sábado, 22 de setembro de 2007

Colonização da intimidade e perfis informacionais


No networked performance, entrevista com o artista francês Cristophe Bruno sobre privatização da olhadela (glance), colonização da intimidade e perfis informacionais. Seguem alguns extratos abaixo:

"ECO: What do you mean with “privatization of the glance”?
CB: The idea of “privatization of the glance” comes from a general tendancy that can be perceived in the transition from market capitalism to network capitalism. At first, there is a postmodernist “dematerialization” phase, which unveils the emergence of libertarian ideals of sharing and freedom but ends up with commodification of the ultimate “atoms” of human relations ; this is what happenened in the realm of language with The Google Adwords Happening. The post-fordist ideas that are at play in the economic dynamics of global structures like Google show the rise of 2.0 markets for these networked commodities involving “long tails” phenomenons (the Adwords/Adsense system for instance). According to contemporary graph theory (cf Barabasi: Linked), the “long tail” (or web 2.0 or “aristocratic network”) phenomenon is the mode according to which globalization is achieved in a closed unregulated networked ecosystem ; by definition it is an extension of the concept of the fordist object to the globality and variety of the human desires.

The new stake of capitalism is the control of these “global objects” through what I called “colonization of intimacy”: for instance when they bought Blogger, Google took a strong position towards the control of Language as a global 2.0 object, because they took hold of the gold mine of mankind’s intimacy.

[...]

ECO: What do you think about the “informatic profile” of every web citizen? In a way it depends on the pattern recognition algoritm that is used….Does it means my pubblic web image depends on values decided by ….Google?
CB: Sure but behind this question lies another one which is more tricky. It is definitely a problem that a private company may tune their algorithm so that the image of an individual would in a way reflect more the criteria of the company than the identity of the individual… By the way this is a very general and universal property of the concept of “image”, that computer science will not be able to solve; there is no objectivity here but instead an interplay between subjectivities (the subjectivity of those who wrote the program in that case).

What these companies want when they use pattern recognition to decide for instance if they are going to grant you a loan, is to have the most reliable universal method to predict your behaviour and evaluate their risk. Because there is no such universal theory, they have to use modelizations which depend on some arbitrary considerations and parameters and hence they have to make arbitrary choices. Now a problem arises when the method used is falsely claimed to be indeed universal and true. This is what is actually happening nowadays with the current expansion of technologies of control and there is a great danger that we are lead to a totalitarian mechanism.

But there is also a paradox. At some point, companies have in fact no interest in cheating and pretending they have a universal scientific method. This attitude is actually a modernist attitude which has been outdated by postmodernity. Any company that would do that takes the risk of being sooner or later suspected and despised. Moreover by imposing a normativity they lose track of what lies ouside the norm. Since what lies ouside the norm may become the seed of the markets of the future, this may reveal to be a self-contradictory strategy. In a 2.0 globalized world, if they put barriers to freedom, they are just unable to optimize the whole process because they lose data!

This is exactely what a company like Google understood. Google has a VERY long term stategy. They keep promoting freedom of speech and avoid any normative positioning because they know that this attitude is the basis for the optimization of their adwords/adsense system which is a never ending process. This is the paradox: freedom of speech has become a tool of totalitarianism (cf Benjamin text) and instead of modernist totalitarianism we are witnessing the rise of totalitarianism of the hypermodernity. This trend is a large scale trend. As the world-system reaches its EXTERNAL limitations (depletion of natural resources, expected end of low-cost labour, the end of the ideology of liberalism, the fading of desire, etc.), capitalism tries to relaunch its machinery by pushing back its INTERNAL limits. Thus freedom of speech is revealed to be the prerequisite for the scientific colonization of intimacy as well as collective hallucination is the prerequisite for the privatization if the glance. [posted by Luca on EcoPolis]"

3 comentários:

Anônimo disse...

Oi Fernanda,

Li hoje no Globo e lembrei de vc:

EUA buscam nova tecnologia para captar potenciais terroristas

http://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/mat/2007/09/25/297869948.asp

Anônimo disse...

O endereço saiu truncado...Vou dividir em duas linhas, ok?

http://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/mat/
2007/09/25/297869948.asp

agora foi!!

Fernanda Bruno disse...

Oi Bia,
Muitíssimo obrigada!! Publiquei no blog um post sobre o Hostil Intent. Dá uma olhada:
http://dispositivodevisibilidade.blogspot.com/2007/08/vigilncia-e-previso.html
Esse projeto tem tudo a ver com o que venho pesquisando e a matéria do Globo traz outras informações importantes. Mais uma vez obrigada.
um abraço,
Fernanda