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
about
Category: Gordon Hull
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By Gordon Hull Consider the following, too brief summary: following Foucault, one can say that biopolitics is about optimizing populations, or something to that effect. This involves a lot of work on the part of the administrative state, which sets itself up to provide services, everything from sewers and other infrastructure to social safety nets. …
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In the shameless self-promotion dept., I have a new paper out – actually a review essay in Ethics & International Affairs (SSRN link here) of two recent books on privacy, Ari Ezra Waldman's Privacy as Trust and Jennifer Rothman's Right of Publicity. Both books are well-worth the read! The essay also pushes my thesis about…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I offered some thoughts on Woody Hartzog’s (and co-authors’) development of “obscurity” as a partial replacement for privacy. On Hartzog’s account, privacy is subject to a number of problems, not least of which is that we tend to think in terms of an unsustainable binary: things are either “private” or…
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By Gordon Hull In a series of articles (and a NYT op-ed; my $.02 on that is here), Woddy Hartzog and several co-authors have been developing the concept of “obscurity” as a partial replacement for “privacy.” The gist of the argument, as explained by Hartzog and Evan Selinger in a recent anthology piece (“Obscurity and…
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I'm very pleased to announce that my new book, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, is now out in print/electronically on Cambridge UP. Here's a blurb: "Intellectual property is power, but what kind of power is it, and what does it do? Building on the work of Michel Foucault, this study examines different ways of understanding…
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By Gordon Hull As I noted last time, the Supreme Court has decided to take up a case about copyright in state codes. Specifically, Georgia contracts with Lexis to produce an annotated version of its code, which is the state then blesses with the title “Official Georgia Code Annotated” and claims copyright in. The question…
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There is an interesting copyright case before the Supreme Court this term, Georgia v. Public Resource.org. It is settled law that official edicts of the government – statutory texts, judicial opinions, agency rules – are not copyrightable. More about that in a moment. In this case, Georgia entered into a contract with Lexis to produce…
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Per an investigative report in the Washington Post, growing numbers of colleges are using cookies and other website tracking devices to profile potential students and selectively recruit, including sometimes by income level (there’s a long discussion of how Mississippi State appears to be doing this). And of course they do so by spending lots of…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, following a new paper by Andrea Rossi, I suggested that Hobbes’s reformulation of the Stoic “security” in terms that we would recognize as biopolitical – oriented toward human flourishing, and not just survival – enables him to reformulate the Ciceronian salus populi suprema lex (“the welfare of the people is…
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By Gordon Hull Foucault aligns Hobbes with juridical power, not biopower. Juridical power is repressive and takes life away; it is epitomized by monarchy. Biopower, in contrast, is power that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (HS 1, 137). …
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