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    Category: Gordon Hull

    • Neoliberal economics and the devalued humanities

      In his critique of Posner’s economic analysis of law, the late Ed Baker offers some remarks that might help us to understand current developments in educational policy.  Posner defends what we will now recognize as a number of the core commitments of neoliberal policy, in particular the fundamental efficiency of markets and the price mechanism…

    • Big Data and Privacy 4: Kyllo and the Collapse of the per se informative

      In a series of earlier posts (here, here, and here), I suggested that big data is going to pose problems for privacy, insofar as privacy depends on a distinction between information and data.  Here, I want to look at how that problem plays out in a specific 4th Amendment case on thermal imaging devices. In…

    • Biopolitical Employment Screening

       If anyone still doubted that Agamben’s thesis – according to which biopolitics today is about the reduction of politics to biological existence (zoe), shorn of anything to do with the form (bios) of life – needs revision, this arrives about big-data employee screening that operates with an amalgam of questionnaires and biometrics.  Salon’s Andrew Leonard relates:

    • Big Data and Big-Profit colleges

      This piece up at Salon gives a good narrative account of the problems with the for-profit college industry.  These colleges prey on vulnerable students, making sunny promises about life after graduation.  Once those students enroll, the colleges pocket the students’ federal grant and loan money.  An alarming percentage of the students don't even finish a…

    • Privacy and Big Data III: When Security beats Privacy

      In a second court ruling on the NSA’s metadata collection program, Judge Pauley rejected virtually all of the arguments raised by the ACLU and other plaintiffs against the program.  This opinion thus stands opposed to Judge Leon’s ruling of a few weeks before (my analysis of that is here).  Here I want to look at…

    • Privacy and Big Data II: NSA Metadata between Juridical Power and Biopower

      In a previous post, I suggested that the concept of privacy is going to prove inadequate as a protection against big data.  This is the case for structural reasons: the concept of privacy is designed to protect information (generally, either information that is thought to be inherently intimate, or in the sense of control over…

    • Big Data: Why privacy is no help at all

      A federal judge today ruled that some of the NSA’s broad, warrantless collection of data from American citizens, particularly of so-called ‘metadata,’ which includes routing information for phone calls (what phone numbers have been in contact with each other, and so on.  This can be very damaging!) – did not violate the constitution.  This ruling…