One Nation Under Tesco
Reading this excellent, and quite exhaustive, analysis of the British zustände I came across this wonderful observation:
In August, in the Pembury Estate in Hackney, one person climbed the lamppost to disconnect the CCTV cameras. After clambering up, he found himself without the right tools to do the job. In a moment reflecting Banksy’s ‘Salute to the Tesco shopping bag’ daubed on Essex Road, the young rioter puts a Tesco bag over the camera. One nation watched over by machines of loving grace, and plastic bags. The security camera was obscured by the shroud of consumerism. For a few nights, the desire for proletarian shopping outmanoeuvred the collection of data. Two machines of the social factory came into conflict with each other.
‘Salt’ by Escalate Collective
Sometimes - like, now - when I feel stuck in the thicket of poststructuralist gobbledygook, it really helps to return to these sobering sentences of the always brilliant David Graeber:
Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment.
Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway, they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.
In fact the threat of that man with the stick permeates our world at every moment; most of us have given up even thinking of crossing the innumerable lines and barriers he creates, just so we don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If you see a hungry woman standing several yards away from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrence for most of us who live in cities—there is a reason you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man with a big stick will come and very likely hit you.
Discourse, schmiscourse. We gotta get rid of the man with the big stick.
re: carebots. You are the monkey.
This little episode neatly illustrates the problem with robotics and artificial intelligence research. At a conference, a medical diagnostic system with voice recognition and built-in emotional response was presented:
When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.” A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”
A medical machine that simulates emotions can only be seriously considered within a social order that strives to eliminate the most basic human response - empathy and care - as unnecessary cost.
Since women won’t put up anymore with bearing the brunt of unpaid reproductive and affective labour, and rightly so, it increasingly seems that carebots like the one above will be pushed in order to continue reproducing the labour force without actually paying someone to do it.
I love robots, but: it’s capitalism, stupid.
Langdon Winner FTW:
Much of what now passes for incisive analysis is actually nothing more than elaborate landscape, impressionistic, futuristic razzle-dazzle spewing forth in an endless stream of paperback non-books, media extravaganzas, and global village publicity. … The Postindustrial Society? The Technetronic Society? The Posthistoric Society? The Active Society? In an unconscious parody of the ancient belief that he who knows God’s secret name will have extraordinary powers, the idea seems to be that a stroke of nomenclature will bring light to the darkness. This does make for captivating book titles but little else.
From: Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977)
This is hilarious:
The “Craigslist robber” offers a minor but illustrative example of obfuscation as a practice turned to criminal ends. At 11 AM on Tuesday, 30 September 2008, a man dressed like an exterminator in a blue shirt, goggles and a dust mask, and carrying a spray pump, approached an armored car parked outside a bank in Monroe, Washington, incapacitated the guard with pepper spray, and took a substantial amount of money. When the police arrived, they found 13 men in the area wearing blue shirts, goggles and dust masks — a uniform they were wearing on the instructions of a Craigslist ad which promised a good wage for maintenance work, which was to start at 11:15 AM at the bank’s address.
From ‘Vernacular resistance to data collection and analysis: A political theory of obfuscation’
