APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis

The APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis is a short story that imagines the future of machine-readable data encodings. In this story, I speculate about the next stage in the development of data encoding patterns: after barcodes and QR codes, the invention of “holocodes” will make it possible to store unprecedented amounts of data in a minuscule physical surface. As a collage of nested fictional materials (including ethnographic fieldnotes, interview transcripts, OCR scans, and intelligence reports) this story builds on the historical role of barcodes in supporting consumer logistics and the ongoing deployment of QR codes as anchors for the platform economy, concluding that the geopolitical future of optical governance is tied to unassuming technical standards such as those formalizing machine-readable representations of data.

Flock of Rogue Drones

This story of Natalija is inspired by Evgeny Zubkov’s artwork titled Russia 2046. The piece depicts an old woman feeding breadcrumbs to drones. We imagine that where the drones are now, there once were birds. What are the relations of these various actors and how can we understand this change? For us, the image of Natalija encapsulates the relationships we as humans can form with non-living creatures, the spaces we share and the practices we engage in. Furthermore, it brings into question the separation lines of post-human and non-human life in an age of learning machines. This story as a whole depicts a future where technologies, in this case self-adapting drones, are introduced into an environment but, as time passes, are left to a state of neglect. In the story, the devices learn to interact with their surroundings, leading to contact and interaction between drones and human. While the story is imaginative, there are several reference points to surveillance research, particularly to questions relating to space/place (how is space under surveillance being produced?), agency (what kind of agency surveillance enables or supports; how is surveillance perceived by the user/target?), and technology (what are the varying contextual roles surveillance techniques are able to take?).

Speculative Fiction, Sociology, and Surveillance Studies: Towards a Methodology of the Surveillance Imaginary

Utopian theorists often speak about the merits of reading utopian fiction in order to reimagine and rebuild a better world, but dystopian fiction is often overlooked. This is, in my view, misguided because dystopian fiction, like utopian fiction, diagnoses issues with the present, inspires activism and resistance, and, in the twenty-first century, often presents ideas of how to effect positive change through collective activism. As speculative literary genres concerned with world-building, utopian and dystopian fiction have inherent sociological concerns. These texts can therefore be utilised by sociologists and other researchers beyond the arts and humanities. Speculative fiction is important to the field of surveillance studies not only because surveillance is a major theme in these literary texts but also because their formal properties provide us with the language, imagery, and feelings associated with being under surveillance. Twenty-first-century utopian and dystopian fiction has not been thoroughly examined by surveillance scholars. Analysis of utopian and dystopian fiction in this field has also focused on texts set in, and written by authors from, the global north. Considering the plethora of dystopian novels in and beyond the global north published in recent years that discuss surveillance, the neglect of the study of these texts to date is an oversight.

Challenging Black Box Technology Power Imbalances by Exposing Them: “Persuasive System” as a Prism for Decomposing Contemporary Surveillance

This article contributes to the discussion around surveillance invisibility by engaging with the existing literature and discussing Salvatore Vitale’s “Persuasive System” installation as a case study. Based on the conceptualization of surveillance as a “black box,” the article frames power imbalances involved in biometrics and video surveillance technologies and shows how Vitale’s installation aims at playing with and exposing these dynamics by reconfiguring them.

2020

In this imagined future, a jaded and anxious history teacher takes her fourteen-year-old students on a virtual visit back to 2020. Along the way, 1984 keeps surfacing. The references are both explicit and implicit: the protagonist’s name is Win and her off-stage other half is Julia; the first and last lines are a play on Orwell’s oft-cited opening sentence; and Ari is a fan of David Bowie’s 1984-themed Diamond Dogs album. But whereas Orwell (and Bowie) saw a dystopian future devoid of privacy, Win, Ari, and Jay inhabit a world where Orwell’s vision isn’t an imagined future but a nightmarish past. As a result, however, they have to struggle with issues of trust and vulnerability.

The Field of Vegetable Operations

In this short speculation, I imagine a future forest that has been disturbed by invasive species, a changing climate, and engineered plant sensors. By staging this encounter between a wandering hiker, who never quite realizes that he is being watched, and MetaBee™ #21783, a drone that watches over nanobionic spinach, I feel out the strangeness of this burgeoning mode of surveillance. In my own research, I term this operationalization of pollinator-plant relations, in which drones harvest information from engineered plants instead of pollen, a “vital informatics.” That is to say, I argue that current military research into nanobionic and genetically engineered plants constitutes a living information science that integrates organic systems into data collection, storage, and processing.

Ten-Four

This story is an appropriation/erasure of George Orwell’s 1984, remixing some of its original text with concepts from popular fiction and academic literature, including my published work. These concepts include: lateral surveillance; pandemic policing; data capitalism; predictive policing; and posthuman. The story contributes to the diverse, expanding field of cultural production known as “speculative fiction… a mode of thought-experimenting” (Oziewicz 2017). Rather than trying to predict the future, speculative fiction “unsettles the present” with what-if questions that allow us to “develop alternative social imaginaries and open up new perspectives” and “spaces of debate” (Dunne and Raby 2013: chapters 88, 189, 3).

Surveillance from the Third Millennium

What will our surveillant futures look like? This piece prods at this nebulous question by taking an exaggerated look at what would happen if we continued down the pathways to a hyper-datafied society that valued optimisation and quickness above all else.

Decentralising Data Collection and Centralising Information in the People’s Republic of China: Decentralise, Manage, and Service Reforms

Xi Jinping’s ascent to power as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was accompanied by changes in national governance strategies in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that have progressively incorporated the use of big data. Shortly after, in May 2015, the Chinese State Council released a set of policy reforms under the abbreviation fang guan fu 放管服 (decentralise, manage, and service). These reforms promoted big data led (1) market regulation, (2) supervision and management systems, and (3) service provision processes. By applying a case study analytical approach, this paper explores how advancements in big data contributed to these reforms aimed at centralising information in China. Combining the joint knowledge of surveillance and China studies scholarship, this paper offers evidence of big data surveillance streamlining China’s fragmented intergovernmental policy system. We build on David Murakami Wood’s 2017 outline of a political theory of surveillance and argue that decentralisation of data collection points and centralisation of both bureaucratic and public access to information are key components of the Party-state’s regulatory governance strategy incorporating the use of big data and comprehensive surveillance. Our findings have implications for future analyses of the relationship between political organisations and surveillance within other nation-state contexts, particularly in situations where Chinese technologies and systems are being adopted and adapted.

The Two Ring Test: The Unbearable Predictability of Artificial Intelligence

This is a coming-of-age of story of a child born and raised in a post-AI society.