#control society

[1000rh]

We are entering control societies that are defined very differently than disciplinary societies. Those who are concerned about our welfare no longer need, or will no longer need, places of confinement. The prisons, schools and hospitals are already places of permanent discussion. Wouldn't it be better to expand home visits by doctors? Yes, that is certainly the future. Workshops and factories are bursting at the seams. Wouldn't it be better to use more sub-contracting and working from home? Aren't there other ways to punish people than prison?

– Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?” (1987)

[zurich-snows]

Based on a transcript from Taeyoon Choi’s class Poetics and Politics of Computation at the School for Poetic Computation, 2015

[kenyatta]

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

The blueprint for modern digital computing was codesigned by Charles Babbage, a vocal champion for the concerns of the emerging industrial capitalist class who condemned organized workers and viewed democracy and capitalism as incompatible. Histories of Babbage diverge sharply in their emphasis. His influential theories on how “enterprising capitalists” could best subjugate workers are well documented in conventional labor scholarship. However, these are oddly absent from many mainstream accounts of his foundational contributions to digital computing, which he made with mathematician Ada Lovelace in the nineteenth century.1 Reading these histories together, we find that Babbage’s proto-Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers are inextricably connected to the calculating engines he spent his life attempting to build.

From inception, the engines—“the principles on which all modern computing machines are based”2—were envisioned as tools for automating and disciplining labor. Their architectures directly encoded economist Adam Smith’s theories of labor division and borrowed core functionality from technologies of labor control already in use. The engines were themselves tools for labor control, automating and disciplining not manual but mental labor.3 Babbage didn’t invent the theories that shaped his engines, nor did Smith. They were prefigured on the plantation, developed first as technologies to control enslaved people. Issues alive in the present—like worker surveillance, workplace automation, and the computationally mediated restructuring of traditional employment as “gig work”—echo the way that computational thinking historically emerges as a mode of control during the “age of abolition,” in the early nineteenth century. Britain officially abolished West Indian slavery in 1833, and Babbage was very aware of the debate on abolition. He was also aware of the questions that were roiling the British elite as they sought alternatives to enslaved Black labor—particularly the question of how to control white industrial workers who persistently rebelled against industrialization, such that they could produce at the pace required to maintain the British empire. Both Babbage’s influential labor theories and his engines can be read as attempts to answer these questions—ones that, knowingly or not, rearticulated technologies of control developed on the plantation.

[e-stranger]

Burroughs was a feminist!

Rub Out The World, drawing by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.

William S. Burroughs tells us how we can scramble the control society through grammar in his essay The Electronic Revolution, from 1970.

delete the copula (is/are), i.e., disrupt fixed identities – YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE NOT [Lacan]!

replace definite articles (the) with indefinite articles (a/an), i.e., avoid reification — THERE EXIST MULTIPLICITIES [Badiou]!

replace either/or with and, i.e., ignore the law of contradiction — JUXTAPOSE [Silliman]!

1. Copula

The IS OF IDENTITY. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal,” you are not a “body,” because these are verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All name calling presupposes the IS of identity. This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS in the sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb TO BE can easily be omitted from any languages. . . . (“ER” 33)

2. Definite Articles → Indefinite Articles

THE DEFINITE ARTICLE THE. The contains the implication of one and only: THE God, THE universe, THE way, THE right, THE wrong, If there is another, then THAT universe, THAT way is no longer THE universe, THE way. The definite article THE will be deleted and the indefinite article A will take its place. (33-34)

3. Either/Or → And

THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF EITHER/OR. Right or wrong, physical or mental, true or false, the whole concept of or will be deleted from the language and replaced by juxtaposition, by AND. This is done to some extent in any pictorial language where two concepts stand literally side by side. (ibid.)

Via Burroughs on How to Escape the Society of Control by Sean Kohingarara Sturm, 2010.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The same society of alienation, totalitarian control and passive spectacular consumption reigns everywhere, despite the diversity of its ideological and juridical disguises. The coherence of this society cannot be understood without an all-encompassing critique, illuminated by the inverse project of a liberated creativity, the project of everyone’s control of all levels of their own history.”

- Guy Debord, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Art and Politics. June 1963. (via @shituationist)

[nonsenselab]

Anonymetrix

CLIMATE CHANGE (Week One) - - - Winds howl westward Streaking speeds through cities Screaming slower than information But more insistently understood In the hollowed out chambers Gales gust ballistic Signals everywhere trembling Foundations are shaking Witness only expiring effects Insults blow past data packets Remote piloting through the æther Hang on dearly as the whole thing Pivots on a bluster We didn't see that one coming. Whisper near beside me Until there is no air between us Winds becoming too swift for bullets The killings will soon be at close quarters . Thousands of muddy footprints Claim an accelerated turn to the dead ends Of another arid fold Mottling the linoleum transit Synthetic concrete optics get Shredded by forensic scuff and grit Yield to the everyday shuffles overhead Feet and hooves beg every sort of design imaginable At once fragile and callous and preening Walking a million dusty miles Only to arrive at the Victorian checkerboard terrace Only to be pinned like a Nike butterfly Under glass and key Treading on a wing and a prayer Only footsteps away from Victory . Giant klieg light burning skyward Blind to the machinations down below Or over there Broadcasts appear on the horizon At the same time every year Sweeps week and spring cleaning join hand in hand To refresh all memory of what was No matter how many snowbanks Or polar icecaps Evaporate to the cloud Heliocentric deities perish successively One after the next Orbit after orbit Yet light continues to govern earthly pursuits It seems these days history is never historical enough To matter Suns warm over even the coldest hearts Until it gets too hot in the kitchen And butcher knives gesticulate wildly Through steam and through broth Temperatures flare While cool glass monitors the situation And the inventory With incidental regard Orders ready to be served this minute To the hungry rush that beckons Past the heat and the glare . Flurries of intensity scramble the morning grayscales One-tenth the volume of channel zero snowfall More or less Chaotic elements turn ambient Turn miserable Once the romance is bled from the programming And enthusiasms become dampened In the erstwhile trickle and melt Splashes of colour by contrast Unbox new modules for minding the urban renders Obscure underlying calculations and Layers of movement beneath Scrolls of numerical transactions Offer some of a child's earliest texts Blissfully unaware of what or whom is being counted With these tiny digits and curls Shards of imagination and potential Guaranteed by white paper writs To speed up the whole thing would Amount to a legal confetti By the everyday blizzard effect . Flashes of bright light Initiate a sequence of sky blue Barely perceptible gradient fill Invites flip to the other side of the windowscreen Gives art to the motor Feel cool velocities brace like a streak To the face Illusions of autonomy often engender the Gravest sorts of dependence Or addiction Though perhaps if one wasn't so autonomous in considering Might summon murmurations most hypnotic Dust particles floating in the windowed sunrays Of late afternoon Conjure swarms of bees for just the briefest span of attention Printing money takes root in all sorts of ways When faced with rectangular living Terraforms tesselate statistical promise For optimizing ecologies Optimism flips to the other side of the windowscreen Barely perceptible art invites Sequences of sky blue and bright light . Rimes of frost trace the horizon Of this chilled #666666 header Salted crystals edge our perpendicular looking-glass And the spirits contained therein Contagions demand a particular shift To their morning disappearances A familiar refrain tweets in the distance While algorithms fetch us a happy springtime From deep within the unix sunrise Arriving instantly from the farmlands Blessing the form fields a robust vernal equinox Under a flat #3b5998 sky 'VOX PUPIL POPULIPO!' -- we shout in reply to all senders The season finale and its ultimate harvest Often occupy the sense of imagination To the detriment of the now Forgetting the little cuts and severances along the way Clippings and cuttings are the clones of the living Every #00aced bird could tell you the same thing . The rosy salmon underbelly hovers Over crepuscular transmission protocols Slowly swimming the long upstream arc across planet telex Glowing hues of orange and blue compete To lend fire to the daily energetics A boeing fin tracks the jetstream currents Along another vector altogether Angular Pescatarian pareidolia everywhere to be found Is this fish love between you and me we're describing Even as the heat suddenly leaps by a dozen degrees? Volatile weathers bring the big winds blowing Hot and cool media nets Streaming with consistencies And doubly redundant echo effects Colour contrast and oversaturation Hue and cry Every time one inspires or expires A breathless tornado could be informing

[1000rh]

The totalization of production leads to the total profanation of life. Rest, too, is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time. It is no longer the beginning of a holy period of assembly. [...] The mounting pressure to perform makes even recreational pauses impossible. Thus, many people find that they fall ill during leisure time. This illness has even been given a name: leisure sickness.

– Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals (2019)

[kenyatta]

If plastic replaces cash, much that is good will be lost – Brett Scott | Aeon Essays

Cash might be grungy, unfashionable and corruptible, but it is still a great public good, important for rich and poor alike

The cashless society – which more accurately should be called the bank-payments society – is often presented as an inevitability, an outcome of ‘natural progress’. This claim is either naïve or disingenuous. Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge.

The first is the banking industry, which controls the core digital fiat money system that our public system of cash currently competes with. It irritates banks that people do indeed act upon their right to convert their bank deposits into state money. It forces them to keep the ATM network running. The cashless society, in their eyes, is a utopia where money cannot leave – or even exist – outside the banking system, but can only be transferred from bank to bank.

The second is the private payments industry – the likes of Mastercard – that profits from running the infrastructure that services that bank system, streamlining the process via which we transfer digital money between bank accounts. They have self-serving reasons to push for the removal of the cash option. Cash transactions are peer-to-peer, requiring no intermediary, and are thus transactions that Visa cannot skim a cut off.

The third – perhaps ironically – is the state, and quasi-state entities such as central banks. They are united with the financial industry in forcing everyone to buy into this privatised bank-payments society for reasons of monitoring and control. The bank-money system forms a panopticon that enables – in theory – all transactions to be recorded, watched and analysed, good or bad. Furthermore, cash’s ‘offline’ nature means it cannot be remotely altered or frozen. This hampers central banks in implementing ‘innovative’ monetary policies, such as setting negative interest rates that slowly edit away bank deposits in order to coerce people into spending.

Governments don’t really mention that monetary policy agenda. It isn’t catchy enough. Rather, the key weapons used by the alliance are more classic shock-and-awe scare tactics. Cash is used by criminals! People buy drugs with cash! It’s the black economy! It supports tax evasion! The ability to present control as protection relies on constant calls to imagine an external enemy, the terrorist or Mafiosi. These cries of moral panic are set in contrast to the glossy smiling adverts about digital payment. The emerging cashless society looms like a futuristic sunrise, cleansing us of these dangerous filthy notes with rays of hygienic, convenient, digital salvation.