Control society

Most critics of contemporary literature have reached a consensus that what was once called " postmodernism " is over and that its signature modes—metafiction and irony—are on the wane. This is not the case, however, with videogames. In recent years, a number of self-reflexive games have appeared, exemplified by Davey Wreden's The Stanley Parable (2013), an ironic game about games. When self-awareness migrates form print to screen, however, something happens. If metafiction can be characterized by how it draws attention to its materiality—the artificiality of language and the construction involved in acts of representation—The Stanley Parable draws attention to the digital, procedural materiality of videogames. Following the work of Alexander R. Galloway and Ian Bogost, I argue that the self-reflexivity of The Stanley Parable is best understood in terms of action and procedure, as metaproceduralism. This essay explores the legacies of United States metafiction in videogames, suggesting that though postmodernism might be over, its lessons are important to remember for confronting the complex digital realities of the twenty-first century. If irony may be ebbing in fiction, it has found a vital and necessary home in videogames and we underestimate its power to challenge the informatic, algorithmic logic of cultural production in the digital age to our detriment.

The speed, scale, and shape of digital circulation pose numerous challenges for rhetorical analysis that seeks to analyze image-texts in context  This paper develops a framework for the rhetorical analysis of Internet memes through the concept of modes.  Analyzing memes requires a shift in focus from the actual (texts and contexts) to the virtual (the capacities for affect and affection structuring an encounter). What makes such memes recognizable and, hence, circulable is a shared, virtual mode structuring all subsequent actualizations. The examination of Fail/Win demonstrates that the analysis of modes can be assisted by a number of rhetorical concepts as long as modes are understood as collective, emergent expressions. It also shows that the Fail/Win mode is better understood not as the representation of specific rhetors but, instead, as an expression of control society that advances both a dystopian view of humans reduced to performing rote operations and a utopian, ideological gesture promising that success remains possible nevertheless.

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

Final draft of the following publication:
Schleusener, Simon (2020): 'You're Fired!' Retrotopian Desire and Right-Wing Class Politics. In: Gabriele Dietze/Julia Roth (Eds.): Right-Wing Populism and Gender. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag (pp. 185-206).
DOI: 10.14361/9783839449806-011
Online ISBN: 978-3-8394-4980-6
© 2020 transcript Verlag.

Deleuze erweist sich in dieser Arbeit als einer der systematischsten Denker des Poststrukturalismus. Übernahmen aus der Mathematik durchziehen seine gesamte Philosophie – eine radikal immanent denkende Prozessphilosophie, die durchgehend um das Problem von Differenz und Wiederholung kreist. Deleuze liefert dabei weder eine Philosophie der Mathematik im Sinne einer Grundlegung, noch soll die Mathematik zur Methode der Philosophie werden. Stattdessen ist sie eine Gegenspielerin der Philosophie: Die Philosophie liefert der Mathematik Widerstände und die Mathematik droht Themen der Philosophie ständig zu vereinnahmen.

Für Deleuze ist Mathematik in erster Linie Differentialrechnung. Diese ist nicht von ihren Anwendungen zu trennen: Biologie, Thermodynamik, Informationstheorie, Linguistik, … und dabei reicht die Perspektive auf die Mathematik von Topologie über Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung bis hin zu metamathematischen Problemen. Fluchtpunkt von Deleuzes Untersuchung ist das Problem der Kontrolle. Strukturen, so dynamisch sie auch begonnen haben mögen, altern. Sie verlangsamen sich, werden rigider, steifer, bestimmter und bestimmender. Deleuze sucht in der Philosophie nach Waffen für den politischen Kampf gegen die Kontrolle, deren Griff sich dank Mathematisierbarkeit immer mehr ausweitet. Kurz: Deleuzes radikaler Ansatz lässt sich systematisch bis an die Schwelle dessen entwickeln, was wir heute Algorithmenkritik nennen würden.

Methodisch nimmt die Arbeit dabei eine systematische Rekonstruktion vor, wobei Verbindungslinien zu anderen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen bewusst ernstgenommen werden. Die mit ihnen verbundenen Argumente werden entwickelt und gezielt weitergetrieben, um nachzuweisen, dass sie sich systematisch zusammenfügen lassen. Es zeigt sich schließlich, dass sich auf Überlegungen in Deleuzes Spätwerk und den gemeinsam mit Félix Guattari verfassten Texten aus Deleuze früheren Texten entwickeln und ausdeuten lassen: Deleuzes Philosophie erlaubt eine neue, kritische Perspektive auf algorithmische Kontrollregime.

In this work Deleuze proves to be one of the most systematic thinkers of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Adoptions from mathematics permeate his entire philosophy – a radically immanent approach to process philosophy that revolves around the problem of difference and repetition. Deleuze neither provides a philosophy of mathematics in the sense of a foundation, nor should mathematics become a method of philosophy. Instead, mathematics is an antagonist of philosophy: philosophy provides resistance to mathematics, and mathematics threatens to constantly take over the themes of philosophy. For Deleuze, mathematics is first and foremost differential calculus. It cannot be separated from its applications: Biology, thermodynamics, information theory, linguistics, … and the perspective on mathematics ranges from topology to probability theory to metamathematical problems. Looming point of Deleuze's investigation is the problem of control. Structures, as dynamic as they may have begun, age. They slow down, become stiffer, more rigid, more determined and more determining. In philosophy, Deleuze looks for weapons for the political struggle against control, whose grip is expanding more and more thanks to mathematizability. In short: Deleuze's radical approach can be systematically developed to the brink of what we would call algorithmic criticism today. In methodological terms, the work undertakes a systematic reconstruction in which connecting lines to other scientific disciplines are purposefully taken seriously. The arguments associated with them are continually developed and purposefully advanced in order to prove that they can be systematically put together. Finally, it becomes apparent that reflections in Deleuze's late work and the texts from Deleuze written jointly with Félix Guattari can be used to develop and interpret earlier texts: Deleuze's philosophy allows a new, critical perspective on algorithmic control regimes.

Ekin Erkan's review of Bernard Stiegler's "The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism" (2019), as published in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge.

To Cite this Essay:
Erkan, Ekin. “Societies of Disindividuated Hyper-Control: On the Question of a New Pharmakon.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 35, 2019, doi:10.20415/rhiz/035.r02

Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's oft-quoted 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Bernard Stiegler’s The Age of Disruption affirms that the Frankfurt School duo scrupulously envisaged a “new kind of barbarism,” or an inversion of modernity’s Enlightenment project illustrated by our contemporary political semblance. Surveying the critical social fissures that index contemporary Western civil society—from 9/11 to the 2002 Nanterre massacre and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting—Stiegler diagnoses that our epoch is plagued by the “absence of epoch,” whereby computational capitalism and algorithmic governmentality have extirpated the “transcendental imagination” underlying a kind of vital primordial narcissism. In short, these are symptoms a world increasingly “going mad,” in a thousand ways, possible because we are the bearers of "a negative protention of a becoming without future," yet "we prefer not to say so: we do not want to know about it."

Implementation of quantified self technologies in workplaces relies on the ontological premise of Cartesian dualism with mind dominant over body. Contributing to debates in new materialism, we demonstrate that workers are now being asked to measure our own productivity and health and wellbeing in art-houses and warehouses alike in both the global north and south. Workers experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs, and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Workers have internalized the imperative to perform, a subjectification process as we become observing, entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies. Thinking through the implications of the use of wearable technologies in workplaces, this article shows that these technologies introduce a heightened Taylorist influence on precarious working bodies within neoliberal workplaces.

Deleuze erweist sich in dieser Arbeit als einer der systematischsten Denker des Poststrukturalismus. Ubernahmen aus der Mathematik durchziehen seine gesamte Philosophie – eine radikal immanent denkende Prozessphilosophie, die durchgehend um das Problem von Differenz und Wiederholung kreist. Deleuze liefert dabei weder eine Philosophie der Mathematik im Sinne einer Grundlegung, noch soll die Mathematik zur Methode der Philosophie werden. Stattdessen ist sie eine Gegenspielerin der Philosophie: Die Philosophie liefert der Mathematik Widerstande und die Mathematik droht Themen der Philosophie standig zu vereinnahmen. Fur Deleuze ist Mathematik in erster Linie Differentialrechnung. Diese ist nicht von ihren Anwendungen zu trennen: Biologie, Thermodynamik, Informationstheorie, Linguistik, … und dabei reicht die Perspektive auf die Mathematik von Topologie uber Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung bis hin zu metamathematischen Problemen. Fluchtpunkt von Deleuzes Untersuchung ist das Problem der Ko...

Introduction to "Stimmen der Kritik" #4, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, November 2021.
https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/friedrichschlegel/assoziierte_projekte/Philologisches-Laboratorium/Veranstaltungsreihe-Stimmen-der-Kritik/index.html
https://lcb.de/programm/stimmen-der-kritik-4/

Este artigo abre um caminho para a análise das consequências sociais que advêm das utilizações de Big Data. Os mecanismos e as estratégias de extração, análise e utilização dos dados dos indivíduos convergem numa nova arquitetura e mecanismo de poder que se diagramou num Aquário. O dispositivo desta nova figura de tecnologia política e económica é transparente, automatizado e antecipatório. A tendência é clara, cada vez mais, serviços públicos e privados estão a ser aquarizados. / This article opens a way to an analysis of the social consequences of Big Data uses. The mechanisms and strategies for extracting, analyzing and using data from individuals converge in a new architecture and mechanism of power that is diagrammed in an Aquarium. The device of this new figure of political and economic technology is transparent, automated and anticipatory. The trend is clear, more and more public and private services are being aquarized.

High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of NAPLAN testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new understandings of the ‘good teacher’. Media reports are used to look at how teachers are responding to the high-stakes database through manipulating the data. This paper argues that manipulating the data is a regrettable, but logical, response to manifestations of teaching where only the data counts.

This article attempts to define a regime of visibility proper to postwar Lebanon by studying a number of Lebanese artists working in the immediate aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War, as well as a generation of younger artists working today. It argues that we can trace a certain continuity between the first postwar generation of the 1990s and its contemporary heirs, insofar as both share a common problematic that crosses different regimes of visibility. I will show how each artist proposes a visual form that resists the historic way of seeing, or, in Foucault's terms, the hegemonic regimes of visibility imposed by central capitalism on the periphery.  Following Deleuze and Guattari, by "central capitalism" I mean the advanced capitalism of the Global North, the West, or the First World, while by peripheral capitalism I imply less developed forms of capitalism pertaining to the South, or what is usually referred to as the Third World.  Against the dominant historical narratives that define the temporality of artistic creation in postwar Lebanon as oriented toward a traumatic past  or a wishful future,  I will propose that the act of artistic creation is fundamentally an act of political resistance in the present. That is, artistic creation acquires its political dimension by creating images that propose alternative ways of seeing in conflict with pre-established aesthetic regimes.

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/artm_a_00253

This compact volume aims to take stock of the myriad critical responses elicited in recent years by transformations in computational media and digital capital. Attending to the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence in the construction of digital media environments, these essays collectively highlight the contingency embedded within algorithmic functionality while addressing the oppressive organizational structures and governmental capabilities such operations make available to big data. Containing entries from Mark Hansen, Luciana Parisi, Claus Pius, and others, Critique and the Digital provides an impressive overview of both the theoretical and practical stakes of coming to terms with the digital in its increasingly ubiquitous forms.

"On March 29, 1969, Pier Paolo Pasolini asks: “Do Novelistic Lives Still Exist?” In this article, Pasolini wonders whether the novel is still a contemporary literary form or if it is rather something which belongs to the past. He concludes that, as long as the real retains its novelistic structure, the novel will not become outdated. But why did Pasolini pose the question of the novelistic in such a time in Italian history? Pasolini was compelled by the understanding that the bourgeois consumerism dominating Italy in the 1960s tended to eliminate the novelistic from reality, forcing pre-molded destinies upon the lives of the people. It is this very homologation that puts the novel at risk: If lives are no longer novelistic, then the novel cannot be the literary device which can best tell their stories.

Yet, can those who write years after Piazza Fontana still agree with Pasolini’s historicalnarratological thesis regarding the obsoleteness of the novel? After the discovery of State terrorism, can we still believe that the bourgeois State enforces its dominion over the present by inducing an ordered standardization and repressing the novelistic structure of the real? The spectacular series of detonations which bloodied a winter market day forces us to admit that the “Italian boom” ultimately led not to the triumph of order, but to a chaos that was all too novelistic. The Italy born out of Christmas ’69, the Italy of the 1970s, must then be understood as a noir, viscous as oil and populated by a multitude of characters worthy of the best crime novels.

But if Italy truly is all of this, it would be a matter of denouncing the epos of a new governmental monster: a monster whose threat lies not in repressing the novelistic and producing disciplined uniformity, but in using lives and events that are strategically novelized to annihilate any possibility of resistance. A monster, therefore, with a “literary côté.”

In this article, I argue that Giancarlo De Cataldo’s "Romanzo criminale" is one of the most ambitious attempts to denounce exactly such a new governmental literary monster. Novelizing the deeds of the Magliana Gang – from its seizing power in the 1970s to its withering in the 1980s – is, for De Cataldo, an opportunity to chart the State’s strategies to ward off any radical change and keep Italy stuck at the gates of history."

At the same time as public space is diminishing in many urban areas new forms of public space are constructed, more then ever, both inside and outside institutions by private companies and corporations. “The public”, it can be argued, becomes a technique to stage a “milieu” in Foucault’s sense of the concept, where space is the medium for events. Programs and activities, earlier hidden in the “apparatus of society,” are opened up for the public, and through transparent surfaces or event zones the individual gets caught in unexpected, but still already staged, situations. In this paper I will discuss this phenomena in relation to some contemporary examples, like the factory and the prison, but also in relation to media institutions.

Foucault’s reading of Benthams Panopticon is often interpreted as focusing upon architecture as physical elements – like walls, windows, doors etc. – dividing space and creating a disciplinary regime. It is possible, however, to regard the architectural affect as the central technique. It was a modulation of light that made it possible for the guard to be absent and for the prisoners to act self-disciplining.  The paper highlights architecture and its capacity to induce public affect, in particular in relation to what Foucault calls “the space of security” – a space that, in contrast to disciplinary space where everything is regulated, “lets things happen”.

How does architecture operate as a security technology? This contribution sets out how reflexive security research and urban studies approach built environments as political inclusion and exclusion instruments. It first presents how this role is understood to operate in the respective scholarly fields, and then illustrates its ambivalent operation with two mini-case studies centering on Bogotá and Zürich. In doing so, the contribution seeks to familiarize readers with architecture-oriented reflexive political analysis, and to draw out main lines of further investigation.

Wie funktioniert Architektur als Sicherheitstechnologie? Dieser Beitrag umreisst, wie reflexive Sicherheits- und Stadtforschung die gebaute Umgebung als Mittel der politischen In- und Exklusion konzipiert. Er erklärt erst, wie diese Rolle in den beiden Fachgebieten verstanden wird, um dann ihre ambivalente Funktionsweise anhand von zwei Mini-Fallstudien zu Bogota und Zürich empirisch zu illustrieren. Damit ist das Ziel des Beitrags, die Leser in architekturorientierte und reflexive Politikforschung einzuführen und weiterfolgende Forschungsrichtungen zu skizzieren.

Comment l’architecture fonctionne-t-elle en tant que technologie de sécurité? Cet article décrit comment les security studies et les urban studies conçoivent l’environnement bâti comme un moyen d’inclusion et d’exclusion politique. Il explique d’abord comment ce rôle est conçu par les deux spécialisations, puis illustre empiriquement son fonctionnement ambivalent avec des observations faites à Bogota et Zurich. Le but de l’article est de familiariser les lecteurs avec les approches réflexives aux processus politiques et des études orientées vers architecture, et de décrire des perspectives de recherche qui en découlent.

La presenta investigación tiene como objetivo analizar la construcción discursiva de la sociedad chilena y su sexualidad a partir de los medios nacionales de prensa escrita durante el primer periodo de la industria cultural de El Chacotero Sentimental (1996-2000). Con el fin de constituirse como una crítica de la memoria tensionando la construcción oficial de consenso del chile de la post-última-dictadura, se realizó un análisis de discurso por medio de repertorios interpretativos a 10 artículos que describieran a sociedad chilena a partir de El Chacotero Sentimental o viceversa. Los resultados dan cuenta de cinco repertorios para referirse a la sociedad chilena y su sexualidad, estos son Discurso Psi, Colectivo Anónimo, Divorcio de la Realidad, Eufemístico, y Chacotero. Estos se articulan en una dinámica que puede ser entendida bajo los conceptos de Industria Psi y Pornografía en tanto mecanismos que producen una multiplicidad de prácticas que tienen como carácter común psicologizar el fenómeno confesional por medio de la patologización o de la explicación validada por profesionales de la salud mental, así como también generar un devenir público de la intimidad volviéndola espectáculo comercializable que desdibuja toda asimetría económico-político-social, ya sea por medio de la identificación anónima o por la referencia a problemáticas comunes, posicionando a los medios como una vocería despolitizada desplazando el foco de atención desde la diferencias y discrepancias hacia puntos en común. De esta forma que se incentiva la política del consenso, mientras que a la vez introducen a los sujetos al mercado, ya sea por medio de la necesidad de atención psicológica o por medio de la necesidad de exhibición pública. Así se desprende una definición de libertad que se somete a la administración de los cuerpos y la explotación de los placeres y deseos.

Resumo
O artigo parte da observação de uma dificuldade na criação de choques estéticos em determinadas poéticas teatrais praticadas hoje. A partir desta inquietação, traça um paralelo entre estas práticas e as ideias de sociedade disciplinar, de Michel Foucault, e sociedade de controle, de Gilles Deleuze. Tais aproximações visam investigar o impacto destes conceitos na prática cênica, seus ecos na recepção do espectador, bem como sua influência nos processos de composição das obras teatrais. Tal análise perpassa pelas ideias de teatralidade e performatividade, observando como a exploração ou denegação destes conceitos pode propor outras formas de percepção da composição cênica na tentativa de reativar a capacidade de criação de choques nas poéticas teatrais.

Palavras-chave: teatralidade, performatividade, encenação, disciplina, controle.


In search of aesthetic shocks: the control influence on the spectator’s emotional anesthesia

Abstract
The article proceeds from the observation of a difficulty in creating aesthetic shocks in certain theatrical poetics practiced today. From this concern, draws a parallel between these practices and the Michel Foucault’s ideas of disciplinary society, and society of control from Gilles Deleuze. These approaches aim to investigate the impact of these concepts on the scenic practice, its echoes in the reception of the spectator, and its influence on the composition processes of theatrical works. Such analysis permeates the ideas of theatricality and performativity, watching as the exploitation or denial of these concepts may propose other forms of perception of scenic composition in an attempt to reactivate the ability to create shocks in theatrical poetics.

Keywords: theatricality, performativity, staging, discipline, control.

This paper applies concepts Deleuze developed in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, especially those relating to modulatory power, dividuation and control, to aspects of Australian schooling to explore how this transition is manifesting itself. Two modulatory machines of assessment, NAPLAN and My Schools, are examined as a means to better understand how the disciplinary institution is changing as a result of modulation. This transition from discipline to modulation is visible in the declining importance of the disciplinary teacher/student relationship as a measure of the success of the educative process. The transition occurs through seduction because that which purports to measure classroom quality is in fact a serpent of modulation that produces simulacra of the disciplinary classroom. The effect is to sever what happens in the disciplinary space from its representations in a luminiferous ether that overlays the classroom.

On the following pages—“indebted” to Lazzarato’s interpretation—the notion of debt is understood as an assemblage of sad passions and considered in relation to social transformations that have led to contemporary societies of control.  Unlike Lazzarato’s essay, the main topic of this chapter will be the connection between the concept of debt—encompassing varying assemblages of affects and passions—and individualization. Firstly, I consider the concepts of control, debt and affect. Secondly, I discuss their relation to the forces and assemblages typical for contemporary societies. In order to grasp the social meaning of the philosophical analysis my discussion will involve a sociological excursion, demonstrating the social processes that previously were described in terms of philosophical analysis.

The growing prevalence of location-based services for internet-enabled mobile phones offers one explanation for the ongoing transformation of mobile subjectivity. The use of such media affects the ways in which movement and identity are experienced, associated, and defined. The  “check-in” demonstrates this present logic of “trajectification," wherein trajectories in physical space are rendered into digital objects that stake out the territory of identity. This digital documentation and modeling of movement is embedded in a circuit of capitalist accumulation that returns in both digital  and physical realms as customized advertisements and  tailored commodities. Thus, the check-in is integral to the continuous cycle of accumulation predicated on mobile identity formation.

The research has as its themes control and biopolitics, having its delimitation in technological questions as part of the relations of biopolitical control, and in the local affectation. The research problem is: how does the current biopolitical project of neoliberal control affect Brazilian society as a recent democracy and what peculiarities can be perceived? That said, the phenomenologicalhermeneutic approach is used as a methodology, together with the monographic procedure methods and the indirect documentation search technique. It is concluded that the national biopolitical project is based on neoliberal logic, and therefore imposes itself in such a way as to demand the maximum of human life for profitability, while increasing the breadth of control devices (and discipline, reserved), at the same time that in the country there is a certain radicality of authoritarian and conflicting characteristics in the adoption of the contemporary control model in national democracy.

The structure is ubiquitously known: a transparent glass structure where fish are placed and fed so that humans can see or profit from them. In the Big Data Society, aquariums are replaced by digital platforms, networks and applications which we can adequately describe as digital aquariums. The fish's life becomes visible from the moment it gets into the aquarium; the same happens to the individual who enters the digital space. The designers of digital aquariums are in possession of the material, financial or intellectual assets. Fish are replaced by humans.
Aquarization is the process of creating digital structures that mediate human activities, rendering them visible and profitable. Aquarization is an effect of the world’s digitization that universalizes mediation and, consequently, the dissemination of surveillance and control. The trend is quite clear: more and more public and private services are becoming Aquarized.
The fish leave the sea and get into the Aquarium for a number of reasons. Some claim they chose to do so because the latter is more comfortable, convenient and predictable. Apparently, they don’t cope well with cold and stormy waters, the perils of the hunt or the haphazardness of life. However, choice may not be the most accurate term to describe the processes behind that change. Millions of fish are lured into the Aquarium every day through complex strategies of seduction and coercion.
If Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural model of the disciplinary society described by Foucault, and if the Deleuzian ‘Rhizome’ is the model associated with modernity in the society of control, the Aquarium epitomizes the Big Data Society, which combines features that are either analogous or disruptive regarding the former two, albeit marked particularly by technological sophistication.
The Aquarium’s instrument of power is transparent, automated and anticipatory.
The Aquarium is a transparent building that provides a dual effect of visibility and invisibility. On the one hand, it is a panoptic architecture conceived to achieve an articulated and detailed inner control – rendering visible those inside it; on the other, such control is only possible due to the building’s invisibility. Power, the extraction and use of the individuals’ data, is enacted in such a way that it is not possible to identify its wielders. Despite being a robust, ingenious and complex architecture, it is imperceptible. While Panopticon's inmates are aware of the watchman's constant presence, the Aquarium’s dwellers actually believe they are free.
In addition to being a lighting system that illuminates individuals making them visible, the Aquarium is also a language system based on and strengthened by the storage, analysis, and distribution of personal information. By combining multiple data sources, Big Data programs incorporate algorithms to create profiles of the individuals with little or no human intervention. The details of what types of data are considered in these profiles and categories or of what algorithms are used to classify any given individual are virtually invisible to the latter, increasing the risk of encoding discrimination into automated decisions.
Inside the Aquarium, the individuals' flow, activities, connections, accomplishments and movements are codified, sorted and classified by algorithms whose processes give rise to dividuals – codified doppelgangers that dwell in a myriad of programs and databases and have a retroactive effect over the former. Data produces effects; they are performative.
Big Data also entails a shift in punitive methods – the Aquarium is a new power technology that punishes differently, replacing treatment or cure with prevention. In the Aquarized society, the mechanism of disciplinary power is replaced by modulatory power. Modeled environments model behaviors./A estrutura é universalmente conhecida: uma redoma de vidro transparente onde são colocados e alimentados peixes para visualização ou rentabilização humana. Na sociedade dos Big Data, os aquários são plataformas, redes ou aplicações digitais, pelo que podemos chamá-los de aquários digitais. Da mesma forma que a vida do peixe se torna visível no momento em que entra no aquário, o mesmo acontece ao indivíduo que entra no espaço digital. Os construtores dos aquários digitais são os detentores dos capitais material, financeiro ou intelectual. Os peixes são substituídos pelos humanos.
A aquarização é o processo de criação de estruturas digitais que medeiam as atividades humanas, tornando-as visíveis e rentabilizáveis. A aquarização é consequência da digitalização do mundo, que universaliza a mediação e, consequentemente, a disseminação da vigilância e do controlo. A tendência é clara, cada vez mais serviços públicos e privados estão a ser aquarizados.
Os peixes abandonam o mar e entram no Aquário por vários motivos. Há quem diga que o escolheram por ser mais confortável, conveniente e previsível. Lidam mal com as águas duras e frias, o perigo da caça e com a aleatoriedade da vida. Mas escolher poderá não ser uma boa palavra. Milhões de peixes entram todos os dias nos Aquários por estratégias complexas de sedução e coação.
Se o Panótico de Bentham é a figura arquitetónica da sociedade disciplinar, descrita por Foucault, e, segundo Deleuze, o Rizoma a figura que se reclama a nossa modernidade, na sociedade do controlo, o Aquário é a configuração da sociedade dos Big Data, que contrai características análogas e disruptivas daquelas, mas especialmente de sofisticação tecnológica.
O dispositivo do poder aquariano é transparente, automatizado e antecipatório.
O Aquário é um edifício transparente que produz um efeito duplo de visibilidade e invisibilidade. Por um lado, é uma arquitetura panótica feita para obter um controlo interior, articulado e pormenorizado – para tornar visíveis os que nele se encontram – , em contrapartida, exerce-se tornando-se invisível. O poder, a extração e utilização de dados dos indivíduos, exerce-se de forma que ninguém consiga identificar os seus executores. Ainda que seja uma arquitetura forte, engenhosa e complexa, é impercetível. Assim, enquanto os habitantes do panótico têm consciência da presença constante do vigilante, os habitantes do aquário creem estar em liberdade.
Além de ser um sistema de luz – que ilumina os indivíduos, tornando-os visíveis – o Aquário é um sistema de linguagem que se baseia – e é reforçado por – no armazenamento, análise e distribuição de informação pessoal. Misturando várias fontes de dados, os programas de Big Data, que incorporam algoritmos, criam perfis de indivíduos com pouca ou nenhuma intervenção humana. Os detalhes sobre que tipos de dados estão incluídos nestes perfis e classificações, e que algoritmos são usados para dar atributos a um indivíduo, são largamente invisíveis para os indivíduos, aumentando o potencial de codificação de discriminação nas decisões automatizadas.
No Aquário, os fluxos, atividades, conexões, desempenhos e movimentos dos indivíduos são datificados, separados e classificados por algoritmos, cujos processos dão origem a divíduos – os duplos datificados que habitam uma infinidade de programas e bases de dados e que retroagem sobre aqueles. Os dados têm efeitos, eles são performativos.
Os Big Data transportam também uma metamorfose dos métodos punitivos, pelo que o Aquário é uma nova tecnologia de poder que pune de maneira diferente, que substitui o tratamento ou a cura pela prevenção. Na sociedade aquarizada, o mecanismo do poder disciplinar é substituído pelo poder modular. O ambiente modelado modela comportamentos.

Las transformaciones tecnológicas que afectan los sistemas de seguridad nacional no son para nada nuevas, por el contrario, responden a una serie de cambios epistemológicos que han venido sucediéndose en las sociedades desde, por lo menos, el siglo XVII. El objetivo del presente ensayo radica en observar cómo la figura del hombre, surgida a partir del XVIII, en la actual sociedad de control -visto a través máquinas que pueden ver, reconocer, vigilar y, si se quiere, destruir con total autonomía con respecto a la mirada humana- es transformada en una figura numérica que responde a la manera en la que los algoritmos informáticos ven y reconocen la realidad empírica. Estas ideas están desarrolladas valiéndonos del caso del nuevo DNI argentino -que utiliza tecnologías digitales en la identificación de los ciudadanos nacionales y extranjeros- y la selección de algunos documentales del cineasta alemán Farocki, por ser pertinentes a la hora de ilustrar el papel de las máquinas en los procesos de vigilancia.

Dentro da epistemologia das sociedades de controle, o futuro deve ser temido, pois seu caráter inovador pode desestabilizar o status quo da ordem social. Na impossibilidade de evitá-lo, o futuro precisa ser pré-dito, analisado e interditado. Alia-se a tal ideia de risco o desenvolvimento de duas tecnologias que infraestruturam a ontologia digital: o banco de dados e o algoritmo que, vinculados, passam a estocar rastros dos usuários na Internet. A observação a partir do big data foca-se em fatores externos ao indivíduo e almeja antecipar comportamentos desviantes. Podemos chamar este modo de observação de reconhecimento de padrões. Tal técnica expressa o colapso do tempo cronológico em um espaço globalizado e a revolução do olhar: olhamos o presente, mas vemos o futuro. Se a arqueologia procura passados alternativos no passado, a anarqueologia deverá procurar por alternativas dentro do presente a este futuro cristalizado.

La privacidad se transforma debido a la circulación de la información personal mediante redes. Sin embargo, el uso que el mercado hace de dicha información privada pareciera ser menos problemático que un impulso similar a manos del aparato Estatal.
El texto describe, por un lado, las mutaciones que la noción y la práctica de la privacidad han experimentados, así como reflexiona sobre el valor de la información. Por otro lado, aborda cómo las lógicas propias de la economía y los mercados actuales echan mano de tales transformaciones en aras de constituir mecanismos de control más afinados y eficientes.

Privacy is transformed due to circulation of personal information through networks. However, the use of such private information made by the marketplace seems to be less problematic than a similar pulse at the hands of the state apparatus.

PUBLICADO EN: TELOS. Revista de Pensamiento sobre Comunicación, Tecnología y Sociedad. N°102; Octubre-Diciembre 2015; ISSN 0213-084X; Fundación Telefónica; Madrid, España; pp. 109-116

What happens when the relationship to credit and debt becomes more about a body's 'going through the motions', more about touch or gesture than about belief or guilt (or sin)? In what ways then does living-with-debt gradually and continuously alter the atmosphere of existence, weaving through and between bodies as a garment to be rhythmically engaged – worn loosely or tightly – and never too easily shrugged off? How should we understand the contact zones, infrastructures, and interfaces where credit and debt are managed, habituated, eluded? Bookended by scenes from Feed (a young adult's dystopian science fiction tale of life under real subsumption in late-capitalism), this essay will pursue various 'threads' toward an ontology of debt – moving beyond the realm of the economic to also consider the ethological, ecological, existential, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of indebtedness in our era of affective capitalism.

Drehli Robnik: Kontrollhorrorkino – Gegenwartsfilme zum prekären Regieren (Wien: Turia+Kant Juni 2015, 195 Seiten, ca. 20 S/W Abb.)
Unter dem Label Kontrollhorrorkino geht es um Formbildungen der Politik, um Denkbilder der Theorie und um Filmbilder von gesellschaftlicher Macht. Wie vermitteln sich Zumutungen des Postfordismus, der heute Bevölkerungen optimiert und kontrolliert?
Diese Frage richtet sich einerseits an Film- und Sozialtheorie bei Gilles Deleuze und an die Diskussionen mit ihm und gegen ihn; und sie richtet sich anderseits an aktuelles Horrorkino, etwa an Zombiefilme oder an Gruselsatiren wie "Hostel", "Shaun of the Dead" und "The World´s End".