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Full Name*: David A. Banks

City*: Troy

State*: New York

email*: david.adam.banks at gmail dot com

twitter*: @da_banks

Facebook URL: https://www.facebook.com/DABanks

Instagram handle: thoriumdirigible

Why do you want an #AmtrakResidency?* [In 1,000 characters or less (including spaces)]

I want to be a part of the #AmtrakResidency insomuch as this is one of only a handful of options left to me as an author. Its good to see that someone is willing to give away a thousand dollar ticket for a couple of tweets and a blog post. I want my workspace to be funded by a tax structure written by corporations combined with ticket sales from working stiffs going back and forth on the Northeast corridor. Food is included in this trip right? more...

The 2014 Theorizing the Web (#TtW14) committee is excited to announce that we will  partner with Interface,  an open access  journal, to publish a special issue based on papers form the TtW14 conference program. The special issue will include peer-reviewed articles and non-peer-reviewed essays, as well as invited panel reviews. All TtW14 presenters are welcome to submit. Look below the jump to learn why we selected Interface as our platform.  more...

Last February, I – piggybacking off a great short essay by Ed Felter on what he called “Property Rights Management” – said that I wouldn’t be surprised to see things like DRM making their way into other devices that don’t explicitly have to do with the kinds of software and firmware in which we’re accustomed to seeing DRM.

Literally one year later: Keurig!

The moral of the story is always listen to me.

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Today’s post is a reply to Robin James’ post, which raises questions stemming from the observations made in Jodi Dean’s recent post on “What Comes After Real Subsumption?”

This might be a tad “incompatible” with the existing discussion because while the discussion so far has focused mainly on a Marxist approach to a series of philosophical questions, I want to take an anarchist approach to an anthropological re-reading of the initial question: “what comes after real subsumption?” That is, I think some of the subsequent questions might be more answerable if we interrogate their anthropological facets. Particularly, I want to focus on what is considered feedstock for production and what is identified as the act of consumption which, by definition, must yield a waste that capitalists sort through in an effort to extract more surplus value. Pigs in shit as it were.  more...

Irwin Altman defines privacy as “the selective control of access to the self” (1977:67).  To maintain privacy is not, necessarily, to avoid disclosure, but to exhibit autonomy and choice over that which is, and it not, exposed. A privacy violation is that which unduly inhibits this control.

What counts as a privacy violation is far from straight forward, and always situation specific.   Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework  delineates the relationship between situational expectations and relative control over access to the self. Specifically, Nissenbuam argues that each context contains its own set of privacy norms, or expectations about how much of the self will be accessible. From this perspective, a privacy violation is that which violates privacy norms. Or in other words, privacy is violated when the self is more accessible than one has agreed to. Ostensibly, one could then avoid those contexts in which the self is highly accessible, and cry “violation!” when the self is unduly accessed.   more...

This post is really a series of questions that arise when I tried to think about my earlier post on the production of WOC/black feminists as “toxic” in light of Jodi Dean’s new post “What comes after real subsumption?” I’m hoping maybe that we can think through these questions together.

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Turns out that my very first post here was about Facebook (and DeviantArt) and gender identification.

This is obviously something to which we Cyborgologists are again paying close attention, what with Facebook now allowing a plethora of new choices by which someone might identify their gender. There have already been a couple of great posts on the subject – the new ways in which Facebook is making it possible to self-identify and the ways in which gender is performed – by Jenny Davis and Robin James. But this is also something that’s very personal for me, and not just in terms of my Cyborgtastic journey of the last couple of years.

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There’s a song from the musical Avenue Q that famously proclaims, “The Internet is For Porn”—but really, anyone who’s been paying attention to the post-“Web 2.0” era knows that isn’t true.

These days, the Internet is for cats.

Furthermore, I propose this corollary: Smartphones are for documenting cats. Whether through T. gondii or through their unrivaled documentability, cats actually rule the world. Cat people know this, and anyone who’s ever spent time with cats knows that cats know this. Rewrite the song: The Internet is For Cats.

My cat, however, is not a fan of the Internet. more...

As Jenny’s post last week discussed, Facebook lets us identify our gender in very specific ways. But this blog post suggests that Facebook may also be a medium for performing gender. The post’s title suggests that “suspension” from Facebook is a “status symbol”–but I wonder if it’s not a gendered, nationalist/racialized status symbol, a symbol of a specific type of Indian masculinity?

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Sometimes it feels that to be a good surveillance theorist you are also required to be a good storyteller. Understanding surveillance seems to uniquely rely on metaphor and fiction, like we need to first see another possible world to best grasp how watching is happening here. Perhaps the appeal to metaphor is evidence of how quickly watching and being watched is changing – as a feature of modernity itself in general and our current technological moment in particular. The history of surveillance is one of radical change, and, as ever, it is fluctuating and rearranging itself with the new, digital, technologies of information production and consumption. Here, I’d like to offer a brief comment not so much on these new forms of self, interpersonal, cultural, corporate, and governmental surveillance as much as on the metaphors we use to understand them.

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