Category: Biopolitics
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By Gordon Hull Privacy plaintiffs have a hard time getting their cases heard in court for a variety of reasons. One of them is that courts lack a coherent and workable understanding of what privacy harms actually are, and how one might articulate them judicially. This problem bleeds into one of standing, which is what…
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Here's the current draft of a new paper – "Translating Privacy for Data Subjects." And here's the abstract: This essay offers a theoretical account of one reason that current privacy regulation fails. I argue that existing privacy laws inherit a focus on judicial subjects, using language about torts and abstract rights. Current threats to privacy,…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I followed up on a reference in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code to Foucault’s short text “Message ou bruit” (1966). Here I want to trace out some of the political implications of that text, or at least to suggest a path from it to some of his later work in the…
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By Gordon Hull In one of the Seinfeld episodes, the proprietor of a popular lunch stop would deny service to customers who offended his arbitrary sensibilities with a loud “No Soup for You!” This is basically the outcome of the Supreme Court’s June decision on standing, TransUnion v. Ramirez. “Standing” in this sense refers to…
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By Gordon Hull Update (4/30). Essential piece by Amy Kapczynski (who is one of my sources below). Also see this Twitter thread by Dennis Crouch of PatentlyO, characterizing the issue as one of technology transfer more generally than patents specifically. Trade secrets are an important issue – like patents, they allow companies to control access…
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Via Foucault News: “Paul Rabinow, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of anthropology and world-renowned anthropologist, died April 6 at the age of 76 in his Berkeley home. Rabinow spent about 41 years at UC Berkeley between 1978 to 2019, serving as the director of anthropology for the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and as the former director of…
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By Gordon Hull As of this writing, approximately 421,000 people in the United States have officially died of Covid-19. We also know that this number is fewer than the number that have actually died of Covid for a variety of reasons. For example, early in the pandemic, there was nowhere near enough testing, and so…
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Now up on SSRN. This paper uses Foucault's works on disciplinary power to develop a typology for understanding different models of Internet governance. Here is the abstract: Following Foucault’s remarks on the importance of architecture to disciplinary power, this paper offers a typology of power relations expressed in different models of Internet governance. Infrastructure governance…
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By Gordon Hull As one knows, online privacy policies (and access to the Internet in general) are generally conditioned on a user’s acceptance of some sort of boilerplate terms of service. Lots of people (myself included) have complained about this state of affairs as attempting to get users to consent to all sorts of practices…
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If you’re like me, you spend too much time – way too much time – these days looking at polling data. I ran across some interesting remarks by Foucault on opinion yesterday, which I’ll share here as a technique of distraction. He makes them in the context of a 1976 conversation with J. P. Barou…
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