie Sanders Is Dead Right
Sunday, 24 January 2016 00:00
By Eliza A. Webb, Truthout | News Analysis
[Excerpt]
As Sanders says, the issue is not that “the Republicans and Democrats hate each other. That’s a mythology from the media.”
The real problem, which Sanders has correctly identified, is that “Congress is owned by big money and refuses to do what the American people want them to do.”
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34528-on-the-corrupting-influence-of-money-in-politics-bernie-sanders-is-dead-right
Put simply: Don’t let the bastards dumb you down or silence you! And don’t allow them to alter your own reality. Keep it real!
Deleuze and Foucalt means this is more of the worthless postmodern nonsense that is a cancer on the left.
When two or three or a group of people are having conversation they subconsciously extrapolate that old laws of nature are in play and what they say to each other cannot be heard the rest of the planet. And of course on one hand people appreciate bigger and bigger audience when the audience likes what they say and go into seclusion trolls when audience doesn’t like their opinion. I think it is rather simple.
@lastnamechosen
I think your post contains an inaccuracy. From your link:
“Readers who do not wish to be tracked even via the anonymized system outlined above may opt out simply by activating the “Do Not Track” feature on their web browsers; this will deactivate both the new Parse.ly system and our old system, based on software called Piwik.”
This doesn’t strike me as “anti-tracking.”
@Baldie McEagle
Do Not Track is a bullshit system invented by the advertising industry to try and head off the backlash against The Upskirt Economy. You shouldn’t have to wear a T-shirt that says “Don’t look under my skirt”. Privacy should be the default. If I want someone to take pictures of my business, then I will tell them on an individual basis and negotiate payment.
If anything is opt-out then you are being screwed by people who are well aware they are trying to screw you–why do you think they made it opt-out? Because they know that no one would opt-in.
Do Not Track is attempt to turn consent on its head. Frankly it is the taunting of a psychopath to suggest that I have to do some complicated ritualistic dance of their choosing in order to avoid being violated.
Do Not Track has been purposefully left undefined so that The Upskirt Economy can ignore the plain meaning of those words for a per site definition that is always left as ambiguous as possible.
For example, nowhere in that text does the Intercept say they will not track, collect and store information about you and your surfing habits, only that they won’t use Parse.ly and Piwik to do it.
I have yet to find a site that includes IP address, cookies, page hits, comments made, email address or postal address (the list goes on and on) within the definition of Do Not Track. Any information that you “provide” is considered outside of the definition of Do Not Track.
Do Not Track is an adverting term, and as such has nothing to do with the plain meaning of the words expressed.
From the Intercept’s “privacy” policy
Web beacons are also referred to as “super cookies” or “web bugs” because they cannot be rejected or deleted by the end user. They are hidden one pixel transparent images that are used to uniquely identify and track people through emails (even when you forward them to other people) and across multiple websites on the internet.
Super cookies are pure evil, and again, conveniently never fall under the definition of Do Not Track.
Also, I want to also point out the dishonesty of the term “non-personally identifying information.” Cookies are considered non-personally identifying information, but are directly correlated using unique identification numbers with people’s real names and addresses all the time. Let’s say your unique identification number is 6, that number is considered non-personally identifying information even though there is a database entry that says Baldie McEagle’s unique identification number is 6.
Marketing sophistry at its best.
https://theintercept.com/privacy-policy/
I wrote:
“…they cannot be rejected or deleted by the end user.”
This is wrong and should read “…they cannot be rejected or deleted using traditional cookie management techniques.”
You can change anything on your computer as long as you have the expertise.
Even TCP/IP fingerprinting can be mitigated by writing your own TCP/IP implementation. The tracking game is won by relentlessly exhausting your opponent.
thelastnamechosen, you conclude: The tracking game is won by relentlessly exhausting your opponent.
My question: But what if you are a “target of one” and they are a “virtual army of online stalkers/hackers/hounds/spies”?
thelastnamechosen:
“The God’s Eye View is a delicious, thrilling read about a deep state surveillance program that even Edward Snowden did not unearth…This page-turner is replete with references to real-life voices of truth and transparency, and shows how easily and quickly democracy can be subverted by government secrecy and unchecked power.” —Jesselyn Radack, lawyer for Edward Snowden
Cable television is a good example of the theme in reality – 150 cable channels, almost all garbage. Cable news is by far the least reliable information source; there are no educational programs, instead it’s wall-to-wall corporate propaganda aimed at increasing sales of some product or other, playing on people’s desires and insecurities – buy more consume more, a deliberate shortening of the human attention span, endless burbling distraction, a warm gooey ooze that melts the brain and suffocates the spirit, all in the name of creating the ultimate consumer – a programmable automaton.
CIA To Spy On You Through TV, Appliances
Published on Mar 19, 2012 Via Wired: “More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them. Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm…”.* Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur break it down on The Young Turks.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jrG1Na6qQ94
I recently read a piece, supporting the thesis of this article, entitled, ‘What does your amateur porn tell your employer about you?’ At one time, releasing a sex tape on the internet was done almost exclusively by aspiring actors. Now as demand for scarce jobs heats up, even greeters at box stores need to differentiate themselves from the competition. Your employer has a vast electronic file, purchased from a data aggregator, with the contents of your home PC, car’s GPS history, phone calls, text messages and social media posts. If they search it and find no amateur porn, they will start to become concerned that you may be the type of person who likes to hide things. You will fall under suspicion, and their surveillance of you, both at work and at home, is likely to intensify. Forget any prospect of a promotion.
On the other hand, if they find the internet is flooded with your porn videos, they may wonder if you are dedicating enough time to work. So it’s important to find the right balance. Fortunately, there are agencies which can film you in their studio, with the product designed to appear like an amateur porn production. These will subtly highlight your enthusiasm, attention to detail and amazing stamina – all the qualities that your employer is looking for.
The article conceded that some people resent this, but argued that yearning for some twentieth century version of privacy is futile. But since employees are being evaluated on this basis, it should be acknowledged, brought into the open, and incorporated into formal job performance reviews. This creates the possibility of an appeal for employees who feel they are being discriminated against.
So like every new technology, surveillance will initially be treated with fear and apprehension, then enthusiastically embraced and finally become so routine and pervasive, that we simply lose awareness of it altogether.
Benito Mussolini, you conclude: So like every new technology, surveillance will initially be treated with fear and apprehension, then enthusiastically embraced and finally become so routine and pervasive, that we simply lose awareness of it altogether.
You refer to what some mad scientists refer to as “adaptation”. It is absurd to imagine that people en mass would not be the least bit resistent to gross violations of their personal dignity.
Mike Rogers: You Can’t Have Your Privacy Violated If You Don’t Know About It
from the say-what-now? dept
by Mike Masnick
Wed, Oct 30th 2013 7:55am
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131029/18020225059/mike-rogers-you-cant-have-your-privacy-violated-if-you-dont-know-about-it.shtml
That’s why Snowden contacted Glenn Greenwald … who, as is his nature, ran with it like a dog with a bone. dept.
We don’t violate the law. – NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers Lol!
Go directly to 65:00 and listen carefully. What a hoot! 14 yrs of protection? Ha! Too much bullshit! Too much! Lol!
https://theintercept.com/2016/01/21/nsa-chief-stakes-out-pro-encryption-position-in-contrast-to-fbi/?comments=1#comment-194718
American Revolutionary War 1775–1783
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
No need to blame Mike Rogers for this: One of the basic principles of US jurisprudence is that in order to sue for damages, one must be able to prove damage. Hence, we are stymied in our attempts to get injunctions against the NSA, FBI or NYPD, as the case may be, because although we may be quite certain that they are spying on us, we cannot prove it.
Just another example of the weakness of the US Constitution, exacerbated by the interpretations of the Roberts court.
Joanne Susan Hosea
@madeforhire
Heterofemale/Targeted Indiv/Protestant~Para A.A. Inter Soc Sci B.A. spytv/dod/cia/fbi/nsa/foxnews/msnbc/cnn14yrs! #FreeChelseaManning #FreeMaryAnneGradyFlores
You must be new to TI. Benito is one of our treasures, whose sublime sarcasm brightens the days of TI’s more intelligent readers.
So true, this has got to be one of his best posts! I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!
The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century Paperback – May 14, 2002
by John Brockman (Editor)
Amazon.com Review
Scientists love to speculate about the direction research and technology will take us, and editor John Brockman has given a stellar panel free rein to imagine the future in The Next Fifty Years. From »»»»» brain-swapping ««««« and the hunt for extraterrestrials …
http://westfieldsms.sharpschool.net/literacy_initiative/critical_thinking
The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century Paperback – May 14, 2002
by John Brockman (Editor)
http://www.amazon.com/Next-Fifty-Years-Science-Twenty-first/dp/0375713425/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453683928&sr=1-1&keywords=Science+The+next+Fifty+Years
*nods*
“Eat cake”.
BenjaminAP: Hello??? Would you like some cawfy with that?
It’s time to start making this surveillance regime explicit, and
purpose it for the real social problems we face, like disaster relief, climate change, resource depletion, and so forth. We can do remarkable things with the information we collect and analyze, and we can equally do terrible things with it. But that choice, as always, is up to us.
— Matt Stoller (former political consultant).
Russell D. Tice (born 1961) is a former intelligence analyst for the United States Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA).
In December, 2005, Tice helped spark a national controversy over claims that the NSA and the DIA were engaged in unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens. He later admitted that he was one of the sources for the 2005 New York Times reporting on the wiretapping activities.[2][3] After speaking publicly about the need for legislation to protect whistleblowers, Tice received national attention as the first NSA-whistleblower in May 2005 before Thomas Andrews Drake, Mark Klein, Thomas Tamm, and Edward Snowden came forward.
(cont.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice
TUE JAN 3, 2006
EXCLUSIVE: National Security Agency Whistleblower Warns Domestic Spying Program Is Sign the U.S. is Decaying Into a “Police State”
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/6496
Hello @Snowden @ggreenwald
AMY GOODMAN: Has Congress responded to your letter offering to testify as a former employee of the National Security Agency?
RUSSELL TICE: Not yet. Of course, the holidays — you know, we just had the holidays here, so everybody is out of town. I can’t condemn Congress too much yet, because I faxed it out on, I do believe, the 18th of December, and we’re just getting into the new year.
AMY GOODMAN: And who did you send it to?
RUSSELL TICE: I sent it to the chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, the SSCI and the HPSCI.
http://m.democracynow.org/stories/6496
~>Why do we expose ourselves!?
Look away then … I’m hideous.
On the contrary, given the inexorable rise of the ‘age of information/knowledge’, tearing down mighty bulwarks while probing their significance with its relentless fury, I think it is the ‘oligopolistic octopus’ that must strive to free itself from … our grip.
An excellent article, for which I thank you. But I must take issue with your statement that in order to meet fellow dissidents one needs to use Facebook or the like. My view is that while organized activity against surveillance can be useful, it also exposes the participants to repression. By remaining outside the surveillance state, that is not using social media, lying when we provide personal data that we know serves no purpose other than to build a profile, and using tools such as Tor Browser we are more effective in countering Them, because information denial is a useful tool in countering information collection. We become the unknown unknowns in the parlance of that great philosopher of the oligarchy, Donald Rumsfeld.
The state fears the lone dissenter for the very same reason they fear the lone terrorist: it is beyond their power to identify, much less neutralize, someone they do not know about.
The penalty for being a lone dissident is of course the inability to coordinate with others; one is forced to use one’s imagination rather than pooling ideas or following conventional leaders.
Jeff,
Not only should we consider keeping social media out of our organizing in order to jam-up the surveillance economy-and-state but it sure seems to me that back in pre-social media days of Seattle 1999, F15, 2003 and many mass actions in-between, organizing was far more effective. It was all done with handbills and utility-pole postings and staple-guns, wheat-pasted posters, and old-fashioned meetings sitting in chairs in rooms. We used the internet all right- e-mail listservers and later the excellent, now dead, Indymedia network.
Effective organizing and dissent all came to an end with the rise of social media. The electronic panopticon of Social media has been disastrous for dissent – and it was deliberately designed that way.
Low-tech always beats hi-tech. Return to letter writing. Do you know how expensive and timely it would be to start going through everyone’s mail?
“Sharing” one’s personal data is becoming increasingly less voluntary, as employees are required to pay for not carrying a fitbit to report on them, while schools and clinics store very sensitive data about their students and their patients in companies. I’ve heard of schools that make Google or Amazon accounts for every student, and under the student’s own name!
And there is no way to avoid surveillance by cameras that recognize your face or your license plate — except to demand laws to prohibit them.
Meanwhile, Trump makes every week into Hate Week.
Illustration by Jennifer Daniel ???
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Surveillance State? It’s So Much Worse
By Bernard E. Harcourt NOVEMBER 29, 2015
[Excerpts]
A survey released in October found that among Americans’ greatest fears are the corporate and government tracking of our personal information. And yet we continue to expose ourselves knowingly and willingly, in a mad frenzy of disclosure, in order to become ourselves.
(…)
In the end, it falls on each and every one of us — as desiring digital subjects, as teachers and students, as conscientious ethical selves — to do everything we can to resist the excesses of our expository society. Particularly in the face of such grotesque exploitation of unquestionably horrid violence, it is imperative that we disrupt this new political economy. It is time to wake up and get real. In fact, like the fading colors on a Polaroid instant photo, time may already be running out.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Mad-Frenzy-of-Disclosure/234338
I’ve just downloaded the book because it does propose an explanation for phenomena I have become increasingly attuned to since starting my dissertation. Namely, the fact that it is often individuals who eagerly expose their most private sides online who also complain the loudest about digital surveillance. There’s a cognitive disconnect happening here and it requires an explanation. What pleasures do we get from exposing ourselves? Why is it that we make an artificial distinction between voluntarily posting our private world and being ‘surveilled’. It suggests that Foulcault – although dead on in his concept of the workings of the panopticon – did not anticipate the jouissance of being a part of that panopticonic society.
Just a note – I use the word ‘jouissance’ in the Lacanian/Zizekian sense. A form of pleasure/pain enjoyment.
Oh! You mean schadenfreude.
Not really. Schadefreude is something rather different. That’s taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. This is more like taking pleasure in your own exposure.
There has been a substantial rise in incurable personality disorders in recent years, one of which is narcissism. That would explain the increasing need to expose one’s self online…
What on earth is this doing on The Intercept? “Tenticular?” Not the state? What?
Virtually every related article on The Intercept traces a clear line between surveillance abuses (privatized or not, NSA or Facebook) and the failure of the regulatory apparatus of the government to enact public-interest privacy protections. The corruption of the democratic process is the underlying political condition that allows the surveillance society to flourish unfettered.
Were democratic processes truly democratic, public sentiment –which is consistently with Snowden and consistently abhors money’s deformation of politics — would be reigning in the technology of control. For all our racism and consumerism, the US public still nurtures at core basic common sense regarding personal freedom, equality, and decency. Opinion polls show this.
The state, Deleuze and Foucault notwithstanding, remains the monopoly of legitimate violence in society and the one force that can step in and tell Google to not be evil or tell the NSA to redo its data mining. Privatizing surveillance, war, or incarceration doesn’t change the fact that the contracts remain accountable to the state. The state, thanks to struggles over many decades by ordinary people, has become responsive to popular will and does contain a seed of the original democratic potential as a republic governed by and for the people. The Intercept, I thought, was raking up the muck of a state and private sector run rampant when democratic controls have begun to falter, and The Intercept, I thought, was ringing a clear bell to re-affirm democratic practices against this corruption eating away at us, of which surveillance is only one result.
Now we have a very fuzzy critical theory book review that wants to seriously consider some unknown non-state target for political change, “boycotting” Facebook, do more cheering of Chelsea and Edward (much needed but not a scalable strategy), or diving into more Occupy? Clearly this book, and its reviewer, have little understanding of the discussions on viable anti-corruption political strategy going on internationally today, and prefers throwaway ill-considered “well, maybe if we try…” solutions instead.
As The Intercept usually makes clear, the state is failing to represent the interests of the people. That is the issue we are facing, and surveillance nightmares – which may eclipse what little democratic opening we might have – are a consequence. Snowden’s line “I used to work for the government, now I work for the people” captures the essence of our current dilemma. Yes people will desire and crave their own techno-goodies that end up controlling them, but only if the marketplace is deregulated that allows the app developers and data miners a field day. Congress, if elected buy the people not by money, could use the wikipedia and WWW models to create public sector, public-good commons that would truly unleash some of the democratic potential of the new tech world we are in. They won’t, as long as they are captured financially by the narrow private interests turning tech potential to privateering profit. The library system, for example, is a non-private realm that could unleash extraordinary public good with just a bit of strong state led regulation and infrastructure. Snowden has proposed some very simple solutions to the need for warrants and wiretaps without invading privacy. It’s not hard to imagine ending poverty through guaranteed basic income, we have some clear directions for addressing climate change — all is possible if we the public, not corrupt private interests, are in the drivers seat. The examples are legion. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and it really is not going to help if The Intercept starts drifting into postmodern-land and fuzzy Foucaultdian power-is-everywhere-maybe-a-boycott-would-help ignorance.
And while I’m at it, I’m very surprised that neither the book nor the review mention Huxley’s Brave New World or Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, both of which fully anticipate a society of control based on desire and manufactured compulsion many decades before likes and check-ins. This is not some new territory – the slaves loving their servitude – this is well travelled territory that political thinkers have been addressing since the 60s uprisings (which included, we should remember, a strong strain of “what do we do now that technology has liberated us from work” discussion that is also occurring today).
This article is so out of place I have to wonder whether the book author and reviewer have some kind of inside connection friendship or dependency to get the article published at The Intercept? I mean it’s like The Intercept has so many stories about state abuses of power and failures to represent public interest then one of the first book reviews on the site suggests the state is not a relevant political actor anymore? What?
Rant
I like where you’re heading with the optimism but I think change can be even bigger.
Also, I really despise when people conflate guns with violence, capitalism with corruption, the “system” with a Republic…you can go the same route with those who would try to ignore nuances and not let them win the reality of the situation as long as you keep the nuances in play
The Upskirt Economy
The problem with Facebook isn’t that people can communicate with each other publicly or privately–the problem with Facebook is that they spy on their users and are a huge data aggregator for The Upskirt Economy.
The problem with Google isn’t that people can search the internet, or send email–the problem with Google is that they spy on their users and are a huge data aggregator for The Upskirt Economy.
The problem with the Intercept isn’t that people can read about NSA spying–the problem with the Intercept is that they spy on their users and would much rather participate in The Upskirt Economy than report on The Upskirt Economy.
The problem is not the “desire” to communicate, or search the internet, or read about the NSA–the problem is spying. None of these things require spying and none of these things “embeds punitive transparence into our hedonist indulgences and inserts the power to punish in our daily pleasures.” (As someone who is often a self parody–how the fuck can anyone write that line with a straight face–Although this may be the perfect description of Balloon Popping Porn.)
I have beat this into the ground enough, but this victim blaming has long pissed me off, the books featured here and their “reviews/transparent promotion” are consistently terrible, and the phrase “Upskirt Economy” is gold money.
Also, why the hell is this thing “supported” by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project–which “supports journalism, photo and video about economic struggle” and is “changing the story of inequality.”
How poor can Columbia Law Professor Bernard Harcourt actually be?
I guess this is what they mean by “changing the story of inequality.”
I agree…it’s like all these people who are supposed to be critics of the MSM (or at the least stand apart from them) seem to thing they have to use them as a starting point and peddle back from them instead of just start with the truth and to hell with liars calling them crazy.
It is not hedonistic to enjoy life. It is wrong – without exception – to do wrong to people (invading their privacy impermissibly, manipulating their life according to your will, profiting off of their information without consent…)
How does the Intercept ‘spy on their users’?
@star
The Intercept spent ten months building a system that creates a unique and permanent identifier for each and every visitor to their site. The things you read, the things you post, how you got to the site, and how you talk about the Intercept in social media are collected, collated, analyzed and shared with one or more third party data aggregators.
The Intercept even built a proxy that prevents individuals from blocking website tracking using specialized anti-tracking software.
The cherry on top is that The Intercept says this system was created to protect our privacy. What marketers lack in honesty they make up for with gall.
I like to call the Intercept’s tracking system “The InterSnitch.”
This article and the comments there will give you background and details:
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/04/what-the-intercepts-new-audience-measurement-system-means-for-reader-privacy/?comments=1#comments
If you do use Facebook, please make a point of including some false information with your profile. Tell them you work at a place you don’t work, tell them you went to a school you never went to, pretend you are interested in culture that bores you, “like” some things you hate.
Use your imagination: they count on this data as meaning something, and you have it in your power to throw in enough brown apples to spoil the whole bunch.
I once claimed I was super interested in seeing the Doobie Brothers in Texas. I wouldn’t cross the street to see the Doobies and I’m far from Texas. The idiot marketing machine naturally sent me all kinds of gibberish in response.
have fun….it might be the most fun you could have on social media, now that the glow is off
Absolutely! Why should you ever tell anyone your age or (unless you are borrowing money) your income. If you searched my real name in the databases you’d come up with someone aged between 18 and 90 having an income of under $17,000 per annum. The last one is best in stopping the marketeers: people living in poverty are not prime customers for vacation properties.
I do the same of security questions. What was the name of the hospital where I was born? “The hospital”. And so on. As you say, it’s fun, and increases the entropy of all the databases. If enough of us did it, they would stop asking.
@ Ms. Taylor
I found this to be, overall, a very interesting thought piece.
By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed your byline here at TI, so welcome aboard.
A few observations or thoughts though:
The above are not all alike in terms of “business model” or foundational “principles”. I thought Facebook, Google and Twitter’s “business models” were based on selling advertising or its users data, or analytics concerning that data? And what exactly is “enjoyable” about using Amazon or Uber? I thought Amazon’s business model was to sell consumer products (and advertising) and take a cut, and that Uber’s business model was undercutting the regulated taxi-cab industry by underpaying Uber user/”drivers” and passing any “savings” on to its user/riders?
Umm that’s a stretch. “Privacy” when employing the internet is a function of voluntary use of encryption or logging on at a library. “Privacy” using a telephone has and will continue to be largely impossible regardless of relative levels of wealth because of technology (unless of course phone calls can be encrypted, which may be the case, and only if the rich can afford to do so which I doubt).
As far as any other sort of personal/personal time “privacy” that’s a choice, independent of relative levels of wealth, depending on what forms of communication you chose to use in your personal life. As far as I know the Postal Service isn’t opening every letter and neither are private industry players like Fed Ex or UPS unless subject to a valid subpoena or warrant (at least domestically). The government, at least to the best of my knowledge isn’t penetrating the walls of my home visually (even if they can and do violate my privacy at home employing phone or internet.) Short of that I don’t have much expectation of “privacy” in my movements outside my home. As far as observing the movements of cars or humans with satellites or CCTV, again, people generally don’t have much expectation of privacy outside the home.
If you are worried about privacy in your banking transactions, at least day to day, don’t pay for things with a debit or credit card. Take your money out of your bank account in person at teller window as needed and pay for things with cash. Nobody will be able to track your purchase transactions.
HIPAA, assuming the person obligated to protect my data is vigilant and observes the law, should protect my PII and health information from purposeful disclosure.
I disagree too. But not for same reasons you do. I don’t use Facebook, never have and never will. I don’t think that makes me “radical” in any way. I just don’t find the use of Facebook “valuable” to me personally. As far as professionally, it may be valuable. But I still don’t use it. Similarly, I wouldn’t have any expectation of “privacy” in my professional communications (advertising etc.) anyway except between me and my clients.
I think this is the real money shot though, assuming “organizing” mass social movements can be done creatively so as to nullify the private/public surveillance state’s advantages born of their ability to spy and disrupt.
That’s the ticket so to speak. Solid effort all in all and thought provoking.
I thought the ‘business model’ for these corporations, specifically Amazon, is the principle of tax avoidance.
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/amazons-big-assist-government
Pretty much since the Magna Carta was signed (for the Caucasian parts of the world, earlier for the Asian and MENA, later for others) the merchantile class and the ‘state’ merged in terms of surveillance of the population, and the manipulation of the population, as well as the targeting of the individual and movements within the population that threatened the duopoly. It may seem more ominous that it is now possible for the corporation that you buy your clothes from to know what you personally read, watch, eat, but the truth is that at least since the end of WW2, such a corporation has been effectively able to know that about their customers (not as a specific individual, but in 10% chunks, which is good enough for targeted manipulation of society) and sharing such information with the ‘state’ security apparatus (usually willingly, but by collecting and centralizing the data, making it easy and cheap for the state to get the information without the willing cooperation of the corporation)
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neal Postman observes: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What [Aldous] Huxley feared [in his 1931 novel Brave New World Revisited] was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
And neither Huxley nor Orwell quite had it right.
Why exactly we need to invoke these 2 mid-20th C Englishmen as our big “prophets” I do not understand. There’s a whole world of interesting literature out there that the New York Times Book Review never paid all that much attention to.
Care to elaborate why neither Huxley nor Orwell “quite had it right”?
Somehow the problem of corporate spying isn’t that almost every website secretly spies on its users, or that websites are willing to trade their user’s privacy to a handful of huge corporate data aggregators for a chance at some “free” publicity, or that corporate journalism not only participates in all this hidden bathroom cam spying, but also refuses to report on this conspiracy because they are balls deep in the upskirt voyeurism game–No, somehow the problem is that people can publicly communicate with each other.
If this point of view weren’t so evil, I would call it trite.
And this has been padded out into a whole book? Talk about a public confession.
I know, like come on people, it may be trite to keep reporting on the intrusion into people’s privacy but let’s not get lazy and start investigating the victims, please.
Maybe it is arrogant for so many people to presume themselves to be so fascinating.
There is a romance to unveiling the unknown, Sex has one end, but the foreplay, the journey, is the genuinely interesting bit. And short-cuts to the end of the story only short-change the experience. That is my issue with online communities. Information overload of cheat-sheets is a poor (and lazy) alternative to rolling up your sleeves and really getting to know someone.
We can learn from each other, sure. But we learn very little from the proxies and avatars separating real people from how they want to be perceived.
There is an old Russian proverb, that evil must be invited into the home. This was carjacked by vampire stories, but the point remains, that bad things are more likely to happen to those who allow it.
I am no fan of the concept of victim-shaming, but in this case…if people object to having all of their datum mined and collected then we do have absolute power to put a stop to it. But culture has molded us to be so egocentric that we no longer have power over ourselves. We trade self-control for the one in a zillion chance at meeting with fame and fortune. That is pathological.
@Richard Caldwell
People’s public postings are an infinitesimally small amount of the data collected by the Upskirt Economy.
A person searching for and reading information about Alzheimer’s because they are worried about their mother is not looking for fame and fortune. Yet they are being spied on too.
A person looking for support groups related to sexual and physical abuse is not looking for fame and fortune. Yet they are being spied on too.
A person wanting to be an informed voter is not looking for fame and fortune. Yet they are being spied on too.
But understand, the idea that people who speak up are deserving targets of surveillance is not an accidental meme. It is an attempt to turn the power of communication against itself.
The problem is not speaking up or wanting information–the problem is spying. Communication and information is the solution–the problem is spying.
Communication and information is the solution–the problem is spying. ~ thelastnamechosen
Relatedly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyeurism
I am not about to defend any spying measures. The public deserves privacy and the government should be held to transparency and not the other way around. But everything you mentioned could be accomplished without using the internet. To say otherwise is blatant laziness.
@Richard Caldwell
There is plenty of spying offline too. To say otherwise is blatant bullshit. Cameras and facial recognition are just the start. If you think you are escaping surveillance by living like a Luddite then you are sadly mistaken.
But why is internet spying more acceptable to you than offline spying? If you want to live like the Amish go to town (in a horse drawn buggy) but don’t try to preach that somehow living with the lights out means that no one is spying on you.
The internet is a godsend for many people for many different reasons. You should take your privilege and turn it into empathy for those less fortunate.
Fantastic!
People are looking are various ways to “blur” their online profile. One way to deal with Amazon for example might be through a purchasing co-op.
It would be like a mail box service. You get an account and make purchases through it. The goods are delivered to the co-op mail box where you pick it up on you way home.
Obviously only well-off people would use it at first. They can afford to pay for their privacy.
Alternatively, you could simply not do business with Amazon. Amazon, by the way, is also a big contractor for the CIA, providing cloud/big data services. Amazon got a multi-billion dollar contract a couple of years back, and now have a big Washington DC area presence. (Their office building is in Herndon, VA, visible on the north side of the Dulles access road, just east of the Herndon exit. From there, it’s a quick 15 minutes to Langley.)
Could it possibly be that Amazon shares their customer database with the IC? Nah, that would be unethical. Ergo, the answer must be Yes.
Near the core of the modern surveillance state is a computer model. You are being modeled. They take a standard model, then apply profiles to it to produce a predictive model. The consumer/user data they get from various and diverse sources “informs” the computer model.
These models are some of the most prized and sought after assets of the domestic surveillance state. Highly guarded and seldom talked about.
I agree with JB. Awesome article! Keep up the good work
Excited to see you writing here Astra! I’m a fan of both the Zizek! and Examined Life films. Great article. Please keep up the great work.
Facebook is not a public platform. There is no right of assembly or even the right to petition. Facebook can mute the microphone or alter the message. It can even place you in a virtual prison. You may be allowed to mobilize a mass protest, but you will be blissfully unaware your million ‘followers’ are bots created by Facebook and no actual human being has ever heard your message.
And of course, Facebook eventually will wield the ultimate power – the ability to banish people from cyberspace altogether, forcing them to eke out a miserable existence in the wastelands known as the ‘real world’. Many may scoff a the notion that the real world actually exists. But I’ve seen it, and it not only exists, but is more terrible than anyone can possibly imagine.
Semper iocosus.
(Always funny.)
Love it! (Not just “like”)
So this guy writes a book puts all the new tech-o words in it and concludes – what we need is mass movements!! Really?? Who would have thought of that? And so easy to organize under full survelance conditions which insure that a high percentage of the mass will be spies.
I sorry but I fail to see the value here.
There are 2 ways we expose ourselves. 1) is when we voluntarily put information about ourselves on the internet via Facebook or WordPress or what have you
2) Is when the government snoops into our private electronics and spies on us (as the Snowden docs have revealed).
There is an important distinction between these two. Only one of them is a violation of our privacy.
we expose ourselves because…..we want to be panopticonically cool?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12gLKggzj9g
I would suggest that if you’re looking for a prescient work of literature, Brave New World is a much better proxy for modern society than 1984.
Posting for public consumption is only .0000000000000000000000000001%* of the information collected by corporate spying. To conflate public posting with corporate spying reveals a commenter as either extremely oblivious or a corporate shill–possibly both.
*Hundreds of zeros preceding the 1 have been removed because the point is already made.
Great article! Reminded me of Neil Postman’s comparison between Orwell’s (1984) and Huxley’s (Brave New World) accounts of society control. In Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman said: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
in my hometown, readers cannot comment on stories in the local paper without a facebook account.
Asking for it
Too much of this blame bullshit is caught up in regressive ideas about sexuality–Those that lack shame deserve what they get. It is the view that showing cleavage means you want everything from any and all.
Two points:
1) If all the bathrooms have hidden cameras in them that doesn’t mean people don’t want privacy when they go to the bathroom. That’s why the cameras are hidden.
2) Very few people are actually aware of the spying–it is all hidden. The media (including the Intercept) is knee deep in this and has no interest at all in exposing how any of this works and how pervasive and foundational corporate spying is.
Like ad blocking, the anti corporate spying movement exists completely outside of the media. What little ‘professional’ commentary there is on the subject spends 99% of its energy blaming the victim for not being prudish enough–with a steaming side of self congratulatory back slapping to round out the tube top defense.
Fuck off you prudes.
Just because kids wear clothes that would have embarrassed you grandmother doesn’t mean they deserve what they get. It just means you are seriously fucked up with rapey tendencies.
What we need is a very simple, very DOABLE technical achievement: the standalone website. We used to have them in the 1990s, even the early 2000s. Even with a standalone website, you give up one piece of information – your IP address, and the fact that you were online there then – and anything else your browser is misconfigured to allow a non-trusted author to know, which can be plenty. But if I want to view this page the way you intend it to be presented, I’m supposed to enable Soundcloud, Vimeo, jwplatform.com — allowing those sites a wide range of activity that is not good for my privacy, including of course tracking across the web. I understand The Intercept is careful about who they do business with; still, it involves more trust than is desirable. And should one of those companies go bankrupt, or revoke your account because they don’t like what you write about, then that part of your article is gone.
There’s really no reason for this. What is Web content? It’s text, it’s pictures, it’s video, it’s sound. All these things can be placed directly in the originating page by the originating company and known to no other. All the fancy trinkets these other sites provide are pointless, or worse than useless, meant to lock up the content rather than disseminate it.
There is no reason why a widely read newspaper should not even be able to post advertisements on its own page, just as the newspapers of a hundred years ago did, by pasting them in place. That is, no reason but cross-site tracking and spying and the occasional enrollment in a botnet when Outbrain gets hacked. These sites are selling us down the river, whereas there’s no reason for them not simply to sell their ads for whatever their reputation and reported circulation will let them command from the market. They could be fast, lean, content-filled sites that pick and choose ads that are as much a service to their customers as to their advertisers. But they have let us down.
PDF magazines. They have the plus of being semi permanent. None of this here today edited-out-of-existence tomorrow.
The intercept is more of a magazine anyway.
Bzzzzt. Wrong answer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF for a briefing. Adobe is one of the ancient anti-piracy fanatics, and only marginally more trustworthy than the big guy with the horns and the tail. PDF is “publicly licensed” to software writers who comply with Adobe standards, which include things like document monitoring, secured documents/DRM, and even its own copy of Javascript with all the usual security risks.
HTML was not a bad idea. It just needs to be used right. By the time they got to HTML 2.0, it was really quite a good standard – vastly more flexible and visually appealing than Gopher, but serving no master. Maybe it would help if someone wrote a new HTML, one that doesn’t even allow scripts from other sites to run on a page for example, but that’s sort of the wrong thinking, in that we need the publishers to take the lead on this and the standard to follow. Why won’t they stand up for themselves, have a little self-respect, and say fuck Web 2.0 with the wire brush!
Interesting, I was looking for the book in Kindle or digital edition, it would be nice if it existed.
Any such plans for the future?
Good news: the book is available in Kindle form.
Bad news: $26
OUTSTANDING article in so many ways, and I cannot wait to scope the book myself. But this part bothered me, Astra:
“If our goal is to build a robust movement capable of taking on the new power structure he describes, we will have to meet people, at least initially, where they are. More than 1 billion of them are on Facebook. A movement made up only of those savvy enough to congregate on more obscure and secure corners of the internet is destined to remain small. Mass mobilization is an important component of any serious strategy for social change”
I think that is categorically false. I think people use any excuse they can to rationalize involvement with any of the social media spots, and I’d like to remind them all that in no case in history has anyone ever changed the system from the inside out for the betterment of all. Repossessing the means of production is still giving validity to the importance of production and credibility to financial systems in general (which I see as the underlining mother of all issues).
And Rosa Parks’ story would have much to say regarding the supposed needs for mass mobilization. The world vitally needs stronger individuals, not anymore gangs or clubs or collectives or social networks. We don’t need to look cool for anybody.
Christopher Lasch wrote presciently in 1979:
“a sense of the absurd” — that phrase takes me back. I’m not sure I see this writing of Lasch’s as altogether prescient, but it might be.
I know one concept I’d add to this mix: that notion of “turning yourself into a brand” in order to get ahead.
Now, anybody with a robust sense of the absurd would have laughed that “brand” stuff off from the git go, so that would be why I don’t think awareness of the absurd is much of a factor anymore.
Huxley already addressed this with Brave New World. It was his dystopian vision that said we would be enslaved by pleasures not force, he even addressed this in a letter to Orwell in 1949.
Excellent article and I look forward to reading Harcourt’s book. Having spent the last 50 years in the news media business, I have dealt with the issue of surveillance many times. And that convinced me that, impossible to avoid being spied on, one has to beat them at their own game, i.e. embellishing the truth with vast amounts of false information so that one’s activities and thoughts become useless to those seeking it.