CRDM 701

Week 11 - Kathy

About a year ago, I began to notice large grey poles along my normal driving routes, which upon further inspection had cameras attached to them. They must have been put up overnight, since I never saw the people who put them there. Yes, things are different after 9/11. Yes, I want to feel safe. I wonder, though, if a massive deployment of cameras along the roads of a suburban community with virtually no crime is a little excessive. Is this an indication of something more than simply "montoring traffic"? After reading Becoming Bombs: Mobilizing Mobility, it is making more sense - perhaps it is a symptom of the shift from a logic of safety to one of security, in this case, "activated through a particular mode of mobility, the automobile" (Packer, 2006, p. 380).

Talking about the shift to a security society, Packer notes that with the development of communications, command, and control networks (C3) "rather than being treated as one to be protected from an exterior force and one?s self, the citizen is now treated an always potential threat, a becoming bomb" (p.382). What immediately came to mind was the Matrix (1999), and the idea that at any time, an average citizen in the Matrix could become an Agent, posing an insurmountable threat. The Matrix could instantly become a dangerous place for those on the side of the resistance, and so needed to be constantly monitored from the Nebuchadnezzar -- a mobile command unit -- to ensure the safe movement of Morpheus and his crew.

The discussion of mobile command units - the Ford prototype and the Hummer Militia (scary thought) - made me think about Carey's (1989) discussion of the expansion of European Empires via the printing press*. With the printing press, Carey highlights the centralization of authority as well as the decentralization of national administration (p. 158). When any vehicle can be a bomb, it makes sense that any other vehicle should become an extension of the State, like an Agent in the Matrix. The idea of making truck drivers and commuters or an assemblage of electronic devices and software a decentralized extension of the centralized State at first seems like a logical choice - until, that is, we take into account what constitutes "suspicious activity." If, as Packer writes the recognition is dependent on "risk assessment algorithms of mobilities" (p. 392), there is a lot of wiggle room on what could be "suspicious". In a world where C3 networks could also track credit card purchases, phone calls, and library records, a simple run to Target for cleaning supplies and a stop at Lowes for some plywood could be suspicious - maybe more so if said vehicle has also been located at a Green Peace meeting. Maybe you aren't spending the weekend cleaning and doing a little home fix-up - maybe now you are explaining your patterns of automobility to the feds.

I am also interested in another kind of mobility - virtual mobility. What web sites you visit, your virtual mobility, could indicate a future threat. As someone who did research on hacking, I can't help but think that my Internet histories could be seen as having interesting future trajectories - perhaps as a L337 H4X0R? While I would be flattered, I certainly lack the skills. I still wonder sometimes if my patterns of virtual mobility will ever compel someone to ask me politely to change my research topics, or to come to different conclusions.  

Something that I would like to discuss more in class is the move from disciplinarily to control societies, and I am interested in learning more about the idea of control societies in general. Packer (2006) cites Deluze as calling for us to "see into and before the dawning of this control society in order to prepare modes of resistance" (p. 384). Effective resistance to the control society is more than sabotage, but (again, citing Deluze) to "create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control" (p. 396). I'm thinking lately about re-visiting my thesis topic (hackers) and feel like this might be an interesting way to pick up where I left off, and perhaps look at hackers as a circuit breaker.

Switching gears real quick: At the point that Innis discusses the format change from papyrus roll to parchment codex and the "system of censorship" involved (1951, p. 48), I was reminded of how changes in format can leave valuable information behind, deliberately or not. In that case, it was a ban on secular learning - these days, what gets lost seems to have a lot to do with profitability. As in, don?t trash those LP's, VHS tapes, and books - not everything makes the cut, and the move to digital means a lot of things might get lost. There are a lot of cool preservation projects out there - check out this one that asks people to send in all kinds of moving images for archiving: http://www.archive.org/details/movies.

See you all tomorrow!


*for you, Dawn.

Posted at 04:45PM Nov 07, 2007 by kfoswald in Week 11  |  Comments[44]