Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
companies collect data for targeted ad campaigns.
20
In spite of this, however, the general
claim can still be upheld: if in response to the proposed National Data Center in the
mid-1960s there was a significant pushback from Congress, the mass media, legal
scholars, and the public, in the present moment Americans on the whole seem not
to mind being mined.
21
It might then at first glance seem to be possible to speak,
as does Mark Poster, of our “interpellation” by databases. True interpellation—in his
terms “a complicated configuration of unconsciousness, indirection, automation, and
absentmindedness ” — requires a coercive system, a “ superpanopticon, ” capable of ren-
dering us as both subjects of and subjects to that particular assemblage that David
Mitchell, in a fictional context, calls a corpocracy.
22
For Kevin Robins and Frank
Webster, this is the essence of “cybernetic capitalism,” by which they mean the whole
of the socioeconomic control system that is in part dependent on the capacity of state
and corporate entities to collect and aggregate personal data to the extent that each
individual can be easily monitored, managed, and hence controlled.
23
As my epigraphs
indicate, Robins and Webster are far from alone in their concern with our dynamic
incorporation within a totalizing technological system of data management.
24
Greg
Elmer also explicates the techniques by which consumer profiles are developed and
individuals are “
continuously
integrated into a larger information economy and techno-
logical apparatus. ”
25
But for Elmer and Lyon and others, a crucial aspect of this incor-
poration is our voluntary participation: the composition of consumer profiles in part
results from solicitation—whether in the form of a request for feedback or personal
data so as to be granted access to a particular service or program—which means we
are interpellated as “ self-communicating ” actors.
26
To be sure, to participate in the
project of modernity has arguably always meant that one becomes a calculable subject
by voluntarily surrendering data. Note the established meaning of “datum” itself as it is
recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary
: “a thing given or granted; something known
or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning or calculation.” In the specific
context of a sociotechnological milieu organized according to the operational principles
of “cybernetic capitalism,” however, our acts of participation or self-communication
themselves become data, the entirety of our everyday life practices subject to, and
constituted by, perpetual calculation. What was speculative at the time of Don DeLillo's
White Noise
(1985)—“you are the sum total of your data”—has in the intervening years
become actualized, and neither the legal nor the political infrastructure has kept pace
with the technology.
27
