![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1 I draw on Zuboff’s (Citation2019) framework and investigation lightly, throughout. Her breakdown of Google as a case study provides keen insight into the methods of obfuscation and opacity that tech- companies use to gather the data and information of its users. But we might also note that Zuboff’s methods keep her from advocating that the economic system that allows Google to thrive should not exist at all. For Zuboff and other scholars, the ethical tragedy of wholesale abuse and theft of citizen data, that she outlines in detail, does not lead them to cast aspersion on capitalism. I take up here how surveillance has proven historically essential to capitalism’s function. At this moment it is critical to frame the Internet’s evolution into the ultimate surveillance tool as more than an assemblage of case studies of a few powerful protagonists who shaped platforms.
2 Grateful to my peer reviewer for bringing me to the first chapter, “Quiet Soundings, The Grammar of Black Futurity,” as a place where Spillers’ essay is powerfully reassessed.
3 The pandemic seems to be frequently narrated as a suspension of time and a time in which the virus was only seeable when it was historical; it can’t be seen until it registers in the body.
4 One outcome of the pandemic, mediated in this way, could be that more people will and are inadvertently training in how models and simulations produce reality, and further, in interpreting and debating their inputs, their assumptions, their lack of clarity and points of necessary revision.
5 This could be limited to be a socioeconomic designation of those who “benefit” from upholding capitalism. This could seem to imply only those with a great measure of financial or social security within that system. But an aspiration to uphold the state and its economic imperatives is not limited to the wealthy and is a shared ideological goal for many, across many classes.
6 “Pandemic theater” is a term used often by Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist and computer programmer, who has published widely and consistently about the pandemic this year. Tufekci is frequently praised for her astute analysis of pandemic spectacle; she invites the public to become savvier at critically reading coded, veiled messaging from public health and government.
7 Paul Preciado’s (Citation2020) text was one of a few early and strong theoretical analyses of the politics and technological dimensions of this pandemic within the history of past pandemics.
8 The history of the Internet’s early days—in which the myth of the Internet as a cyber-cowboy’s new frontier bloomed—is narrated beautifully in Fred Turner’s (Citation2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture. One might also look back at John Perry Barlow’s (Citation1996) infamous “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which he claimed the Internet was “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth … a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” For a clear, concise history of the Internet’s architecture evolving from open to closed over two decades, please see Benkler (Citation2016).
9 In Chapter 6, “Spectacular Time,” Guy Debord described spectacular time in part as the time spent consuming images; further, the “social image of the consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance, and as desirable by definition.” The social image today of collective consumption of time is arguably of the pursuit of images; time is passed consuming spectacular media (Citation1995, 112).
10 Preciado walks us through Foucault’s conception of biopolitics as foremost a way “to speak of the relationship that power establishes with the social body in modernity. Foucault described the transition from what he calls a sovereign society, in which sovereignty is defined in terms of commanding the ritualization of death, to a ‘disciplinary society,’ which oversees and maximizes the life of populations as a function of national interest.” Preciado asks us to consider how discipline and punishment are enacted in the anesthetized technological theater of quarantine.
11 As Wendy Chun describes masterfully software updates introduce and obfuscate their content to such a degree, through insidious, opaque dark patterns, that users rarely notice or read—or have the space—to analyze what is being introduced. Over time, this relationship to software, in which users are actively incentivized to scroll past, has made the force of the click and swipe, the need to keep one’s phone moving, a matter of powerful design, working as intended (Citation2016).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nora Nahid Khan
Nora Nahid Khan is a writer of criticism. She is on the faculty of Rhode Island School of Design, Digital + Media, teaching critical theory, artistic research, writing for artists and designers, and technological criticism. Her most recent book is Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019), on the impact of machine vision on criticism.