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 It’s not news that Facebook generates a lot of privacy concerns. But it’s nonetheless worth keeping up a little, just to indicate how seriously we need to be concerned about the connection between Facebook and data analytics. We’ve known for a while that automated analysis of Facebook likes can predict basic personality…
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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 Foucault’s use of Nietzsche to make the distinction between history and genealogy in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” is well-known. What is less well-known, I think (perhaps I am projecting again, but I had forgotten this passage until I saw a note I’d made to it the other day), is a very clear presentation…
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Big data can – and very often is – used to discriminate. It was only a matter of time before health insurers started using it to predict who might be more likely to get sick, and to charge them more (yes, they've figured out how to circumvent the ACA). ProPublica has the story here. Be…
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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 Santa Claus knows when you’ve been sleeping, knows when you’re awake, and knows if you’ve been bad or good. Your phone knows all of that too, because it knows exactly where you are. It then sends all that information to your carrier, which keeps it in its logs for five years. Stay…
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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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