{"id":2151,"date":"2014-03-03T11:06:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T11:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2014\/03\/03\/resistance-and-surveillance-the-design-of-todays\/"},"modified":"2015-01-04T17:06:51","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T16:06:51","slug":"resistance-and-surveillance-the-design-of-todays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2014\/03\/03\/resistance-and-surveillance-the-design-of-todays\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
Resistance and surveillance: The design of today\u2019s digital tools makes the two inseparable. And how to think about this is a real challenge. [\u2026] When the time for my panel arrived, I highlighted a recent study in Nature on voting behavior. By altering a message designed to encourage people to vote so that it came with affirmation from a person\u2019s social network, rather than being impersonal, the researchers had shown that they could persuade more people to participate in an election. Combine such nudges with psychological profiles, drawn from our online data, and a political campaign could achieve a level of manipulation that exceeds that possible via blunt television adverts. How might they do it in practice? Consider that some people are prone to voting conservative when confronted with fearful scenarios. If your psychological profile puts you in that group, a campaign could send you a message that ignites your fears in just the right way. And for your neighbor who gets mad at scaremongering? To her, they\u2019ll present a commitment to a minor policy that the campaign knows she\u2019s interested in\u2014and make it sound like it\u2019s a major commitment. It\u2019s all individualized. It\u2019s all opaque. You don\u2019t see what she sees, and she doesn\u2019t see what you see. Given the small margins by which elections get decided\u2014a fact well understood by the political operatives who filled the room\u2014I argued that it was possible that minor adjustments to Facebook or Google\u2019s algorithms could tilt an election. I\u2019m not sure if the operatives were as excited by this possibility as I was afraid of it. [\u2026] To make sense of the surveillance states that we live in, we need to do better than allegories and thought experiments, especially those that derive from a very different system of control. We need to consider how the power of surveillance is being imagined and used, right now, by governments and corporations. We need to update our nightmares. [\u2026] That\u2019s what a street protest does, in its essence: It makes you feel not alone. We should leave aside the stale arguments about protests that happen on the street versus those that take place online. There\u2019s one key feature that the Internet and the street share: They make us visible to each other. That is their power. [\u2026] To understand the actual\u2014and truly disturbing\u2014power of surveillance, it\u2019s better to turn to a thinker who knows about real prisons: the Italian writer, politician, and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was jailed by Mussolini and did most of his work while locked up. Gramsci understood that the most powerful means of control available to a modern capitalist state is not coercion or imprisonment, but the ability to shape the world of ideas. The essence of some of Gramsci\u2019s arguments can be seen in another great dystopian novel of the 20th century. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisions a state that eschews existential terror in favor of a drug, soma, that keeps its citizens happy and pliant.<\/blockquote>\n

Is the Internet good or bad? Yes.\u00a0 \u2014 Matter \u2014 Medium<\/a><\/p>\n\n

OK, this is one of the best things I\u2019ve read on Occupy Gezi Park in ages or probably ever. Last year I wrote up my thoughts on gameful design and the built environment in a chapter for The Gameful World and what emerged was mainly about legibility and resistance. This article describes in great detail both the workings and value of street protests and the mechanisms by which contemporary Western regimes (attempt to) control people. In my chapter I suggested that fuzzing, making oneself illegible, is the most effective strategy for resistance in this day and age. I think that is supported by what Zeynep Tufekci argues here.<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Resistance and surveillance: The design of today\u2019s digital tools makes the two inseparable. And how to think about this is a real challenge. [\u2026] When the time for my panel arrived, I highlighted a recent study in Nature on voting behavior. By altering a message designed to encourage people to vote so that it came … Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-tumblr","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}