In all, the CIA took some 14,000 photographs of the agency’s black sites around the world, but we, the public, have never been able to see any of them until now.
There are plenty of examples of this macabre genre. Israel produces it. So does Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. As did the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The Nazis. The Soviets. The French. Governments of different political leanings have contributed to this dark archive, uniting the magical technology of the camera with the awesome power of detention and even death. They take pictures of their own crimes and immediately file them away, in an acrobatic technocratic act of simultaneous remembering and forgetting.
Moustafa Bayoumi in Hyperallergic. The Banal Evil of Atrocity Photography
In the dark genre of self-reported atrocity photography, governments take pictures of their crimes and file them away in an act of simultaneous remembering and forgetting.
Honestly I feel ROSANNA is the REAL "image of an idealistic state-head that is in no way achievable in reality", NOT Lord. xD
Lord is much more of an ACTIVIST figure who's just taking on a conventionally odd role of a ruler. Always has been. But Rosanna? An iron lady president who is l'etat-c'est-mois fully committed to her status as the embodiment of the Isolan government, BUT SHE IS ALSO FULLY WELL-MEANING AND ACTUALLY TAKES HER ROLE FOR HER PEOPLE JUST AS SERIOUSLY??
We got plenty of activists like Lord, but no way we got any presidents like Rosanna 🫠
Government databases make possible the overreach and omnipresent surveillance that are the dominant features of our times.
Databases in the UK—and elsewhere—have only proliferated; increasingly manufactured and maintained by a nexus of private actors and state agencies, they are generated by and produce more and more information streams that inevitably have a material effect on the populations they’re used by and against. More than just a neutral method of storing information, databases shape and reshape the world around us; they aid and abet the state and private industry in matters of surveillance, police violence, environmental destruction, border enforcement, and more.
Databases and their particularities are often seen as a merely technical concern—something to be worried about only when there’s a glitch or a security breach. But as theorist Liam Young argues in his book List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed, statistics and information have emerged as the “lifeblood” of the modern state. These massive streams of information—portrayed as seamlessly whizzing from one dataset to another—produce the state in as much as they also reveal the state as it is.
As the authors of the 2009 report note, the aims of what they call the “enforcing state” and the “public services agenda” are increasingly fused together; information collected about individuals en masse is cast as a way to better provide for them. To a very limited degree, there is some value to this argument—in certain health care contexts, for example around vaccinations and allergies, detailed datasets offer clear benefits. But these databases demonstrate how excessive—and often unnecessary—the majority of their counterparts are.
[...]
At the time of the Database State report, the [UK] Labour government then in power was dedicated to what it called “joined-up” thinking, or pulling information from one part of the state to another in order to enact policy and deliver services more efficiently and effectively. In practice, this led to the creation of massive databases containing seemingly indiscriminate amounts of information, databases that frequently had no legal justification for their existence. Though often seen as neutral, or even user-friendly, by those who design them, these repositories are political interventions; they make possible the governmental overreach and omnipresent surveillance that are the dominant features of our times.
Public debate around databases tends to focus on the question of extraction—the extent to which modes of data collection pose a threat to civil liberties. But there’s more to it. As Dan McQuillan, an academic and lecturer in creative and social computing at Goldsmith’s College, explains, the relational database “transcribes between informational content and action in the world,” meaning that even seemingly neutral, legal data collection inevitably produces outcomes that may not have occurred otherwise. In this way, too, massive government databases are never just benign repositories.
For all of the crypto conversation about the supposed liberatory benefits of putting the world on the blockchain (a publicly distributed database), I'm surprised at how little critical conversation I've found about how databases are still an apparatus of power whether we "intend" them to be or not. Maybe I'm not reading the right stuff.
It just seems really weird considering how much the crypto and crypto-adjacent folks love Seeing Like a State.
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have a history of Bahubali - muscle men who become local extortionists, criminals, and champions of their caste’s social power - turning into political leaders and using the levers of state power to further their criminal enterprise and suppress rivals. Bahubalis continue to be fielded as candidates by all parties, some win. When the police are expected to function according to the whims of political leaders, rather than the law, they lose accountability and gain arbitrary power over the citizenry. Deaths in police custody are a corollary.
‘Vikas Dubey: Argument for Radical Reform’, Economic Times
We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes
