Dresden
A new day has dawned on us at ICA2006, and the first session of this Wednesday has started. I'm in a session on Surveillance and Control, and Josh Lauer makes a start with a paper on the development of credit reporting agencies (or mercantile agencies), framed here as a surveillance technology. The emergence of such agencies in the U.S. in the 1800s can be seen as a sign of modernity, increased population movements, and the breakdown of trust in the public sphere. Initially, such systems were framed mainly as a simple extension of credit checks already conducted by individual merchants, but in the form of an impartial national service. Credit information was tightly protected - no written traces of credit checks were allowed to leave the business premises of the initial credit checking agencies.
How does this translate to modern mercantile surveillance technologies? In the 1800s, the focus was mainly on checking the credit rating of individual business proprietors, and later individual consumers, which investigated the track record of individuals by sometimes rather invasive methods; today, this has moved into a broader checking of companies' credit rating, as well as a broader-scale investigation of large numbers of consumers. The 1800s model gave rise to a kind of proto-database embedded in a wider system of mass surveillance, inscribing the textualised individual into ledger books and thereby expediting business transactions - but they also privileged financial performance and opened up personal character to rumour-mongering.
The system was, and is, inescapable and thus an infringement on privacy. It was designed specifically for commodification and use by external client, making it a precursor to the modern information age in which individuals were condensed into the financial data which could be extracted from them.
Dataveillance and Homo Sacer
The second paper, presented by Tema Milstein, is on dataveillance and the constructions of terrorists in the 'war on terror'. This is based on Agamben's idea of homo sacer, and draws a parallel between biopolitics during Nazi times and information politics today. Then, medical and biological arguments were used to place certain groups in a 'zone of indistinction' and to describe them as life not worth preserving, leading ultimately to the development of the concentration camps. Indeed, all modern, post-enlightenment states continually use biopolitics to redefine what the boundaries of their own citizenry.
Dataveillance can be seen as another emergent technology of biopolitics. The war on terror, by its unending duration, unwinnable and indeterminate goal, and the multiplicities of spaces of exception, functions much as in Nazi times to render the state of exception - the state of emergency - permanent.
Domination or Democratisation?
Next up is Victor Pickard. He notes the continuing theme of a tension between the democratising potential of the Internet and the colonisation and enclosure of the Net by state and commercial interests. There is a neoliberal paradox by which the ubiquity of neoliberalism breeds new potential for resistance, and there is an increasing interest in activist approaches to the Internet. What is necessary here, though, is to examine the democratic theories employed by such groups.
One example for such activism is Indymedia, with its slogan 'be the media' and its open publishing technologies. But this also generates constraints, and prefigures a vision of ideal society in which an open and intelligent exchange between informed citizens is possible and desirable. Another example is MoveOn.org - 'democracy in action' - with its liberal pluralist model that harnesses the political power of the progressive constituency. It employs a top-down structure that lacks in transparency - MoveOn does not aim to change the fundamental political structure of society, and instead it could be seen as engaging in an arms race with other political forces.
Free Republic is essential a news aggregator highlighting specific stories in the media and adding further debate which may generate political action (such as Dan Rather's downfall). Such news forms can be seen as public spheres. Democratic Underground can be seen as a progressive counterpart to Free Republic, and indeed there is a kind of paranoia about potential incursion of 'Freepers' into this environment.
Such groups are under threat from moves to dismantle Internet neutrality, of course, and indeed they find themselves in a strange bedfellows coalition (also with groups such as the NRA) attempting to save Net neutrality.
