New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    • Biometeric Chicanery

      Let’s say the state passes a law that says that restaurants may not put worms in hamburgers, and that customers can sue those that do. Your kids eat at the local Annelids franchise on the way home from school, and you later discover that the burgers contain worms. You sue the restaurant, and in response, it says that since your kids didn’t get sick from the experience, it only “technically” violated the law, and you therefore have no basis to either collect damages or force them to stop. That is, on the face of it, a pretty stupid construction of the law, since it would make it totally unenforceable. It is also, more or less, how Facebook, Google, and Six Flags Great America think you should read the Illinois Biometric Privacy Information Act (BIPA).

      In a unanimous ruling yesterday, the Illinois Supreme Court said otherwise. The Act regulates companies that collect biometric information like fingerprints and face scans. In the case at hand, the amusement park used thumbprints to identify customers who had bought a season pass, in order to admit them quickly and to stop people from sharing passes (you know the second reason is the real one; since when do amusement parks worry about long lines?). If the company wants to collect such information, it has to inform customers what they’re doing in writing, and get affirmative consent. In particular, the company must “inform[] the subject or the subject’s legally authorized representative in writing of the specific purpose and length of term for which a biometric identifier or biometric information is being collected, stored, and used” (cited in para 20).

      This is notice and consent privacy as it should be! There’s a lot of reasons why I don’t think notice and consent privacy actually works – I called it a “successful failure” because the main effect is to teach us that privacy is something we should sell off but without actually protecting privacy. Nobody knows what they’re consenting to, the privacy notices are impossible and long and incomprehensible, and so on. Six Flags et al don’t even get that far: they argue that they don’t actually have to follow the law. So for them, privacy should just be a failure.

      (more…)

    • A Mysterious Scandal

      By Gordon Hull

      The Supreme Court just granted cert in an important trademark case, in re Brunetti.  The case concerns whether Eric Brunetti can get federal trademark registration for his FUCT line of clothing.  Although Brunetti can of course market the clothing in any case, and can claim common law trademark rights, federal registration confers a number of benefits, especially if the owner ends up litigating the mark.  A little background.

      Section 2 of the Lanham Act specifies a few things that are not eligible for registration, such as official insignia of governmental entities and the identifying name, signature or portrait of a living person without their consent.  The statute also prohibits registration of a mark which:

      Consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute (15 USC 1052(a)).

      In denying registration to scandalous or disparaging material, the Lanham Act seems to be generally biopolitical in that it is concerned with optimizing the population: independently of its viability in commerce, putting governmental imprimatur on a scandalous or disparaging mark is viewed as bad for the polity.  In the case of disparaging marks, the idea is that the use of the mark would be damaging to those targeted by the mark in question.  The First Amendment means that the government cannot stop such use, but it is also not required to reward the use with the benefits of trademark registration, and so the policy explicitly values a vision of civil discourse over commercial benefit.

      Various marks were denied registration under the disparagement clause, including both those that repeat slurs assumed to disparage others (the NFL’s Washington “Redskins”) and those where members of targeted groups intend to reappropriate the terms, as in “Dykes on Bikes.”  In Matal v. Tam (2017), the Supreme Court ruled on First Amendment grounds that the government did not have the right to refuse registration to disparaging marks.  The case pitted Simon Tam, an Asian-American who wanted to register the name of his band – the “Slants” – in order to reclaim a racial slur, against the PTO, which argued that the term disparaged Asian-Americans, many of whom would find it offensive.  After the decision, Tam got his band name and the Redskins got their registration back.

      Citing the Tam decision, the Federal Circuit ruled at the end of 2017 in Brunetti that the ban on scandalous marks also violated the First Amendment.

      (more…)

    • A Note on Derrida and Law (and Drucilla Cornell)

      By Gordon Hull

      I pass along the following with minimal additional comment, as it fills in a historical detail that I’d not known.  It’s from Peter Goodrich, a very prominent critical legal theorist at Cardozo Law School, on “the role that Derrida played at Cardozo, and less expectedly the part played by the Law School in radicalizing Derrida:”

      “It was after becoming a Fellow at Cardozo that he shifted to a more political trajectory and engaged with the fight to free Mandela and end apartheid. I think he would have been surprised to learn that Cardozo radicalized him but why not? It was a two-way street, and recollecting the atmosphere and passions that circumambulated 55 Fifth Avenue back then, I think it is fair to say that Drucilla Cornell who was here at the time was a political powerhouse that few could avoid if they walked through the corridors where the faculty live” (603)

      The Derrida piece that emerges from the symposium is “Force of Law,” which appeared in the (1990) issue of the Cardozo Law Review to emerge from the symposium.  Derrida’s piece revolves around his reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”  It emphasizes a central point also found in CLS: that law is power.  Here is Derrida: “the word “enforceability” reminds us that there is no such thing as law that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being ‘enforced,’ applied by force” (925)

      How we are to understand Derrida as a political writer is of course a big topic; in a late interview, he distinguishes his own work in “deconstruction” from a tradition running from Luther to Heidegger, suggesting that “the ‘deconstruction’ I attempt is not that deconstruction, it’s definitely more ‘political’ too, differently political; but it would take too many words to explain this” (Paper Machine, 115).  He elsewhere insists that a “political dimension” was “decipherable in all my texts, even the oldest ones’ (Paper Machine, 152).  I’ve tried to argue that this is true for his 1968 “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and that there is a specific politics involved in ratcheting him to phenomenology.  Still, it’s hard to miss that his writings from the early 1990s forward are more obviously political than the earlier ones.  In any case, these connections can be complex; if American CLS nudged Derrida toward a more direct engagement with politics, that potentiality had to be there in the first place.

      Goodrich closes with an anecdote:

      “Back in 1987 I was in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, in Russian occupied Budapest. I had been invited to lecture but when the Marxist professoriate of Etvos Lorand University Law School met me and discussed my planned lecture, they rapidly realized that this was not a good idea and cancelled the class. Sensible folks. I had a day free and decided to travel to Sopron, a city on the border with Austria where my host had a sister willing to show me round. I took the train and a copy of Jacques Derrida, The Postcard, as my reading. It did not occur to me that I needed a passport to travel inside the country but close to Sopron the police entered the train and asked for ID. My only document was The Postcard, which they scrutinized, discussed and then shaking their heads indicated that it was not enough and arrested me for a while until my host came and vouched for me. When I was next on a panel with Derrida, I told him the story. He paused and pondered for a moment and then said “I am sorry that my book was of no help.” And of course it was useless, but in the best of senses. It gave no comfort to the authorities. It provided no identification of me. It made no demand. And yet I read it on the train, I read it in the police cell. I finished it on my return. Socrates and Freud were comfortingly to hand. At random, though I am fond of quoting it: “In history, this is my hypothesis, epistolary fictions multiply with each new crisis of destination.””

       

       

    • On the Political Economy of Social Media: Dispossession of the Other

      By Gordon Hull

       

      The Washington Post has a disturbing story about how “lies become truth in online America.”  It narrates the story of two individuals.  One spends his time in Maine, dishing out deliberately fake news stories designed to troll those on the right by saying completely absurd things and then watching them blindly repeat them as truths.  Christopher Blair and his friends then occasionally wade into comments sections to chastise the vulnerable, as well as baiting people into saying racist things and getting their social media accounts removed and so on.  “Nothing on this page is real” says one of the apparently fourteen (!) disclaimers on his site; he gets up to 6 million hits from believers a month.  Blair would make up pretty much anything that aligns with stuff circulating on the far right:

      “In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55”

      (more…)

    • The Internet of Prison People

      By Gordon Hull

      In what seems like a distant, more innocent time in surveillance (viz. 2003), Andy Clark was able  to use as an example in his Natural Born Cyborgs an implanted tracking chip for pets.  Does your cat tend to wander off?  Now you can know where Whiskers is at all times! (no doubt taking a nap in the sun, and not earning his keep catching mice)  Clark’s point was to argue that we are all tool-using creatures by nature, to the point that when we speak of our “minds,” that term really needs to include at least some of the tools we use.  So the extended mind hypothesis was the point of the book, and pet-tracking an example, but Clark’s optimism was evidenced in the way that he dumped concerns like privacy together into a final chapter.  It's that ability to put the worries in the last chapter that seems dated now.

      Of course, these days RFID chips are everywhere – now, apparently, in the bodies of employees (h/t dmf).  The story needs to be read, but basically an entrepreneur named Tim Westby started out by marketing RFID vending machines to prisons because prison administrators liked convenience in their contracts and because the machines could operate with a high markup (what are the inmates going to do, choose a different supplier of soda?).  Twenty years later, the business has grown to putting RFID tags on its employees and marketing smart phone apps that utilize “ping notifications and geo-fences that keep kids from leaving pre-defined areas”

      (more…)

    • Becker, Irrationality and Neoliberal Biopower

      By Gordon Hull

      In Sleights of Reason, Mary Beth Mader makes the point that there is an ontological distinction between the members of a normalized “population” and the individuals they represent.  Mader is talking about statistics and bell curves; as she summarizes the part of her argument that’s relevant here, “statistical social measurement is ontologically problematic on the very level of the conceptual composites expressed in statistical measures and distributions and not only on an allegedly duplicitous subsequent prescriptive application of an allegedly descriptive conceptual instrument” (45).  In other words, it’s not just that we get told that we’re “abnormal” or not living up to the norm; it’s that the way the norm is constructed also needs scrutiny.

      The connection between neoliberalism and biopower – the one that Foucault seems to make in Birth of Biopolitics, but then doesn’t exactly spell out – is made crystal clear in a piece by Gary Becker that makes precisely this move in declaring that accounts of human behavior based on human rationality can nonetheless apply to irrational behavior as well.  The piece is cited often enough for the temerity of the claim that economic rationality can be applied to irrational behavior, and it clearly evidences Foucault’s claim that “American neo-liberalism still involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market.  It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges “ (BB 243; Becker elsewhere claims that  “the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior, although I recognize, of course, that much behavior is not yet understood” (Essence of Becker, 13, emphasis original)).  That said, what is actually going on in the discussion of irrationality becomes substantially more interesting when read in light of Mader’s point about norms and populations.

      (more…)

    • New Paper on Foucault and Parrhesia

      By Gordon Hull

      I'm happy to announce (shamelessly!) that my article, "The Banality of Cynicism: Foucault and Limits of Authentic Parrhesia" is now out in Foucault Studies (open access).

      The abstract is:

      Foucault’s discussion of parrhēsia – frank speech – in his last two Collège de France lecture courses has led many to wonder if Foucault is pursuing parrhēsia as a contemporary strategy for resistance.  This essay argues that ethical parrhēsia on either the Socratic or Cynical model would have little critical traction today because the current environment is plagued by problems analogous to those Plato thought plagued Athenian democracy. Specifically, authentication of parrhesiasts as a technique for authenticating their speech – the specific problem that the move to ethical parrhēsia in ancient Greece was designed to solve – becomes intractable in a social media environment, even with the added Cynical move to pure visibility. The problem is that contemporary society overproduces visibility as a condition for participation, which means that the context for authenticating parrhesiastic speech is one in which visibility is banalized and in which there is a surplus of speech which presents as parrhesiastic. The problem of authentication is thus a serious one, one which social media makes particularly intractable.

      There's lots of papers in this issue, and I of course haven't read them yet – but they look good.

       

    • More on Facebook and Mental Health Privacy

      By Gordon Hull

      It’s not news that Facebook generates a lot of privacy concerns.  But it’s nonetheless worth keeping up a little, just to indicate how seriously we need to be concerned about the connection between Facebook and data analytics.  We’ve known for a while that automated analysis of Facebook likes can predict basic personality type.  A 2017 paper showed that targeting of advertising based on personality type was highly effective, as measured by clicks and purchases.  Facebook appears to be marketing predictive-advertising (so an advertiser can know to send you a nudge if FB software predicts you may be about to switch brands of something).

      Now there’s this: an individual’s Facebook posts can apparently predict depression independently of subjective reporting (discussion here). From the study:

      “Each year, 7–26% of the US population experiences depression, of whom only 13–49% receive minimally adequate treatment. By 2030, unipolar depressive disorders are predicted to be the leading cause of disability in high-income countries. The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends screening adults for depression in circumstances in which accurate diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up can be offered. These high rates of underdiagnosis and undertreatment suggest that existing procedures for screening and identifying depressed patients are inadequate. Novel methods are needed to identify and treat patients with depression.

      By using Facebook language data from a sample of consenting patients who presented to a single emergency department, we built a method to predict the first documentation of a diagnosis of depression in the electronic medical record (EMR). Previous research has demonstrated the feasibility of using Twitter and Facebook language and activity data to predict depression, postpartum depression, suicidality, and posttraumatic stress disorder, relying on self-report of diagnoses on Twitter or the participants’ responses to screening surveys to establish participants’ mental health status. In contrast to this prior work relying on self-report, we established a depression diagnosis by using medical codes from an EMR.”

      It seems to me that these paragraphs speak to why this technology can be so difficult to wrap one’s head around.  On the one hand, it is really important to take mental health seriously, and we live in a neoliberal society that both generates mental health problems and offers problematic band-aids to solve them, including moves by Pharma to drum up purchases of drugs with dubious clinical efficacy.  The study is classic big data: by looking at actual EMR records and correlated FB posts, the authors were able to train the algorithms with existing known cases of depression.  What it discovered was that certain words in posts predict a future diagnosis of depression pretty well, better as you get closer to the diagnosis.  And it doesn’t rely on self-reporting. Nor does it rely on a primary care physician spotting the problem, which the study suggests is part of why depression is so under-diagnosed.  As the authors put it, “the potential exists to develop burdenless indicators of mental illness that precede the medical documentation of depression (which may often be delayed) and which, as a result, could reduce the total extent of functional impairment experienced during the depressive episode.” There’s a chance here to do some real good for public health at a relatively low cost (though one should raise a digital divide worry: those who do not leave a sufficient social media trail – say, the homeless, who are at very high risk for mental health issues – will fall further through the cracks).

      On the other hand, want to buy a list of depressed patients to sell those dubious remedies to?

    • Capitalism’s Headache

      By Gordon Hull

      I mean the title of this post literally. A recent study that surveyed global neurological disease incidence concluded that neurological disorders now are the leading global cause of disability, and that their rates are rapidly rising.  A substantial portion of this is due to increasing rates of Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s and other dementias; as the study concludes, “the most striking change has been the more than doubling of people in the world who die or are disabled from Alzheimer's disease and other dementias over the past 25 years.”  The primary risk factor for these conditions is age, and the increase is clearly tied to increasing life expectancies.  It may also in part explain why women (who generally have higher life expectancies than men) have a 22% higher burden from these diseases than men.  Other results were similarly expected: the global rates of communicable neurological conditions like meningitis were declining due to vaccination programs; their burden was highest in low-income regions.  The study concludes:

      “In conclusion, we have shown that neurological disorders are a large cause of disability and death worldwide. Globally, the burden of neurological disorders has increased substantially over the past 25 years because of population ageing, despite substantial decreases in mortality rates from stroke and communicable neurological disorders. Because low-income and middle-income countries still have a long way to go through the demographic transition of reductions in child mortality and population ageing, the number of patients who will need neurological care will continue to grow in the coming decades. It is important that policy makers and health-care providers are aware of these past trends to be able to provide adequate services for the growing numbers of patients with neurological disorders”

      This sort of headline, especially about the staggering burden that Alzheimer’s is going to place on the U.S. healthcare  system as baby boomers enter old age, is relatively common.  Buried in the headline-grabbing statistics, though, is a somewhat alarming data point: the rise in headaches.  Between 1990 and 2015, the global prevalence of migraines shot up 49.6%, tension-type headaches 49.2%, and of medication-overdose headaches by 57.8% (table 1 in the linked article).  The highest rates of headaches were in high-income regions. There is also a fairly sharp drop in the rate of headaches at around age 65 in the table accompanying the graph.

      One hesitates to interpret too much on a quick read (there is a lot of data; the article is open access, so those with better quantitative skills should dive in!), but it’s hard not to notice that the years from 1990 to 2015 are also the years that global capitalism took its victory lap over communism, and celebrated with a neoliberal intensification of staggering proportions.   It is also hard not to notice that 65 is retirement age.

      Franco (“Bifo”) Berardi has  been saying for a long time that the rise in global mental health disorders needs to be read as a symptom of capitalism’s intensification, a point on which Will Davies concurs (I intend to do a post on this at some  point).  In Berardi’s case, though, the argument has the feel of speculation.  But here we have a data point that is difficult to explain otherwise: quite independently of how long one lives, life today, as Lenin once said of Hegel’s Logic, seems to be “a best means for getting a headache.”

    • Bakhtin’s Carnival, Genealogy, History

      By Gordon Hull

      Foucault’s use of Nietzsche to make the distinction between history and genealogy in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” is well-known.  What is less well-known, I think (perhaps I am projecting again, but I had forgotten this passage until I saw a note I’d made to it the other day), is a very clear presentation of the distinction in Society must be Defended.  Here I want to tentatively suggest some connections between the language of SMD and some of Foucault’s other writings.  The SMD context is a discussion of state historiography and archiving in the 18th Century.  Foucault announces “another new excursus,” and writes:

      “The difference between what might be called the history of the sciences and the genealogy of knowledges is that the history of sciences is essentially located on an axis that is, roughly speaking, the cognition-truth axis, or at least the axis that goes from the structure of cognition to the demand for truth. Unlike the history of the sciences, the genealogy of knowledges is located on a different axis, namely the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive practice-clash of power axis” (SMD 178).

      He then suggests that if one is to do a genealogy of knowledges of the 18th Century, the first thing one needs to do is to “outwit the problematic of the Enlightenment” (ibid.), which is to say that one has to avoid the urge to talk about the emergence of reason, the fading of ignorance, and so forth.  In other words, one has to avoid the era’s framing of itself.  Instead, one should see:

      “an immense and multiple battle, but not one between knowledge and ignorance, but an immense and multiple battle between knowledges in the plural—knowledges that are in conflict because of their very morphology, because they are in the possession of enemies, and because they have intrinsic power-effects” (SMD 179).

      I want to flag the text here because it helps to illuminate the political stakes of genealogy, and thus of writing history, quite clear.  This is of course also in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” especially when he talks at the end about what genealogy might do.  I want to focus on the first, which is parodic or carnivalesque.  Foucault comes across there as somewhat cryptic; the genealogist “will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing” and so “genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival” (Foucault Reader, 94).

      (more…)