Locative Media & The City

I wanted to elaborate a bit on something I have mentioned towards the end of last week’s class. With reference to the fictional world portrayed in Minority Report and, more in general, to control societies, I was noticing how one of the ways in which control is exercised is through machines and tools of daily use. What I was trying to say is that many of these tools and machines (I cannot find a better way to put it) have now double or multiple accesses. The users are not anymore the only ones to have access to these tools and machines, and they know that ‘others’ can access them as well (at the same time or later on) and check on the way they are or have been used. This is very badly put, but here’s an example. Think of the way credit cards have changed the nature of economic transactions. Paying in cash for products or services used to be to a large extent an anonymous operation. With credit cards, on the other hand, not only we leave traces of these transactions, but these traces can be accessed by other people for a wide variety of reasons (checking our credit history, reconstructing our spending habits for the purpose of market researches, etc.). In completing an economic transaction using a credit card, in other words, we are aware that a third party could be ‘watching’ us (in real time or in the future). A similar sensation of ‘being watched’ is also there when we write emails, or surf the internet. Again, the point is that in using the net we are using a ‘tool’ with multiple accesses; we are not alone, we do not have exclusive control of the ‘tool’ we use. (An extreme case of this is portrayed in the film, where cars can be stopped remotely and redirected). What makes this kind of cases akin to panopticism is, among other things, the fact that we can never know for sure if we are actually being watched or not, but we always know that we could be.
Within this multiplication of traces and data, however, lies also the possibility of subversion. As our ‘data body’ grows disproportionately (is this the expression Mark used, ‘data body’? I was going through my notes, but couldn’t find it) grows the possibility of blurring traces and accumulating contradictory data. A project like tracenoizer (that Mark mentioned last time) is a great example of a way of using the very mechanisms of control in order to subvert the ‘control project’ (to call it a ‘project’ has a funny aftertaste of conspiracy theory, but you know what I mean). Another example is the recent practice (widespread among many activists) of peppering emails with random references to Iraq and words like ‘bomb’ and ‘weapon’ in order to short-circuit the (potential? actual?) security ‘word-checks’ on emails. (Btw, I would be very curious to know more about other similar actions and projects, so if you are aware of others, please let me know). The interesting thing, however, is that even without sabotage, the mechanism seems to be doomed to failure: past a certain threshold, the hypertrophy of data becomes unsustainable, and collecting new data can only generate confusion. Projects and actions such as the ones mentioned above are only accelerating this process. (Am I being too optimistic? Too simplistic?).