Pub Date : 2020-07-28DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.003.0004
Sun-ha Hong
The Snowden files are recessive objects: things that promise to extend our knowability but, in doing so, catalyze speculation and doubt. Drawing on media phenomenology, this chapter connects this recessivity to the surveillance systems themselves and the war on terror. The effort to predict the “lone wolf” terrorist, from the Boston bomber to the Las Vegas shooter, paradoxically becomes a site for smuggling in old racial prejudices about the monstrous Other. The convenient myth of “pure” data here encounters the far older and troubling project of national, territorial, and racial purity.
{"title":"Recessive Objects","authors":"Sun-ha Hong","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The Snowden files are recessive objects: things that promise to extend our knowability but, in doing so, catalyze speculation and doubt. Drawing on media phenomenology, this chapter connects this recessivity to the surveillance systems themselves and the war on terror. The effort to predict the “lone wolf” terrorist, from the Boston bomber to the Las Vegas shooter, paradoxically becomes a site for smuggling in old racial prejudices about the monstrous Other. The convenient myth of “pure” data here encounters the far older and troubling project of national, territorial, and racial purity.","PeriodicalId":188731,"journal":{"name":"Technologies of Speculation","volume":"226 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131959932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-28DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.003.0002
Sun-ha Hong
Technologies of datafication exert their societal influence through a recurring modern fantasy of “honeymoon objectivity,” wherein technoscience might purify complex social problems and human biases to produce a stable grounding for judgment. Although fulfillment is constantly deferred, this fantasy enrolls society in a fast-expanding data market. Problems of criminal justice, political will, self-knowledge, and economic success are subordinated to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its search for meaning-indifferent, commercially recombinable data.
{"title":"Honeymoon Objectivity","authors":"Sun-ha Hong","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479860234.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Technologies of datafication exert their societal influence through a recurring modern fantasy of “honeymoon objectivity,” wherein technoscience might purify complex social problems and human biases to produce a stable grounding for judgment. Although fulfillment is constantly deferred, this fantasy enrolls society in a fast-expanding data market. Problems of criminal justice, political will, self-knowledge, and economic success are subordinated to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its search for meaning-indifferent, commercially recombinable data.","PeriodicalId":188731,"journal":{"name":"Technologies of Speculation","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128087103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}