Built to lie: Investigating technologies of deception, surveillance, and control

This article explores technological systems that dissimulate by design. Examples include untrustworthy hotel and workplace thermostats, digital applications to spy on workers and family members, and commercial and law-enforcement systems that surreptitiously collect mobile phone data. Rather than view such cases as exceptional, I argue that deceptive communication systems are hidden articulations of normal technological orders. If deception in itself is not the primary problem with such systems, then transparency alone cannot be the solution. As troubling as institutional opacity might be, an analysis of deceptive systems reveals more fundamental problems: imbalances in power and widespread acquiescence to corporate and state efforts to control individuals, groups, and their data. By moving beyond a quest for (or belief in) technological veracity, scholars could redirect attention to power inequalities and the pressing question of how to live together ethically

Editorial: surveillance and inequality

Many domains of social life are being transfigured by new technologies of identification, monitoring, tracking, data analysis, and control. The lived experiences of people subjected to surveillance, however, can vary widely along lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, and nationality. This can be seen with the enforcement of different types of mobilities for different categories. Regardless of the domain, new surveillance systems often amplify existing social inequalities and reproduce regimes of control and/or exclusion of marginalized groups in societies

The arresting gaze: Artistic disruptions of antiblack surveillance

This article analyzes a range of art and performance pieces that unearth and problematize the racist cultural underpinnings of surveillance. Drawing upon recent black studies scholarship, I probe the ways that contemporary creative works disrupt dominant signifying regimes that would position racialized surveillance/violence couplings as historical and exceptional rather than as foundational and routine. I argue that such aesthetic disruptions achieve creative vitality by holding in tension exclusionary regimes of white liberal personhood, on one hand, and articulations of hope that depart from those regimes, on the other. Whereas the gaze of surveillance seeks to silence and arrest subjects, creative expression can undermine authorized forms of visuality by focusing on survival and community that persist in spite of it

Somatic surveillance: corporeal control through information networks

Somatic surveillance is the increasingly invasive technological monitoring of and intervention into body functions. Within this type of surveillance regime, bodies are recast as nodes on vast information networks, enabling corporeal control through remote network commands, automated responses, or self-management practices. In this paper, we investigate three developments in somatic surveillance: nanotechnology systems for soldiers on the battlefield, commercial body-monitoring systems for health purposes, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) implants for identification of hospital patients. The argument is that in present and projected forms, somatic surveillance systems abstract bodies and physiological systems from social contexts, facilitating hyper-individualized control and the commodification of life functions

Surveillance as Governance: Social Inequality and the Pursuit of Democratic Surveillance

Monahan, T. 2010. Surveillance as Governance: Social Inequality and the Pursuit of Democratic Surveillance. In Surveillance and Democracy, edited by K.D. Haggerty and M. Samatas. New York: Routledge, 91-110

Flexible Space & Built Pedagogy: Emerging IT Embodiments

This paper analyzes the convergence of information technology infrastructures and traditional educational spaces and proposes flexible criteria for material-virtual, hybrid learning environments. I develop the concept of built pedagogy to account for the ways that built environments teach values through their constraints upon social action and interaction and suggest ways that the built pedagogies of hybrid spaces can facilitate learning by inviting students and teachers to participate in the continual re-design of learning structures

Algorithmic Fetishism

Surveillance-infused forms of algorithmic discrimination are beginning to capture public and scholarly attention. While this is an encouraging development, this editorial questions the parameters of this emerging discussion and cautions against algorithmic fetishism. I characterize algorithmic fetishism as the pleasurable pursuit of opening the black box, discovering the code hidden inside, exploring its beauty and flaws, and explicating its intricacies. It is a technophilic desire for arcane knowledge that can never be grasped completely, so it continually lures one forward into technical realms while deferring the point of intervention. The editorial concludes with a review of the articles in this open issue

Transit's downward spiral: Assessing the social-justice implications of ride-hailing platforms and COVID-19 for public transportation in the US

This paper explores the interconnections between ride-hailing platforms and public transit systems in large US cities. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with expert key informants representing city government agencies, industry, community groups, and others, we find that ride-hailing platforms have catalyzed a downward spiral in many public transportation systems: as more people use ride-hailing instead of transit, transit systems receive less revenue and must reduce services to compensate, which makes transit seem even less desirable to would-be riders, leading more people to explore other transit options. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, preexisting transit deficiencies, shifting customer expectations, and stigmatization of transit systems and riders each contributed to ride-hailing platforms’ successful encroachment upon public transit. The pandemic has fundamentally destabilized both transit systems and ride-hailing alternatives, but it portends an even greater decline in transit as people gravitate to privately owned vehicles and eschew sharing rides with others. Ride-hailing and transit partnerships, such as a Boston-based pilot project to provide paratransit services for people with disabilities, point to possibilities for complementary arrangements moving forward, but they remain constrained by their industry-focused market models. The current downward spiral is particularly concerning because it negatively impacts the most vulnerable and disempowered in society

Modern American characters and the natural world : a quest for reconciliation

This thesis charts the quest for reconciliation with the natural world in four recent American novels: Saul Bellow's Henderson The Rain King, John Updike's The Centaur, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and William Gibson's Neuromancer. These novelists provide us with characters whose discontent motivates them to leave their accustomed environments in search of meaning or identity. This lack of rootedness or centeredness prevents them from maintaining healthy relationships with themselves or others. Only by first leaving their usual environments can they reacquaint themselves with their bodies, at which time they feel comfortable enough to return to their local communities and proceed with their newly defined lives. Americans' dependency upon technology complicates the lives of these characters in their search for meaning. They must negotiate not only their relationships with others and the natural world, but also the influence of technology on these relationships. They soon discover that they must take all of their surroundings into consideration -- natural, artificial, and, in some cases, virtual. Only through acknowledging the effects of each of these forces on their lives can they accept both nature and technology and begin the path toward self-healing and self-empowerment. In typical quest fashion, all of them must eventually return to their original environments in order to complete their cycles of reconciliation. This reconciliation can be understood through examining ecopsychology and sustainability, which provide two models for resensitizing ourselves to the Earth's systems while maintaining our accustomed urban social structures.California State University, Northridge. Department of English.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-89

Picking and Choosing Among Phase I Trials

This article empirically examines how healthy volunteers evaluate and make sense of the risks of phase I clinical drug trials. This is an ethically important topic because healthy volunteers are exposed to risk but can gain no medical benefit from their trial participation. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 178 healthy volunteers enrolled in various clinical trials, we found that participants focus on myriad characteristics of clinical trials when assessing risk and making enrolment decisions. These factors include the short-term and long-term effects; required medical procedures; the type of trial, including its design, therapeutic area of investigation, and dosage of the drug; the amount of compensation; and trust in the research clinic. In making determinations about the study risks, participants rely on information provided during the consent process, their own and others’ experiences in clinical trials, and comparisons among studies. Our findings indicate that the informed consent process succeeds in communicating well about certain types of risk information while simultaneously creating lacunae that are problematically filled by participants through their collective experiences and assumptions about risk. We discuss the ethical implications of these findings and make recommendations for improving the consent process in healthy volunteer trials