Category: Gordon Hull
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This piece, on Facebook's behaving more like an autocratic, hostile state than a large company, is worth the read. Here's an excerpt: "Perhaps Americans have become so cynical that they have given up on defending their freedom from surveillance, manipulation, and exploitation. But if Russia or China were taking the exact same actions to undermine…
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I was both saddened and stunned this morning to read of the passing of Charles Mills. I first met him at a SPEP years ago; I was having lunch at some random sandwich shop with friends. He knew one of us, and asked if he could join. Nevermind that we were all junior. I managed…
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Shameless self-promotion dept… here's the preprint for my new paper, "The Death of the Data Subject," now forthcoming in Law, Culture and the Humanities. And here's the abstract: This paper situates the data privacy debate in the context of what I call the death of the data subject. My central claim is that concept of…
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And what does that mean? Now is a good time to ask. The Court has let stand a 5th Circuit decision upholding a Texas law that is plainly unconstitutional under current SCOTUS jurisprudence (it bans abortion at 6 weeks) and involves an enforcement mechanism that comes straight from Stalin’s playbook (it allows individuals to sue…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I started to look at the details of the Supreme Court’s recent TransUnion decision, which ruled that a credit agency that wrongly labeled someone as a match for a terrorist watch list (using only first and last names, with no effort at verification. Sorry “John Smith”…) could only be sued…
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By Gordon Hull In one of the Seinfeld episodes, the proprietor of a popular lunch stop would deny service to customers who offended his arbitrary sensibilities with a loud “No Soup for You!” This is basically the outcome of the Supreme Court’s June decision on standing, TransUnion v. Ramirez. “Standing” in this sense refers to…
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By Gordon Hull In a previous post, I noted that Foucault strongly implies in a 1978 interview that his communist detractors are bureaucrats, and tied that to an earlier interview with Maoists in which he suggests that structuring populist tribunals on the model of bourgeois courts would fail to break with the power structure of…
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My further thoughts on the background through which we should interpret Covid patent waivers, at Real Life.
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By Gordon Hull In a previous post, I made the case for reading Foucault’s 1978 comments on Marxism (especially in the Yoshimoto interview) in the context of theory/practice questions raised by the re-evaluation of Marx’s 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach.” Here I want to flesh out that position a little more, starting with reference to another…
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By Gordon Hull Update (4/30). Essential piece by Amy Kapczynski (who is one of my sources below). Also see this Twitter thread by Dennis Crouch of PatentlyO, characterizing the issue as one of technology transfer more generally than patents specifically. Trade secrets are an important issue – like patents, they allow companies to control access…
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