Category: Biopolitics
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By Gordon Hull I mean the title of this post literally. A recent study that surveyed global neurological disease incidence concluded that neurological disorders now are the leading global cause of disability, and that their rates are rapidly rising. A substantial portion of this is due to increasing rates of Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s and other…
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By Gordon Hull As Foucault emphasizes in Birth of Biopolitics, one of the signal moves in American neoliberalism is the extension of economic analysis into all aspects of life. As he puts it, the American neoliberals “try to use the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and…
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By Gordon Hull The current issue of Foucault Studies contains the first English translation of a lecture Foucault gave in Japan in 1978. This “Analytic Philosophy of Politics” is essential reading if you have an interest in the transition between Foucault’s “power” and “ethics” work and/or his later understanding of power and resistance. The Tokyo…
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By Gordon Hull One of the things that marketers like about big data is that they can personalize ads. That operation is getting increasingly sophisticated. We’ve known for a while that basic personality traits (like introversion/extraversion) can be predicted from Facebook likes. I missed this paper when it came out, but some of the same…
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By Gordon Hull We’ve all heard of a version of the experiment: you set a kid down with a marshmallow, and tell him that if he can sit there and not eat it for a while, he can have two. Some kids can do it, and others can’t. A famous paper suggests that whether the…
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By Gordon Hull In a recent paper, Karen Yeung introduces the concept of a ‘hypernudge’ as a way to capture the way Big Data intensifies design-based ‘nudges’ as a form of regulation. Yeung’s discussion draws partly from discussions of Internet regulation, partly from literature on design, and partly from legal literature around privacy and big…
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By Gordon Hull The Supreme Court issued a landmark patent ruling yesterday in Oil States v. Greene. The most recent major revision to the Patent statute specifies that the validity of patents – in terms of whether they meet conditions of patentability (utility, non-obviousness and novelty – the opinion does not directly specify whether questions…
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By Gordon Hull In the two previous posts, I first suggested that Thomas Merrill’s logical argument for why the right to exclude was the sine qua non of any conception of property was inconclusive. I then offered a brief reading of the Foucauldian distinction between juridical and biopower, applying it to Locke to suggest that…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I suggested that Thomas Merrill’s logical argument for why the right to exclude was the sine qua non of any conception of property was inconclusive. With that space cleared, I want to focus on what I think a focus on the right to exclude does emphasize. Merrill is right that…
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