recent posts
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 4: Kant, Anthropology, and Departing from Heidegger
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 3: Heidegger and Foucault on Kant
- AI Literacy Paper
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 2: Heidegger?
- (Very) Early Foucault on Humanism, Part 1: From Order back to Lille
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Category: Gordon Hull
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By Gordon Hull I argued a few days ago that late capitalism, with its fetishization of efficiency, leaves us unprepared for a pandemic because of vulnerabilities in the supply chain. In a recent blogpost, Frank Pasquale adds some healthcare-specific texture to the point, noting how our healthcare system is almost designed to fail in a…
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Geolocation data is getting increasing attention as a way of tracking social distancing in particular. Google has just released a bunch of its geolocation data, which tracks changes in trips to retail, parks and other places. In the meantime, a new paper in Science says that a good contact-tracing App, if sufficiently robust and adequately…
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By Gordon Hull I know there’s a lot of ways to develop that thesis! Let me focus on one: the fetishization of “efficiency,” and its corollary, just-in-time supply chains. In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis argues that a lot of the disruption in consumer goods (toilet paper, etc.) is initially attributable not…
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As I noted earlier, cellphone tracking data is proving an interesting tool in trying to understand the spread of COVID-19. You'll recall that Florida beaches featured a whole bunch of tightly-packed WOO-HOO SPRING BREAKers. And that they then presumably left the state. Where did they go? Here's a map based on cellphone data. Thanks Gov.…
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By Gordon Hull A recent piece in the Guardian points to the limitations of models in understanding the spread of COVID-19: principally, those models are often not based on reliable data specific to the disease, so they can be wildly off. As I argued earlier, the bottom line is that we really have no idea…
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By Gordon Hull In a follow-up to a controversial piece in which he argued (in late February) that the social distancing and quarantining in Italy presented the temptation to universalize the state of exception, Agamben says this: “Fear is a bad counsellor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The…
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By Gordon hull The coronavirus outbreak showcases a lot of what is wrong with the Trump administration and the stupid, preening narcissist at its head (this is a president who claimed not to have known that flu kills thousands of people every year – but whose own grandfather was a victim of the 1918 pandemic). …
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By Gordon Hull Toward the end of “What is an Author,” Foucault distinguishes between the “founder” and “initiator [instaurateur]” of a discourse. Galileo is the paradigmatic example of the former, and Marx of the latter. This is a puzzling distinction, to say the least. Let’s begin with the terminology: Although “founder [fondateur]” is common enough,…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I suggested that a recent paper by Mala Chatterjee and Jeanne Fromer is very helpful in disentangling what is at stake in Facebook’s critique of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Recall that BIPA requires consent before collecting biometric identifiers, and a group of folks sued FB over phototagging. Among…
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By Gordon Hull Facial recognition technology is an upcoming privacy mess. An early example of why is photo-tagging on Facebook. The privacy problem was noted a while ago by Woody Hartzog and Frederic Stutzman: “once a photo is tagged with an identifier, such as a name or link to a profile, it becomes searchable …making…
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