Resisting Sovereign Surveillance: an activist agenda from the Incarcerated
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Presentation made by Jessa Lingel and Aram Sinnreich at the Internet Research 15 Conference in Daegu, Korea, 10/23/14. Full draft of the article is available at http://j.mp/incodification. Presentation audio: https://soundcloud.com/original-sinn/incodification_ir15 Abstract: This paper reviews penal history in order to consider forms of resistance to mass surveillance. Because experiences of surveillance are endemic to incarcerated life, identifying tactics of resistance among these populations provides valuable insights for potential forms of counter-conduct in other circumstances of ubiquitous monitoring. We focus on three forms of protest: hunger strikes, alternate communication networks and viral dance videos, which we frame through Foucault’s theory of askesis. We introduce the term incodification as a means of describing conditions of continuous surveillance ingrained into infrastructures of everyday life, even as these conditions give rise to tactics of resistance like those identified in this paper. Our objective in introducing this term, and with our analysis as a whole, is to provoke theoretical and activist projects that account for and subvert infrastructures of incodification.
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Resisting Sovereign Surveillance: an activist agenda from the Incarcerated
- 1. RESISTING SOVEREIGN SURVEILLANCE: AN ACTIVIST AGENDA FROM THE INCARCERATED Jessa Lingel + Aram Sinnreich | October 2014
- 3. ASCETICS, ASKESIS, ACTIVISM 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 (1998).
- 4. HUNGER STRIKES AND ASKESIS?
- 5. MEDIA REFUSAL AS COUNTER CONDUCT
- 8. ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS 1. Argot Network Society Equivalents • 1337 • Geek-speak • TXTing language • LOLcats/dogespeak • Memetic slang
- 9. ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS 2. Tap Codes Network Society Equivalent • Mesh networks
- 10. ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS 3. Textual Encryption Network Society Equivalents • Digital Encryption
- 11. ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS 4. Smuggling Network Society Equivalents • VPNs • Proxy servers • Steganography
- 12. INCODIFICATION You are here Incarceration You are here Incodification
- 13. COMMENTS + FEEDBACK? jlingel@microsoft.com | jessalingel.tumblr.com sinn@rutgers.edu | aram.sinnreich.com Download the article: j.mp/incodification
Notes de l'éditeur
- In light of last years’ disclosures about the NSA, I've been thinking a lot about possibilities for resisting surveillance, specifically the kind of surveillance that is structural and to a large extent invisible. I want to state at the outset that I'm actually less concerned with possibilities for avoiding detection (which I think is probably impossible in any meaningful way) and more interested in possibilities of simply resisting, of registering dissent – managing surveillance. So I asked myself about the most surveilled population I knew of, the most monitored and controlled – prisons. And that’s where I decided to look for ideas on how dissent operates in prison, which could perhaps offer insight into how to talk about and think through conditions of continuous, asymmetrical surveillance.
- 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.
- In terms of a theoretical framework for thinking about surveillance and counterconduct, we draw on Foucault’s understanding of askesis. 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.
- 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 surfaced in 2013 among inmates in California's prison system. At its peak, approximately two thirds of California's prisoners were participating in a hunger strike.
- 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. 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.
- When denied a legitimate venue for protest, collective action can coalesce in unpredictable ways; for Ranciere, these actions take on particular urgency and power when they are absurd or inscrutable. Perhaps more than our other two examples, the power of viral dance videos 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.
- Reference AoIR presentations - Yoel Roth on how Grindr/Manhunt policies limit gay male expression