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    Category: Gordon Hull

    • 23andMe has a new business model…

      By Gordon Hull A couple of weeks ago, in a post on Theranos, which has been developing a new – and very fast and cheap – technique for blood-testing, I mentioned the woes of 23andMe.com, a site which originally offered direct to consumer genetic testing, before the FDA shut it down for any medical claims…

    • Responses to Zamora’s “Can We Criticize Foucault?”

      Daniel Zamora’s interview in Jacobin (following the publication of a book he edited), in which he claims that Foucault ended up de facto endorsing neoliberalism, has generated a lot of renewed discussion about Foucault’s late work.  Over at An und für sich, Mark William Westmoreland has organized a series of posts responding to Zamora.  I’m…

    • Theranos and the Biopolitics of Blood-Testing

      By Gordon Hull The current New Yorker includes a profile of Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up that is developing new techniques of blood-testing, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes.  In the old way, you’d go to the doctor, who’d order some tests.  You’d then get a blood draw of a couple of vials of blood, and…

    • Big Data and the Hyper-Reserve Army

      By Gordon Hull At the end of my time in high school, I worked part-time bagging groceries.  There was some modest union influence on the job, and its scheduling was pretty predictable: the longer you’d been there, the better schedule you’d get.  Your first few weeks, you knew you’d be working late into the evening,…

    • Taylor Swift’s Platonism

      By Gordon Hull Over on Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James has a post up about Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album.  James focuses on two moments in that promotion: on the one hand, Swift has removed her music from the free streaming part of Spotify, on the grounds that it insufficiently compensates her (and…

    • The Surveillance State at the Intersection of Bio, Juridical and Sovereign Power

      By Gordon Hull As I’ve suggested here before, one of the undertheorized aspects of biopower is the relation between biopower and the juridical power it supposedly supplants.  Now, I think it’s a mistake to think that biopower simply replaces juridical power, at least not on Foucault’s considered view (for the sorts of reasons given in…

    • Health Informatics, Negative Spaces, and Corporate Privacy

      by Gordon Hull Judge Richard Posner’s well-known application of law and economics to privacy yields results that appear, well, ideological.  First, he considers what individuals do with informational privacy. What is an interest in privacy of information, he asks?  Well, it’s an interest in enforcing an information asymmetry in markets.  Information asymmetry is presumptively bad…

    • Cloud Computing and the Extension of the Price Mechanism

      by Gordon Hull Cloud computing – where users keep their data (and often their applications) online – poses significant theoretical and regulatory problems.  Many of these concern jurisdiction: it’s very hard to even know at a given moment where data is kept, and it’s often unclear (in the case of privacy, for example), which jurisdiction’s…

    • Privacy Research and Academic Freedom

      by Gordon Hull To the long list of rich entities trying to generate academic research that supports their business model, add (maybe) Google.  This piece in ProPublica discovered that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society had promised not to use any Google money to fund privacy research, after research done at Stanford led to…

    • RFID Tags and Commodification

      by Gordon Hull In a recent post, and by way of an important paper by Katherine Hayles, I suggested that “insofar as RFID chips negotiate the boundary between informatics and objects, and transitions between those, they should be studied as sites for the primitive accumulation of capital.  That is, they are places where objects can…