Big Brother and “little sisters”, post-1989

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Karl Palmås

In The File, Timothy Garton Ash describes how, in the early 1990s, the intelligence community was initially struggling to find a new raison d’etre in the context of a post-Cold War world. In particular, they were at pains with legitimating themselves - their budget, and the legal rights they enjoyed - towards wider society.

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Reality mining

Posted on June 24, 2008 by Karl Palmås

Just a little tip - check out yesterday’s New York Times piece on reality mining, and the recent Nature article on “human mobility patterns”.

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Oyster: Tracking you in London

Posted on June 21, 2008 by Karl Palmås

Just a few yards from my front door, I found this cute bit of anti-panspectrocism street art

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Mixed assemblages; on the micropolitics of panspectrocist surveillance.

Posted on May 30, 2008 by Christopher Kullenberg

[Here is a short draft for the panspectrocism project. Comments are appreciated.]

The Internet cafés in Burma are under strict surveillance. Every five minutes the computers are programmed to record a snapshot of the screen and save it to the hard drive. Then the owner of the café is instructed by the authorities to burn the snapshots to a compact disc and send them away for registration. The user never knows exactly when the snapshot is being recorded, it could be just about anytime. Jeremy Bentham would probably have liked the idea of a visibility without a human gaze, but maybe he would have preferred not to distribute prison-like technologies throughout all aspects of society.

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The concatenation of RFID and relational databases

Posted on May 21, 2008 by Karl Palmås

A note on Katherine Hayles‘ current work on panspectrocist technologies.

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London; oligoptic and panspectric

Posted on May 12, 2008 by Karl Palmås

The oligopticon vs. the panspectron: Notes from two London sites, featuring two different modes of organisation and surveillance.

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The Panspectrocist Abstract Machine

Posted on May 5, 2008 by Christopher Kullenberg

Tomorrow I am off to Linköping to talk about surveillance and panspectrocist technologies. The conceptual point of departure is summarized in an abstract, which I have submitted to a conference in Cardiff called “One or Several Deleuzes”. To download the document, click here.

The point, however, is not to obey a certain conceptual apparatus. There is a multitude of entry-points to the panspectron condition, so alternative approaches are welcome as comments.

Cap&schizo wiki entry

Posted on April 29, 2008 by Karl Palmås

I have just posted a short text about panspectrocism at capitalismandschizophrenia.org - read it here. As I mention there, this is very much a concept in-the-making; it will most likely change during the course of this project.

Point of departure

Posted on April 28, 2008 by Christopher Kullenberg

The panspectrocism project was originally inspired by Manuel DeLanda’s argument that the gaze produced in the diagram of the Panopticon is facing competition from a new mode of surveillance residing within the coupling of the machinic phyla of radio-wave spectra and digital technologies. Let us, as a point of departure, quote what DeLanda is saying in his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines:

There are many differences between the Panopticon and the Panspectron /…/ Instead of positioning some human bodies around a central sensor, a multiplicity of sensors is deployed around all bodies: its antenna farms, spy satellites and cable-traffic intercepts feed into its computers all the information that can be gathered. This is then processed through a series of “filters” or key-word watch lists. The Panspectron does not merely select certain bodies and certain (visual) data about them. Rather, it compiles information about all at the same time, using computers to select the segments of data relevant to its surveillance tasks.

This is something we will explore further, and expand outside the field of military surveillance, and even to shed light on its productive aspects. Foucault located the panoptic social diagram in other institutions of society as well; in schools, prisons and in military barracks. This multiplicity which was produced together, constituted a central aspect in the disciplinary societies. But it was also productive in the sense that it shaped  modern subjectivity and the conditions for science, discourse and everyday social relations. But what about the thesis that panspectrocism is replacing the panopticism (which peaked around the mid-twentieth century)? How are we able to go from the military-industrial complex and warfare to economy, culture, science and everyday consumer technology? Stay tuned to this blog, there will be answers as well as further questions! Even the blog software is indeed being produced by the ARPANET-phylum, designed to function with high-velocities and the strength of decentralization. No matter how we feel about it, there is no return to the steam engine and the factory as models for modern society. We need new concepts and understandings in order to proceed.

Up and running…

Posted on April 27, 2008 by admin

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