New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    Category: Gordon Hull

    • Biopower, Juridical Power, and Patent Trolls

      Patent law seems like an easy place to talk about biopower.  After all, it has been possible to patent life forms for some time now, and large numbers of patents are issued for products that directly affect life, as in the case of pharmaceuticals and other medical innovations.  Biopolitical implications of patent law are thus…

    • Kant on Big Data?

      A recent paper by Ermanno Bencivenga in Philosophical Forum argues that it’s “time for philosophy to step into the conversation” (135) about big data, in particular to refute the thesis, which the article identifies in a 2008 piece in Wired, that big data will mean that we no longer need theory: “with enough data, the…

    • Republican Thanatopolitics

      Foucault reminds us that biopolitics is describes a kind of power structure according to which some will be compelled to live (or have their lives as members of a favored population optimized), while others will be allowed to die.  As he puts it, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by…

    • Trump Administration Hypocrisy of the Day: What Should Local Cops be Doing?

      I know there’s a lot of material to pick from here, but the following two positions are hard to reconcile with a straight face.  Since Trump’s and his surrogates’ big mouths have been used against him before in Court, perhaps some court will see this one.  On the one hand, the mass deportation program is…

    • Today in Creepy Privacy Invasions: Burger King

      Apparently Burger King ran an ad that attempted to trigger Google Home by having a Burger King employee say “OK, Google: What is the Whopper burger?”  First the ad was up, then it was down, now BK says that it might come back.  The ad was supposed to trigger Google Home to read the first…

    • North Carolina Repeals and Replaces HB 2

      As you probably have heard, in a flurry of activity yesterday, the North Carolina legislature repealed and replaced its omnibus LGBT-hate law, HB 2.  The state was clearly moved to act by an NCAA deadline (repeal by Thursday, or no championships until 22) and an AP report earlier in the week that said the law…

    • Do Brands Produce Value? Thoughts on de-fetishizing use value

      Brands are of increasing importance to capitalism.  As an insightful book by Franck Cochoy argues, this is part of the logic of commodification, which generates a perpetual demand for product differentiation.  At the point that a product becomes a commodity – i.e., at the point that it leaves the bazaar, where individual vendors measure out…

    • Squaring the Circle on Big Data, Class, Value and Primitive Accumulation

      A recent paper by Hamid Ekbia presents an interesting Marxian theory of the relation between exploitation and computer networks.   The paper is intended as an intervention in to discussions of the accumulation of value in what is now called cognitive capitalism (I’ve attempted to synthesize some of that literature here).  The most interesting part of…

    • Notes on Big Data, Marx, Time, and the Production of Value

      There is a running debate in critical theory circles about the applicability of Marxian analysis to big data specifically, and to an economy dominated by immaterial goods, more generally (I have blogged about this periodically, circling primarily around the concept of primitive accumulation: see here and here).  As part of working through that literature, here…

    • Self-Tracking, Big Data, and the questions of Subjectification and Primitive Accumulation

      One question surrounding big data – in addition to well-established worries about privacy and discrimination – that is starting to get attention is how it functions as a mode of capitalist accumulation.  There is an emerging literature on capitalist value creation and big data, but a lot of that is about the creation of surplus…