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 Several months ago, I argued here that big data is going to make a big mess of privacy – primarily because of a distinction between “data,” understood as the effluvia of daily life, generated by such activities as moving around town or making phone calls, and “information,” which implies some sort of…
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Mark Graber (Law and Government, Maryland) has an interesting post up on the Salaita case and academic culture over at Balkinization. Here's the paragraph that jumped out at me, as I haven't seen this particular point made before: Each year, more and more pressure seems to be put on faculty to spend less time on…
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Only a couple of weeks after the Ferguson shooting, and only about three miles away, St. Louis police shot and killed another black man, Kajieme Powell, after he apparently shoplifted from a convenience store. The details of what happened in Ferguson are in dispute, which has allowed the law and order crowd to defend putting…
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As I noted in an earlier post, preparing for a seminar on privacy and surveillance has given me the opportunity to learn more about any number of aspects of the topic – in this case (again) the feminist critique of privacy. To recap: on this argument, which is most commonly associated with Catharine MacKinnon (see…
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I’m teaching a course on privacy and surveillance this fall, and one of the things I’ve been doing is reading up on aspects of privacy theory that I didn’t know much about, such as the feminist critique of privacy. The basic feminist argument is that “family privacy” has been historically used as a cover to…
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“Yo” Is an App that doesn’t let you do much: it just lets you send or receive a “Yo” message to/from another subscriber. Purists might insist on this being content, but it really is pretty de minimis, which lets you ask the obvious question: why on earth would a communication technology that doesn’t really let…
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Suspecting that a disappointing Court decision is coming doesn’t make it any better when it arrives, as did the Hobby Lobby opinion this morning, in which a 5-4 majority (led by Justice Alito) said that it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1992 to require a “closely held corporation” (“family-owned,” but expect lots of…
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In the most anticipated Copyright decision this term, the Supreme Court today ruled, 6-3 (opinion by Breyer, dissent Scalia) that Aereo’s service for watching broadcast TV online violates the Copyright Act. Briefly: Aero operates a large number of tiny antennas. Subscribers pick a program they want to watch, and get exclusive access to an antenna. …
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In case you hadn’t heard, it’s been a big week in intellectual property. The biggest news item in the non-legal press was the Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to cancel several of the NFL’s Washington Redskins trademarks because they were “disparaging.” This review and cancellation is required by statute, and the decision is generating a…
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I am increasingly convinced that any Foucauldian effort to understand neoliberalism needs to focus on it as a strategy of subjectification (more specifically, it’s the strategy of subjectification specific to contemporary biopower, and it says that the truth of the human being is as homo economicus). One reason I think this is that one finds…
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