A Foucauldian NIghtmare

The biopolitics of the information age: Data Mining

This excerpt from NPR (talking about a new book by data mining expert, Stephen Baker) discusses the way in which different entities (from Amazon.com to political campaigns to insurance companies) order you in categories ("tribes") depending on your consumptive choices (ranging from the goods you buy to the sites your surf) and attempt to mold and direct your day-to-day choices based upon the information that they receive.

Here is a portion of the article...also check out the 20 minute interview:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95166854

"When it comes to producing data, we're prolific. Those of us wielding cell phones, laptops, and credit cards fatten our digital dossiers every day, simply by living. Take me. As I write on this spring morning, Verizon, my cell phone company, can pin me down within several yards of this café in New Jersey. Visa can testify that I'm well caffeinated, probably to overcome the effects of the Portuguese wine I bought last night at 8:19. This was just in time for watching a college basketball game, which, as TiVo might know, I turned off after the first half. Security cameras capture time-stamped images of me near every bank and convenience store. And don't get me started on my Web wanderings. Those are already a matter of record for dozens of Internet publishers and advertisers around the world....

...The Numerati also want to alter our behavior. If we're shopping, they want us to buy more. At the workplace, they're out to boost our productivity. When we're patients, they want us healthier and cheaper. As companies like IBM and Amazon roll out early models of us, they can predict our behavior and experiment with us. They can simulate changes in a store or an office and see how we would likely react. And they can attempt to calculate mathematically how to boost our performance. How would shoppers like me respond to a $100 rebate on top-of-the-line Nikon cameras? How much more productive would you be at the office if you had a $600 course on spreadsheets? How would our colleagues cope if the company eliminated our positions, or folded them into operations in Bangalore? We don't have to participate, or even know that our mathematical ghosts are laboring night and day as lab rats. We'll receive the results of these studies—the optimum course—as helpful suggestions, prescriptions, or marching orders."

The scary part about this is that data mining opens up a wealth of knowledge about personal behavior that the statistics of twenty years ago did not. This provides new potential for entities to intervene in the management of day-to-day life...Political campaigns engaging in micro-targeting, for example, have the means to render us transparent as a very deep level.

Althusser - Foucault connection...

According to Wikipedia: "The prominent Guevarist Régis Debray studied under Althusser, as did the Derrida, noted philosopher Michel Foucault, and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller."

Amy Poelher's silence kills the McCain campaign.

The road to the Whitehouse runs through Letterman and Saturday Night Live...