----- Forwarded message from Florian Cramer ----- Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 22:37:17 +0200 From: Florian Cramer To: nettime-l@kein.org Subject: Re: <nettime> Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE) Reply-To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism One aspect doesn't seem to have been addressed here yet: that the Panopticon may be an outmoded metaphor because of its sole emphasis on visuality. Twelve years ago, in 2001, the exhibition "ctrl_space" at ZKM Karlsruhe drew deserved criticism after its curators had departed from the notion of the panopticon and narrowed down the show to visual surveillance: primarily, cctv cameras and video installation work. This was at a time when Telepolis and other media had extensively covered Echelon, the NSA communications surveillance program that preceded PRISM [ http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/6/6929/1.html]. The ZKM curators apparently couldn't deal with Echelon because it wasn't visual and thus not easily translatable into an exhibition, and because it didn't fit Foucault's and Deleuze's canonical cultural studies theories of surveillance as smoothly. In 2013, we're watching this history repeat itself as a farce. Many people (myself included) are flabbergasted by the lack of mass-scale protest against the government programs disclosed by Snowden. It seems as if two limiting factors are at work simultaneously: Seasoned media activists and critics didn't learn anything fundamentally new from Snowden except that their earlier assumptions are now confirmed and can no longer be dismissed as paranoia. For others, the news simply seemed to be too abstract and intangible, much like the news reporting on financial derivatives schemes and billion dollar bank bailouts in the past. There are no emotionalizing images, no icons, figuratively speaking: no My Lai photographs. Teaching a mixed group of third year Bachelor-level students of informatics, media technology and media design, I learned that even most of them did not know or understand systems like PRISM, commercial mining of personal data and big data operations. Criticism is unlikely to become effective unless (a) it sharpens up its analysis beyond staid cultural studies paradigms and metaphors, and (b), seemingly in contradiction to (a), creates a powerful visual language to raise awareness of the issue. For the time being, I'd seriously recommend people watching the 1998 Will Smith blockbuster "Enemy of the State" (and its Coen brothers parody "Burn after Reading"), for the lack of anything better. A popular activist philosopher like Zizek could be criticized for reinforcing visual fetishisms and resulting blindness through the way his own lecturing is so much based on iconic popular cultural images; on the other hand, this might be the route to go. -F On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Al Matthews wrote:

Hello list. On Tor,

...

The US was slow to realize (or did they know this from the beginning?)

Surely the latter <...>

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