Society of Control

Accelerationism is a theoretical movement that seeks to mobilise reason and technological development as a strategy for moving beyond capitalism. The first wave of accelerationism took the effects of capitalism at their most pernicious and suggested that they have not gone far enough. More recent work has complicated this project and explored political, epistemic and aesthetic accelerations. The central push to accelerate, and therefore to manifestly alter time, has consequences in terms of how one understands temporality in education. This article outlines the development of accelerationism and examines whether this theoretical movement can aid critical analysis of the growing presence in education of commercial technology providers, new modes of data analytics, and the application of machine learning algorithms to analyse data. These developments provide a useful example in relation to which a critical question can be asked: is it possible to accelerate technological development in education separate
from its capitalist development?

Hunting stories will always glorify the hunters, since it is the hunters who write the stories. In this book, Dénètem Touam Bona takes up the perspective of the hunted, using the concept of marronage to highlight the lives and creativity of colonized and subjugated peoples. In a format which blends travel diary, anthropological inquiry and philosophical and literary reflection, he narrates the hidden history of fugues, those of the runaway slave, the deserting soldier, the clandestine migrant and all those who challenged norms and forms of control. In the space of the fugue, in the folds and retreats of dense and muggy woods, runaway countercultures appeared and spread out, cultures whose organization and values were diametrically opposed to colonial societies.

This thesis is about the rapid expansion of a new mechanics of power and its implementation in relegated areas, such as the chosen case study: the favela da Rocinha, after the installation of a Center of Command and Control at UPP Rocinha. To better depict this process, through interviews, ethnographically- inspired day-to-day accompaniment, informal talks and literature review, it also was developed an extensive field work and a theoretical effort to try to explain reality as it presented itself in the field.
From the analysis of subsequent processes to or presuppositions of the central aim of the research, more data is gathered and there's certainly more substratum to get to the point. This is the reason why are analyzed here the origins and function of the police institution, the history of the Military Police of the state of Rio de Janeiro, the public safety policies of Sérgio Cabral and Pezão administrations, the war on drugs and the militarization of public safety, the favela as an analytical category – or not -, the UPP project. Besides key theoretical concepts to the development of this work, such as: state of exception, homo sacer, the field, schmittian sovereignty and biopolitics.
After these conceptual discussions, the course of the analysis is modified to understand which other mechanics of power are still in full operation and how they mingle, reframing themselves, giving birth to a hybrid. The disciplinary society, an embedded kind of governmentality in the favelas, clashes with the society of control, thus mixing biopolitics and control. As well as the society of control, electronic surveillance is rhizomatic, the opposite of surveillance in disciplinary societies, which is arborescent, because it denies the multiplicities, through “molding” processes depicted by Deleuze and Guattari (2000).
Only then it is possible to reach conclusions from the field with high explicative power, for instance, that the implementation of the camera system accentuates differentiations, therefore, expanding the social cleavages, once it is based on classifications, which in turn are based on racist, misogynistic and class stereotypes not to mention others of all sorts, varying in function of the perceived risks and of the desired target-population to be declared under exception rules with electronic monitoring, typical of society of control borderless penalizations, which is already called by some as ecopolitics.

Within the contemporary articulation of the Society of Control, online-platforms such as Facebook have vastly extended the breadth of surveillance and depth of control exerted by capital, used to guide our subjectivation within circuits amenable to the accumulation of surplus-value. As digital-networks facilitate the proliferation of information, the symbolic order becomes increasingly fractured and the capacity for previously authoritative sources such as news media to secure common meaning declines (Andrejevic, 2013). Through examining the development of control societies into Platform Capitalism, as well as the Cambridge Analytica and “Fake News” scandals emerging within the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, this thesis seeks to examine two converging strategies through which capitalism attempts to maintain its domination. The first is the control exerted over our subjectivation as statistical technologies facilitate the production of fine-grained inferences from unstructured data, such as our seemingly arbitrary Facebook likes being used to infer sexual orientation, ethnicity and political views (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). The second is the exploitation of a decline in symbolic efficiency, which the emergence of a ‘post-truth’ politics is symptomatic of. A problem which results in the subject turning towards affect as a means to resolve meaning (with affect measurable and exploited through data-analytics), and a culture of conspiratorial-cynicism which makes disinformation such as “fake news” effective. This thesis further examines the centralization of the internet through monopoly platforms as an expansion of imperialism, seeking to examine their role in contesting the sovereignty of the nation-state and shaping the terrain of political struggle.

A popularização da internet e das tecnologias digitais, e em especial de dispositivos móveis como smartphones, permitiram que sistemas algorítmicos se tornassem cada vez mais presentes no cotidiano. LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter e Facebook são sistemas que fazem uso de algoritmos para organização e distribuição de conteúdos publicados por usuários e anúncios publicitários. Google, Amazon e Apple, dentre outros, desenvolveram sistemas algorítmicos para prestarem serviços diversos aos seus usuários, como busca de conteúdos na internet e recomendação de personalizada de produtos. O crescimento do uso destes sistemas se deu, ao menos em um primeiro momento, em vista de sua evidente utilidade para realizar uma tarefa qualquer na internet. Todavia, estes sistemas algorítmicos também guardam uma dimensão política. Ao organizarem os conteúdos da web, disponibilizando-os ou não a determinados usuários, e direcionarem publicidade de forma personalizada, sistemas algorítmicos inscrevem relações de poder e conduzem as condutas humanas em alguma medida.

How do urban security assemblages evolve? Scholars inspired by Deleuze's Control Thesis detect profound shifts in the ways security operates. Different to Foucault's disciplinary logics, they argue, security assemblages now rely intimately on expanding casts of policing agents, digital surveillance and statistical knowledge(s). They reach beyond enclosures and national borders, and they challenge democratic politics ever more forcefully. Whether this general trajectory of security management holds true across the global cityscape is yet far from evident. Not only do most studies of contemporary control draw conclusions from European and North American cases exclusively. Many also reproduce and project abroad distinctively Eurocentric assumptions about state-society relations, governance and insecurity. This article foregrounds and problematizes these penchants. It then looks at the Moroccan city of Marrakech to detail how urban security assemblages may evolve in different ways, at other speeds, and following different steering logics than what is generally set out by research on control. The article concludes with a discussion of how insights offered by places such as Marrakech contribute to more robust, analytically refined and globally inclusive research on the contemporary politics of urban security.

Using Fredric Jameson's category of the "hysterical sublime," this chapter asses the Black Mirror episode, Playtest, and how it addresses, conceptually, anxieties about new media technology and how they relate to our experiences of contemporary, neoliberal capitalism.

Ina Blom's 2007 book On the Style Site: Art, Sociality, and Media Culture is the most sustained and sophisticated attempt so far to analyse, from the perspective of post-autonomist debates concerning biopolitics and immaterial labour, the work of some of the most prolific international artists to emerge during the 1990s. This article specifies Blom's claims before examining in greater detail the key theoretical assumptions underlying her argument that the ‘style site works’ of Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others are most attuned to contemporary possibilities for critical practice. Blom defends these artists' immanent engagements with spectacle and style by invoking the biopolitical mantra that life-time and work-time have become indivisible as a result of the proliferation of media technologies into every corner of contemporary life. In doing so, Blom rests her argument on the problematic claim that communication and sociality – characterised by plenitude – are today productive of surplus-value, which in the classical Marxian analysis results from the variability of supply, and hence fundamental scarcity, of labour.

Society is a collectivity consisting of free individuals living with harmony, solidarity, and order. Yet, the "freedom" of the individuals is questionable. For the continuity of the order, human beings have to be kept under control. Individuals of a certain society are controlled, molded and orientated into the needs of the system by the rules and norms that are determined by the powerful. Gender and the notion of reconstructed "truth" are the most influential ways of control. The 19th century was the era in which these control mechanisms can be observed clearly. Since the 19th-century society was male-dominant and ruled by patriarchal norms, gender was one of the dominant control mechanisms of the era. The gap between male and female were massive and both genders belonged to different spheres which increased the level of inequality. Through certain rules, depictions and language used by men, the 19th-century women were controlled, molded and interpellated into the mainstream patriarchal society. The other control mechanism is the brand new notion of "reality or truth" constructed by the upper-class people of the 19th-century. Since the "truth" is determined by the upper-class, in other words, the powerful, rules and laws serve to them. Therefore, everyone lives their lives in accordance with those rules and norms in order not to be otherized, marginalized and terrorized. Likewise, gender as a control mechanism, how lower-class people are controlled, and interpellated into the system by the powerful can be observed through laws, depictions and the use of language. Thus and so, this paper will study gender and the reconstructed notion of "truth" as control mechanisms and how these mechanisms are seen in the 19th-century novel, Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Japan  has often been considered  by the rest of the world as an orderly country without much civil unrest. As evidence of that, Prime Minister Abe speech promoting Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic Games emphasized the  fact that the city was one of the safest in the world. However, dissatisfaction amongst Japans youth has frequently appeared in my  ethnography.  How  can  this  dissatisfaction  coexist  with  the  image  of  cohesion  and obedience that Japan sustains? In order to elaborate on this topic, this paper  introduces narratives from the dissatisfied youth in Japan that, due to seeing no prospect of change in  the  country,  have  opted  out  of  Japan  altogether,  preferring  to  live  their  lives  in countries  they  see  as  fitting  their  lifestyle  best.  More  than  discussing  this  phenomena through  the  lenses  of  class  privileges,  this  paper  also  sees  the  issues  surrounding  the choices  made  by  the  dissatisfied  young  Japanese  not  so  much  as  a  source  of cosmopolitan  subjectivity,  but  instead  as  a  condition  made possible  by  a  neoliberal ideology.  Such  ideology  commodifies  identities  and  notions  of  belonging,  shaping  the way the Japanese youth deal with dissent into more consumer oriented logics than those of  collective  politics  and  mobilization.  It  is  this  shift  from  the  citizen  to  the  consumer that, this paper argues, is behind the choice for escape rather than change.

How does architecture operate as a security technology? This contribution sets out how reflexive security research and urban studies approach built environments as political inclusion and exclusion instruments. It first presents how this role is understood to operate in the respective scholarly fields, and then illustrates its ambivalent operation with two mini-case studies centering on Bogotá and Zürich. In doing so, the contribution seeks to familiarize readers with architecture-oriented reflexive political analysis, and to draw out main lines of further investigation.

Wie funktioniert Architektur als Sicherheitstechnologie? Dieser Beitrag umreisst, wie reflexive Sicherheits- und Stadtforschung die gebaute Umgebung als Mittel der politischen In- und Exklusion konzipiert. Er erklärt erst, wie diese Rolle in den beiden Fachgebieten verstanden wird, um dann ihre ambivalente Funktionsweise anhand von zwei Mini-Fallstudien zu Bogota und Zürich empirisch zu illustrieren. Damit ist das Ziel des Beitrags, die Leser in architekturorientierte und reflexive Politikforschung einzuführen und weiterfolgende Forschungsrichtungen zu skizzieren.

Comment l’architecture fonctionne-t-elle en tant que technologie de sécurité? Cet article décrit comment les security studies et les urban studies conçoivent l’environnement bâti comme un moyen d’inclusion et d’exclusion politique. Il explique d’abord comment ce rôle est conçu par les deux spécialisations, puis illustre empiriquement son fonctionnement ambivalent avec des observations faites à Bogota et Zurich. Le but de l’article est de familiariser les lecteurs avec les approches réflexives aux processus politiques et des études orientées vers architecture, et de décrire des perspectives de recherche qui en découlent.

This article analyses the culture of the criminal control in a current days. In such a way, examines the electronic monitoring of prisoners in Brazil for study the complex change in the field of the control of crime. If, throughout the experiences of the alternative to imprisonment and to try to deal with the bankruptcy of the punishment by confinement, have had a great increase of the incarceration, can be verified, doubtlessly, the widening of control of the criminal system on the citizens. Over all, at last, the modifications in the power practices in a Society of Control demonstrate how operate the new mechanisms of sanction and, necessarily, verify the diverse mechanisms of control that have been implemented in the place of the disciplinary confinements.

We are surrounded by walls that we don’t notice. We are pierced by invisible walls. We have walls within us. Today’s walls are multiple and present, open and constant. Sometimes we sense them being “built”, but for the most part their power overtakes us. Because of their closeness and transparency they simply become “normal”. They are present in every space. They capture all that is around and inside them. From that, this article explores the diferent "regimes" of walls that are part of society and our context.
(Link to the complete book: https://bit.ly/3hdsBi5)

The present paper investigates the attempt of Japanese Universities to internationalize, and to promote multicultural spaces. During ethnographic investigations and interviews involving students and professors from six different universities, the emphasis on multidisciplinary area studies departments drew attention. Other results from the investigation included the segregation felt in departments between Japanese and non-Japanese students, a curricular emphasis on Japanese particularities and uniqueness on one hand and global institutions on the other, as well as the insistence in a West vs. East paradigm. The paper argues that what the internationalization strategies from Japanese universities have produced, at least so far, is a further isolation of Japan, since international students and Japanese students are divided in very rigid cultural and institutional boundaries. This is an inherent consequence given the option of choosing an area studies paradigm as the entry point of those students into Japanese educational, let alone socio-cultural life. Further, it is also argued in the paper that the internationalization strategies of those universities do not envision the formation of more international oriented, cosmopolitan students, but rather, as a fuel for cultural and intellectual imperialism, reinforcing rigid concepts of Japaneseness that, while continuing to produced Japanese students with a strong nationalized and racialized identity, also creates international students that, it is hoped, serve as Japan’s public relation speakers in their country of origin. The paper thus concludes that the internationalization of Japanese universities is not so much failing, as it is serving a different political goal.

Este artigo busca traçar algumas procedências espaço-siderais que contribuíram para a emergência das sociedades de controle, que segundo o filósofo Gilles Deleuze, surgem a partir da segunda metade do século XX. Para tanto, a exploração do espaço-sideral é tomada como um acontecimento cujos efeitos contribuíram para a configuração de dispositivos de poder que operam na velocidade de fluxos contínuos e ilimitados e na intensidade de comunicações rápidas e instantâneas, ajustados para operar ao ar livre em dimensão planetária. Procedente da guerra, o acontecimento exploração espacial permite observar o deslocamento da política e, mais recentemente, a expansão dos investimentos capitalistas para a órbita do planeta Terra.

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) is read through a Guattarian theoretical prism to emphasise four chief points: (1) the role of the unconscious, (2) the role of affect (affectus in the Spinozian sense; contrary to feeling which immobilises, affect moves us), (3) the apparent becoming cyborg of the human race and (4) the desire to desire repression. The author contends that while qualitative multiplicities play a central role for MLT, it is neither inconsistent nor contradictory to consider the role of the machinic in greater detail. It is argued that more research must be directed into the cartographic, ethological and noological mechanisms at work in plastic universes of reference (new technologies and the arts) which transform the virtual and transfigure the dynamic of affect.

In the context of ongoing debates about the distinctive temporalities associated with contemporary regulative regimes, this paper explores the interpretive trajectories initiated in contrasting conceptualisations of the politics of time. This exploration is developed through analysis of interview data from a study of unconscious relations in academic practice. Section one uses one moment of data to contrast phenomenological, Deleuzian and Lacanian theorisations of the relation between time and subjectivity. Section two is an exegesis of Lacan's paper on Logical Time. This outlines the way temporality is structured in relation to the subject's guess about the expectations of the Other. Section three uses this to develop an interpretation of three temporalities that constitute the space of contemporary academic subjectivities. The final section considers the intensification of the juxtaposition of these incongruent temporalities, contrasting Lacanian and Deleuzian theorisations of time in the Real/virtual and their implications for both methodological and political strategy.

C'è una spaccatura dentro l'organismo umano, la spaccatura o fessura tra i due emisferi; quindi ogni tentativo di sintesi resta irrealizzabile in termini umani (…) Una parte è scivolata dentro una incontaminata innocenza senza tempo. L'altra si è avviata inesorabilmente verso il linguaggio, il Tempo, l'uso degli strumenti, la guerra, lo sfruttamento e la schiavitù." (William Burroughs La febbre del ragno rosso) Se la guerra, come diceva Von Clausewitz, altro non è che la continuazione della politica con altri mezzi, che cosa c'è di più politico di un film di guerra?

Ecologists and environmentalists have tried to interfere in the debate about the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of transcending the approaches of virologists and epidemiologists. While the views of virologists and epidemiologists are often limited to the virus as an isolated organic element, those of ecologists and environmentalists mostly connect it to environmental issues such as the destruction of wild life habitats. This is valuable, but a broader view is also necessary with regard to how the virus is received and dealt with. This essay will frame the scientific and political responses to SARS-CoV-2 within a long-term perspective, not by simply pointing at the historical precedents of the quarantine and hygienic measures, but by historicizing and denaturalizing the scientific and political rationales behind them. As this inevitably includes the way in which science and politics interact, I will have recourse to the work of both Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault, which enables the conceptual and analytical framing of the virus and the rationalities of governance related to it to be unpacked. While Latour's ideas help explain why the virus is framed as an isolated natural organism which threatens to invade the human body from the outside, Foucauldian concepts reveal the specific forms of governance and political subjectivity involved-which are predicated on discourses of danger and 'security dispositives'. Jointly these views explain why, in contrast to the ideas of climatologists, the models of virologists and epidemiologists are followed almost unconditionally.

La privacidad se transforma debido a la circulación de la información personal mediante redes. Sin embargo, el uso que el mercado hace de dicha información privada pareciera ser menos problemático que un impulso similar a manos del aparato Estatal.
El texto describe, por un lado, las mutaciones que la noción y la práctica de la privacidad han experimentados, así como reflexiona sobre el valor de la información. Por otro lado, aborda cómo las lógicas propias de la economía y los mercados actuales echan mano de tales transformaciones en aras de constituir mecanismos de control más afinados y eficientes.

Privacy is transformed due to circulation of personal information through networks. However, the use of such private information made by the marketplace seems to be less problematic than a similar pulse at the hands of the state apparatus.

PUBLICADO EN: TELOS. Revista de Pensamiento sobre Comunicación, Tecnología y Sociedad. N°102; Octubre-Diciembre 2015; ISSN 0213-084X; Fundación Telefónica; Madrid, España; pp. 109-116

A ubiquidade do acesso à Internet traz consigo mudanças no modo como nos relacionamos com a tecnologia. As formas aceleradas de produção e consumo de dados nas plataformas tecnológicas colocam-nos hoje perante um desafio crítico no que diz respeito a privacidade e liberdade. O Big Data, enquanto buzzword, nome mercadológico sonante e uma das faces visíveis desse desafio, remete-nos para as questões antevistas em alguma literatura do último quartel do século XX.
O que pretendo fazer neste ensaio é trazer alguns exemplos de discursos literários do (sub)género Cyberpunk, cruzando esses textos com uma pequena seleção de discursos filosóficos recentes que centram a sua reflexão na sociedade tecnológica contemporânea. Pretende-se, a partir deste assumido exercício de cruzamento experimental, problematizar a visão distópica do controlo do indivíduo pela tecnologia fazendo a ponte com o surgimento e expansão do Big Data no momento que vivemos – uma era marcada por termos-chave como a “digitalização” e a “dadificação” de todas as esferas da vida pública e privada e pelo “data-ismo”, um verdadeiro império dos dados, para usar uma expressão de Steve Lohr (2016).

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Congresso de Cibercultura. Universidade do Minho, 13 e 14 de outubro de 2016.