Profiling Machines [Electronic resources] : Mapping the Personal Information Economy نسخه متنی

The Politics of Profiling: Maps and Simulations

As economies, information technologies, and production, distribution, and consumption ‘‘loops’’ have become increasingly more pervasive and complex, critical studies of social control and inventory systems have focused on the question of the rights and freedoms of individuals. Although Michel Foucault’s work draws on a somewhat distant European past and has a specific historical perspective, his interest in techniques of categorization, surveillance, and social control have been taken up by many contemporary cultural theorists who are perplexed by a culture that has become overdetermined by technological networks. In this regard, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), particularly his architectural discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, has been the source of much lively debate. Contemporary criticism has interpreted Foucault’s work in light of the rise of information technologies and networks in government, the workplace, education, and consumer markets. A central question that pervades much of this work is how we are to understand surveillance across—not necessarily ‘‘outside’’ of—isolated, fixed, and imprisoned spaces as well as wider urban, rural, and geographical spaces.

Modern forms of surveillance, as Christopher Dandeker’s Surveillance, Power, and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day (1989), reminds us, can be traced back to the rise of bureaucratic and legal forms of governance. Dandeker (1989, 37–38) describes the shift in power relations as moving from forms of ‘‘supervision’’ to ‘‘bureaucratic surveillance.’’ Such a shift could be understood simply in terms of the directness or immediacy of forms of control and management. The supervisor’s morning ‘‘Hello,’’ for example, serves as a gentle reminder of the need to arrive at the workplace on time. In a system based on bureaucratic surveillance, conversely, workers simply punch a time card into a clock, removing the need for direct supervision of arrival times. Rules and technologies are therefore established to ensure the worker’s compliance with the work schedule and expected level of production.

Steven Nock’s The Costs of Privacy: Surveillance and Reputation in America (1993) offers a more systemic, or sociological, explanation for the rise of supervisory and bureaucratic forms of surveillance. Nock methodically details the changes in domestic living arrangements in the immediate post–World War II period, finding plenty of evidence to support his contention that children became independent of their parents at increasingly earlier ages. Moreover, children also moved out of their parent’s homes in large numbers, greatly increasing the number of single-occupant domiciles in the United States. Nock contends (quite rightly, I believe) that such changes led to a heightened sense of privacy and individualism. Without the family, society needed to institutionalize new social forms of control. For Nock (1993, 5–6), surveillance was the cost that society had to pay for an increased need for privacy. Greater and greater numbers of people were strangers to each other, and their ability to interact with and to trust individuals was compromised. Surveillance, then, filled in for the demise of ‘‘reputations,’’ resulting in the establishment of increasingly bureaucratized and institutionalized forms of credentials—credit, education, identification.

Such analyses and histories of surveillance provide much needed perspectives on trends in information systems. However, to respond to more pervasive systems of surveillance—outside the home and the workplace—contemporary theories have increasingly focused on issues of privacy and overt forms of discrimination. There are many differing approaches to surveillance, but the study of ‘‘dataveillance’’ provides a useful point of departure for discussion and analysis. The term dataveillance is widely attributed to Roger A. Clarke (1988), a scholar of information systems and technologies. Clarke has studied the computer’s contributions to the redefinition of systems of surveillance and defines dataveillance as the systematic use of personal data systems to monitor behavior. Clarke’s study, entitled ‘‘Information Technology and Dataveil- lance,’’ is one of the most comprehensive attempts at classifying various forms of surveillance. The major distinction that he draws in his study is between personal forms of surveillance (focusing on issues of criminal behavior) and mass surveillance (focusing on issues of social control). Although Clarke recognizes the role played by profiling or computer matching in predicting deviant behavior, he nonetheless fails to acknowledge a potential for discriminatory practices against individuals and communities. For example, the profiling of drug suspects (an instance of personal surveillance, according to Clarke) often leads to the systematic harassment of young men of color in the United States (surely a mass phenomenon).

Mark Poster’s The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (1990), particularly the chapter on ‘‘Foucault and Databases,’’ similarly takes Clarke’s term dataveillance as a central line of inquiry. Engaging with poststructural theories of language, Poster is, however, more concerned with the database as a new medium than he is with any systemic notion of privacy or discrimination. Speaking more directly to Foucault’s work, Poster (1990, 93) discusses surveillance as a ‘‘Superpanopticon’’ that creeps out of the recesses of architectures to the larger topographical terrain. Poster (1990, 91) has also argued that databases are not an invasion of privacy but rather that they constitute a means of ‘‘adjusting and readjusting ad infinitum the norm of individuality.’’ David Lyon’s The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994) is similarly influenced by Clarke but questions Poster’s evacuation of person- hood and agency. By maintaining some sense of an individual as a ‘‘self-communicating’’ entity, Lyon (1994, 52) argues that surveillance works through a series of solicitations and seductions whereby individuals actively ‘‘trigger’’ their own inclusion into systems of surveillance.

Oscar H. Gandy’s The Panopticon Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (1993), perhaps the most detailed work on surveillance from the perspective of computers and dataveillance, engages both the poststructural and political economy traditions. Again focusing on the role of data in government, education, and consumer markets, Gandy argues that the contemporary information system sorts individuals and communities into abstract categories. In such an economy, notions of privacy are replaced by an understanding of the larger political and economic effects of the loss of control over personal information. Gandy’s central contribution stems from his insistence that this process of sorting individuals and groups is inherently discriminatory, a belief that is directly discussed in his essay aptly entitled ‘‘It’s Discrimination, Stupid’’ (1995). In the essay, Gandy (1995, 42) forwards a notion of ‘‘group privacy’’ based on the fact that surveillance systems work in particular geographies, through the use of zip codes, school districts, and other geographic markers. Gandy’s insistence on geographic variables is a welcome corrective to the over- emphasis on data and repositories of data in the works of Clarke, Lyon, and Poster, yet it remains largely underdeveloped and untheorized.

While almost all of the authors discussed above mention profiling or computer matching at one time or another in their works (albeit mostly in passing), few equate such processes with the need for simulations and visual representations in surveillance systems (see chapter 4 for a discussion of the importance of computer mapping programs such as geographical information systems). The process of establishing a category or profile of a potential transgressor of rules (such as a criminal or deviant) must by definition precede the act of transgression itself. Taking the view of data- veillance, this would entail a process of cross-referencing patterns of behavior to establish commonalties among transgressors—a profile. The form that this profile takes (and ultimately where the dataveillance approach ends) is a typographical list or simple printout. For example, in the case of a criminal profile, the list could read ‘‘five feet tall, Caucasian, single, passive aggressive, a loner with a history of mental illness’’). In the police station, however, the typographical profile is only the beginning of the investigative process. Typographical profiles are almost always followed by visual representations—sometimes a picture but often (as a result of the need to locate possible future sites of transgression) a map.

With these thoughts in mind, consider William Bogard’s The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (1996), in which he discusses the processes of profiling and surveillance in relation to simulations. According to Bogard (1996, 34–35), surveillance attempts to ‘‘look through’’ or ‘‘around’’ something, whereas simulations are ‘‘projected onto something’’ (such as screens). The theoretical—and by extension, political—strength of Bogard’s work is his rejection of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, which is dominated by questions of sensibility and the collapse of true/false distinctions.^[4] Instead, Bogard (1996, 14) turns to the work of Gilles Deleuze, who maintains that simulations or ‘‘the virtual’’ should not be likened to the ‘‘actual’’ but rather to the ‘‘possible.’’ Thus, for Deleuze, simulations are always working toward potential situations and goals, producing effects on individuals and groups. Bogard uses the Deleuzian definition of simulation to discuss surveillance and profiling as predictive technologies in space. In other words, for Bogard, simulations of surveillance provide maps of potential transgressions in space. Such simulations give us the ability to change spatial arrangements and the behavior of individuals and groups.

To summarize, while all theories of surveillance speak to the shifting social fabric of everyday life, few relate issues of privacy, power, and discrimination to the processes and effects of simulational technological systems. And while concerns over privacy continue to mount, Gandy reminds us that information systems increasingly place individual wants and desires into larger, ratio- nalized, and easily diagnosable profiles (demographics and psychographics). Surveillance in this light cannot be removed from notions of social control or from the potential for certain preplanned effects.

^[4]Nevertheless, Jean Baudrillard (1994, 1) also recognizes the topo- graphic functions of simulations: ‘‘Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless.’’