ICA 2016: Resisting Surveillance: Counter Conduct of the Incarcerated
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Presentation given by Jessa Lingel and Aram Sinnreich at the International Communication Conference in Fukuoka, Japan, June 2016. This presentation focuses on how incarcerated populations resist and mitigate surveillance, and what online populations can learn from their acts of "counter-conduct."
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ICA 2016: Resisting Surveillance: Counter Conduct of the Incarcerated
- 1. RESISTING SURVEILLANCE COUNTER CONDUCT OF THE INCARCERATED Jessa Lingel + Aram Sinnreich | June 2016
- 2. Incodification “The term “incarceration” effectively describes not only the direct physical experience of imprisonment but also the array of social conditions that derive from this experience … For groups of people who are continually held in suspicion by the police, such as young men of color, incarceration encompasses not only jail time and prison sentences, but an entire set of relationships between oppressed people and the legal system that extends far beyond prison walls. We aim to make an analogous argument for mass surveillance by introducing the term ‘incodification.’” -Lingel, J., & Sinnreich, A. (2016). Incoded counter-conduct: What the incarcerated can teach us about resisting mass surveillance. First Monday, 21 (5).
- 3. You are here Incarceration You are hereIncodification
- 6. Askesis and inscrutability Askesis – “An exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out, to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being.” (Foucault) Inscrutability – “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak.” (Rancière)
- 7. Hunger strikes and askesis
- 8. Media refusal as counter conduct
- 10. Alternative communication networks 1. Argot Network Society Equivalents • 1337 • Geek-speak • TXTing language • LOLcats/dogespeak • Memetic slang
- 11. Alternative communication networks 2. Tap Codes Network Society Equivalent • Mesh networks
- 12. Alternative communication networks 3. Textual Encryption Network Society Equivalents • Digital Encryption
- 13. Alternative communication networks 4. Smuggling Network Society Equivalents • VPNs • Proxy servers • Steganography
- 14. Aesthetics of incodified counter- conduct
- 15. Comments + Feedback? jlingel@asc.upenn.com | jessalingel.tumblr.com aram@american.edu | aram.sinnreich.com | @aram bit.ly/incodeICA
Notes de l'éditeur
- Purpose of this talk is to introduce the term Incodification.
- And Incodification matters for the following reasons, examples slide Code isn’t just law, it’s an architecture of experience and subjectivity.
- It's important to state at the outset that there is a very real risk of blithe indifference in drawing a comparison between people serving prison sentences and people whose ICTs are being monitored. The scope of control are very different, where monitoring is not only about technological use but is highly embodied, curtailing movements, food, sleep, physical proximity to others. Rather than trying to draw any sort of comparison, we’re interested in thinking about how modes of resistance that have emerged within prisons can be useful in drawing out tools of dissent in the context of technological surveillance. Our approach is to provide some examples from penal history, making connections to critical theory in the context of power, communication and subjectivity. These theories offer a means of weaving together different narratives and technologies of resistance. The modes of resistance I’ve come up with so far are hunger strikes, viral dance videos and alternative communication networks. I’ll talk about the first two, and then hand it over to Aram.
- From a critical theory perspective, it's easy to make an instant leap to Foucault and the panopticon, but as many theorists are starting to point out (Lovink, Bossewitch and Sinnreich) I don't think that model is the most useful for thinking through modes of resistance. Instead, I want to make some connections between hunger strikes and late Foucault, on askesis, which speaks to shaping behavior through performance, where individual behavior shapes the behaviors of others. Hunger strikes are a radical form of askesis, where political urgency is mapped quite literally onto the body. Askesis offers a model of how protest ideology can circulate socially - the display of a certain set of behaviors, particularly deeply embodied behaviors, becomes a means of shaping collective norms. Hunger strikes are a means of bodily communication , of insisting on a particular dialogue. Dialog not only between subjects and institutions but between subjects and other subjects. Ranciere on inscrutability as politics
- There is a long tradition of self-deprivation as a form of protest (my favorite, perhaps, is Evo Morales going on hunger strike against his own congress and sustaining himself on coca leaves). Prison hunger strikes in the last few months have emerged most famously in Guantanamo, but a massive hunger strike also recently surfaced among inmates in California's prison system. At its peak, approximately two thirds of California's prisoners were participating in a hunger strike. From a discourse perspective, there are fascinating findings related to the rules, regulations and documents surrounding protest - what constitutes a hunger strike (for CA prisons, at least, nine consecutive missed meals; fasting does not equal consumption of liquids, apparently), what information is disseminated to strikers (health pamphlets describing medical consequences of fasting, which may or may not be accompanied by actual medical attention), agreements with prisoners to stop or explain their protests.
- In what ways can we move this mechanisms of shaping collective behavior through practices of self to some of the recent work on diet and attention (Lovink) and what it means to limit one's information intake (Laura Portwood-Stacer). Metaphors of internet diet present a return to the body - much like my earlier stance that escape from surveillance is impossible, the use of “diet” assumes consumption of information. What would a hunger strike of the internet look like? We can gather both individual and activist collective actions under the label of media refusal.
- I've been thinking for some time about the bizarreness of Filipino prison dances - most famously with "Thriller" but also more recently with Psy's "Gangham Style." The fascination with videos of these dances points to the somewhat contradictory simultaneousness of attention and inscrutability, where I want to make connections to Ranciere's work on illegibility as the only possibility for protest, and also to open up a discussion of consent, connections to Butler on Excitable Speech. The absurdity of these videos contains multiple layers: the globalization of pop songs somehow still startles; the paradox of a spectacle that offers a rare glimpse inside a prison that nonetheless reveals no information because it is so staged; the contradiction between dance as pleasure and play and circumstances of institutional coercion. We view prison dance videos as both highly mediated (leveraging convergence culture to produce an artifact that is at once a representation and somehow unknowable) and ultimately illegible, and it is precisely this inscrutability that we see as potentially disruptive in the context of sovereign surveillance. Perhaps more than our other two examples, the power of viral dance vidoes draws from being already interwoven into non-incarcerated life. The connection between mobile technologies and flash mobs is often constructed in terms of facilitating coordination, but no less important is the ability to disseminate documentation of flash mobs quickly and across many platforms. Like hunger strikes, viral dance videos require an audience to succeed. Improv Group - Surprise surveillance theater. Performances directed to CCTV. OBRIST All of these behaviors can be thought of as attempts to disrupt surveillance, in that they take as a given monitoring of everyday behaviors and then subvert them.
- Recognizing, encountering Incodification in everyday life – thinking of this as a contribution to a vocabulary that can account for and begin to think about alternatives to the structures of data control currently shaping our everyday interactions.