Presentation @ 4S

I will be at 4S [Society for Social Studies of Science], Boston this week in the ‘Surveillance and Security’ panel: Thursday 31 August, 4.00pm, Sheraton Boston Flr 3 Kent.

Recessive Objects: Surveillance and the (Dis)appearance of fact

Recessive objects are things which promise to extend our knowledge, but thereby publicise the very uncertainty threatening that knowing. These archives, statistical figures, black boxes mobilise our enduring faith in nonhuman objectivity and technological progress, imposing a sense of calculability and predictability. Yet far from extinguishing uncertainty, they provide material presence of the absent, secret, unknowable – especially the widening gap between human and machinic sensibility. Recessive objects address longstanding questions about the social production of what counts as objective fact, and what kind of virtues are invested into ‘new’ technologies. They emphasise the practical junctures where public imagination, material artefacts and the operational logic of new technologies intersect.

I discuss two recessive objects featuring centrally in America’s recent encounters with surveillance technologies: (1) the Snowden Files, an indefinite archive of state secrets leaking profusely since 2013; (2) the latest generation of self-tracking devices. What does it mean to know about a vast state surveillance system, even as it operates almost entirely removed from individuals’ sensory experience? How can the public make its judgment when proof of surveillance’s efficacy is itself classified? What kind of ‘self-knowledge’ is it when we learn about our bodies through machines that track us in ways our senses cannot follow – and claim to ‘know you better than you know yourself?