{"id":17855,"date":"2014-01-10T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=17855"},"modified":"2014-01-08T18:44:41","modified_gmt":"2014-01-08T22:44:41","slug":"more-eyes-different-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/01\/10\/more-eyes-different-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"More eyes, different eyes: droning & Google Glass"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Three articles came out this week that help me develop my concept of droning as a general type of surveilance that differs in important ways from the more traditional concept of \u201cthe gaze\u201d or, more academically, \u201cpanopticism.\u201d There\u2019s Molly Crabapple\u2019s post on Rizome<\/a>, the NYTimes article about consumer surveillance, and my colleague Gordon Hull\u2019s post about the recent NSA legal rulings over on NewAPPS. Thinking with and through these three articles helps me clarify a few things about the difference between droning and gazing: (1) droning is more like visualization than like \u201cthe gaze\u201d–that is, droning \u201cwatches\u201d patterns and relationships among individual \u201cgazes,\u201d patterns that are emergent properties of algorithmic number-crunching; and (2) though the metaphor of \u201cthe gaze\u201d works because the micro- and macro-levels are parallel\/homologous, droning exists only at the macro-level; individual people can run droning processes, but only if they\u2019re plugged into crowds (data streams or sets aggregating multiple micro- or individual perspectives).<\/p>\n

I. Glass<\/em><\/p>\n

Google Glass is a great illustration of the way droning layers itself on top of the infrastructure (both technological and cultural, like behaviors and norms for social interaction) of the gaze. Google Glass takes the gaze–individual sight, and uses it as the medium for data generation and collection. It superimposes droning onto the panoptic visual gaze; in this way droning is \u201csuper-panoptic\u201d (to use Jasbir Puar\u2019s term).<\/p>\n

Crabapple\u2019s article makes this superimposition really clear. On the one hand, Google Glass broadcasts her individual gaze: “Google Glass lets the government see the world from my perspective.” With Glass Gaze, I was giving the network the same opportunity.\u201d But, on the other hand, \u201che network quantifies eyeballs. It can’t see what’s behind the eyes.\u201d Her individual gaze is broadcast, but it\u2019s just the medium for another type of cultural and economic production, in the same way that paint (pigment + emulsifier) is a medium for the production of a painting. The message is the medium, in a way, a medium for the production of datasets, which are then visualized (that is, algorithmically processed). We can\u2019t see the message until the algorithms visualize it for us. We rely on drones–here, algorithms–to see in the first place. And those drones need data: \u201cINPUT! More input!<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Interlude: data<\/em><\/p>\n

Over on NewAPPs, my UNC Charlotte colleague Gordon Hull has been writing<\/a> about the recent court rulings on NSA surveillance programs. He argues that \u201cdata\u201d is different than \u201cinformation\u201d–information is meaningful (it has semantic content) in and of itself, whereas \u201cdata\u201d is meaningful only in relation to other data; but, we can only see that relationship when we process the data through algorithms designed to pick these relationships out of the enormous haystacks of data we\u2019re constantly collecting. As he explains:<\/p>\n

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This is the data\/information distinction at work: the data by itself (or in a vacuum) is meaningless \u2013 and may even be meaningless forever \u2013 but you cannot even know whether it will rise to the level of information until after you run the analytics (hence my claim that privacy arrives too late). \u00a0In this, I think, big data is charting new territory, insofar as older kinds of surveillance did not extensively collect material that was not obviously meaningful in some way or another.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So this new kind of surveillance isn\u2019t inserting itself into our lives by invading our privacy and listening to or stealing our information. Rather, it compels and rewards us for generating data. We have to feed the algorithms. That\u2019s one way to read Crabapple\u2019s claim that \u201cIn a networked world, we\u2019re all sharecroppers for Google.\u201d (And, somewhat aside, if labor is historically less protected than privacy is, perhaps that\u2019s one of the insidious effects of this type of surveillance? It both eviscerates privacy (as Hull argues) and turns surveillance into labor performed by the surveilled?).<\/p>\n

As I read Hull, he\u2019s arguing that \u201cdata\u201d is necessarily big–\u201dall data needs to be available for collection, since we can never know what data is going to be meaningful.\u201d So, not only does the government need to collect all the data that\u2019s made, but it\u2019s actively interested in getting us to produce all the data that could possibly exist.<\/p>\n

II. \u201cMore eyes, different eyes\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the really interesting things Crabapple\u2019s drawing performance does is perspectivally multiply the individual user\u2019s \u201cgaze.\u201d She explains: \u201cI was caught between focusing on the physical girl, the physical paper and the show that was being streamed through my eyes.\u201d With three different perspectives before her eyes, Crabapple\u2019s experience mimics, in scaled-down form, droning\u2019s \u201cperspectival\u201d vision.<\/p>\n

Droning, as a type of surveillance, isn\u2019t the perspective of one individual viewer. It\u2019s not the Renaissance vanishing-point perspective<\/a> that you learn about in high school art class. That sort of perspective is oriented to the gaze of a single viewer. Droning is perspectival in Nietzsche\u2019s sense of the term: it aggregates multiple single-viewer perspectives in a way that supposedly provides a more circumspect, more accurate account than any single perspective could. He argues,<\/p>\n

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we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge…There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival \u2018knowing\u2019:…the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be the \u2018concept\u2019 of the thing, our \u2018objectivity\u2019 (Genealogy of Morals<\/a>, Second Essay section 12).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This goes back to what I said earlier, via Hull, that data has to be big—the most valuable knowledge isn\u2019t \u201cinformation\u201d–the content of an individual perspective, what a gaze sees–but the \u201cdifference in perspectives,\u201d the relationships among \u201cmore, various\u201d eyes. For example, when I use Yelp or TripAdvisor or some other internet ratings site, I don\u2019t trust any one reviewer over another–I\u2019m looking for consistent patterns across reviews (e.g., did everyone describe similar problems?). In order for there to be patterns, there has to be a largeish pool of data, enough reviews to establish a trend.<\/p>\n

So, droning needs as many \u201ceyes\u201d as possible to generate data. Enter Tuesday\u2019s NYTimes article<\/a> by Quentin Hardy on the growing ubiquity of webcams, webcams attached, even, to tortoises. Tortoisecam, according to Hardy,<\/p>\n

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illustrates the increasing surveillance of nearly everything by private citizens\u2026[T]he sheer amount of private material means an enormous amount of meaningful behavior, from the whimsical to the criminal, is being stored as never before, and then edited and broadcast.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Droning outsources regular old panoptic surveillance to private citizens, often to do in their leisure time and\/or second-shift labor (e.g. nannycams). As a matter of droning,issue with this widespread private surveillance isn\u2019t privacy (to extend Hull\u2019s argument), because droning isn\u2019t collecting information–it isn\u2019t interested in the camera\u2019s gaze. [1] Rather, droning is interested in the data created by the camera. It actively encourages the proliferation of private surveillance cams because it needs \u201cmore eyes, various eyes,\u201d as many eyes as it can get…even from tortoises.[2]<\/p>\n

III. So Why Call It Droning?<\/em><\/p>\n

At first glance, the kind of surveillance I call \u201cdroning\u201d doesn\u2019t seem to be closely related to autonomous aerial vehicles. However, I think \u201cdroning\u201d is the right term for a few reasons:<\/p>\n

First, it\u2019s omnipresent. It\u2019s a constant background, like a musical drone in, say, Indian classical music.<\/p>\n

Second, it\u2019s an autonomous process run by data-generating, data-saving, and above all by number-crunching hardware and software. It doesn\u2019t need to be operated by or to correspond to the gaze\/perspective of an individual human being. Instead, and<\/p>\n

Third, as I discussed above, droning happens at the level of the swarm, the flock, the population. UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) are operated by teams, and they rely on both living and autonomous\/machinic\/digital team members. The vehicle is just the representative of its constituents, its team. Droning is not something one person does to another, or a tyranny of a \u201cmajority\u201d over a minority; droning is of, by, and for \u2018the people\u2019. [3]<\/p>\n

[1] Because droning isn\u2019t in the camera\u2019s gaze, droning works differently than the \u201cmale gaze,\u201d at least as it is classically conceived in feminist film theory. Mulvey argues that the camera\u2019s gaze is what sutures the male gaze, what makes it seem and feel authoritative. But droning isn\u2019t in the camera\u2019s gaze; it\u2019s in the camera\u2019s metadata. In my forthcoming book with Zer0 Books, I have a chapter that discusses the ways the male gaze has been reworked by contemporary media and by biopolitics.<\/p>\n

[2] Hardy\u2019s Times article also states: \u201cEvan Selinger, an associate professor of the philosophy of technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. \u201cShould the contractor like being seen all the time? What happens to the family unit? Sometimes the key to overcoming resentment is being able to forget things.\u201d In this last sentence Selinger is referring to the opening sections of the Second Essay of Nietzsche\u2019s Genealogy–the same text I cited above regarding perspectivism. There, Nietzsche argues that \u201cbad conscience\u201d or \u201cressentiment\u201d is due, in part, to the inability to \u201cforget\u201d or \u201cget over things.\u201d (I know that\u2019s a massive oversimplification of his argument, but, you can read it for yourself in the above-linked copy of the text.) Maybe Selinger has been edited\/quoted in a way that misrepresents his claim, but I don\u2019t think \u00a0big\/ubiquitous surveillance fails to forget. Droning forgets–in fact, the data\/information distinction is a great illustration of precisely the kind of Nietzschean \u201cactive forgetting\u201d Selinger alludes to in his comment. There is an explicit choice to let data sit fallow as just data (not information); that choice is coded into the algorithm itself.<\/p>\n

[3] Is there any consensus on what a flock of drones is called? I asked about this on Twitter earlier this week, and Sarah Jeong suggested calling it \u201can unconstitutionality of drones,\u201d which I may like even better than my suggestion of calling it a \u201cmurder of drones,\u201d after a murder of crows.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three articles came out this week that help me develop my concept of droning as a general type of surveilance that differs in important ways from the more traditional concept of \u201cthe gaze\u201d or, more academically, \u201cpanopticism.\u201d There\u2019s Molly Crabapple\u2019s post on Rizome, the NYTimes article about consumer surveillance, and my colleague Gordon Hull\u2019s post […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[13319,36425,10794,19938,26531,8497,26532,3998,424,2143],"class_list":["post-17855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-big-data","tag-data","tag-drones","tag-google-glass","tag-gordon-hull","tag-information","tag-molly-crabapple","tag-nietzsche","tag-privacy","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17855"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17857,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17855\/revisions\/17857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}