Sometimes When We Touch
An essay about Covid-19 and the quarantine by Paul Preciado, published a few weeks ago in Artforum, concludes with a remarkably prescient sentiment:
It is imperative to modify the relationship between our bodies and biovigilant machines of biocontrol: They are not only communication devices. We must learn collectively to alter them. We must also learn to de-alienate ourselves. Governments are calling for confinement and telecommuting. We know they are calling for de-collectivization and telecontrol. Let us use the time and strength of confinement to study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now. Let us turn off our cell phones, let us disconnect from the internet. Let us stage a big blackout against the satellites observing us, and let us consider the coming revolution together.
When I first read it a month ago, it seemed far-fetched to me. It struck me as the kind of tacked-on rallying-cry conclusion that many critical essays end with, sounding a note of hope when their critique otherwise suggests the futility of resistance. But now it seems as though ”the time and strength of confinement” has actually turned into a surprisingly broad commitment to “study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now” for those thousands of people now joining protests whose tone has been set and adopted from Black Lives Matter and other police- and prison-abolition movements. It's as if the “coming revolution” has indeed come, and de-alienation is taking place night after night in the streets.
But that development hasn't come as a result of obeying Preciado’s command that we “turn off our cell phones” and "disconnect from the Internet.” The uprising is not currently shaping up as a unified resistance to technology; rather it has manifested as a collective rejection of racist policing and the societal manifestations of structural racism more broadly, triggered and sustained by widely shared footage of police violence.
That’s not to say that current technology is not deeply implicated in sustaining and extending racism. The webs of surveillance it facilitates make possible not only established forms of discrimination and targeted oppression but new forms of embedded, infrastructural racism, whether that is a matter of the racist search results Safiya Umoja Noble details in Algorithms of Oppression, the systematic misidentifications of facial recognition technology that Joy Buolamwini has detailed, or the ways race is encoded and reified and leveraged, as Ruha Benjamin outlines in Race After Technology. Day after day, Chris Gilliard’s Twitter feed documents the tech industry’s complicity in structural discrimination and racist policing. Especially egregious are “neighborhood watch” platforms like Nextdoor, which are vectors for racist intimidation, and surveillance systems like Amazon’s Ring, which have proliferated through the company’s partnerships with police departments.
So Preciado’s implied sequence of events is perhaps backward: Our relationship to “biovigilant machines of biocontrol” — a.k.a. phones — begins to change once our relationship to resistance and liberation struggles changes. (And then changes in relationships to technology feed into protest tactics and strategy, and so on.) We don't need to turn off our cell phones to join the revolution, but the revolution would necessarily make one think differently about how to use them and how they use us.
For now, tech companies are apparently on the defensive: For instance, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon have been pushed (thanks in part to the researchers cited here) to abandon their development of facial recognition technology or temporarily halt its sale to police departments. Some workers at companies like Facebook have questioned their roles in fomenting fascism and racism, and have staged walkouts. Yet it is also easy to imagine that tech companies will try to capitalize on any progress toward police abolition by proposing as alternatives its surveillance-driven forms of predictive policing and pre-emptive discrimination (like “cashless stores” which effectively prescreen customers, and other tech-driven forms of “targeting” that allow businesses to shop for customers). All the many forms of algorithmic screening will likely be touted as useful planks in efforts to “defund the police” by automating the police’s current function of enforcing modes of segregation and unevenly distributed economic exploitation.
In Cloud Ethics, Louise Amoore details how companies have tried to sell AI tools to police departments that would, for instance, anticipate protests or identify targets for ICE by scanning social media and other forms of location data and network activity. These tools are marketed as police aids but they could be repositioned as automating the police away. Of course, this would not solve the problems presented by policing but encode them in systems that would be just as impervious to change but abetted by the false sense of computational neutrality.
It will likely require sustained protest and pressure to prevent tech companies from putting forward their usual methods (datafication, surveillance, solutionism, regulatory capture) that their business models demand. “Decollectivization and telecontrol” will certainly be attempted to contain the protests, even if they did not necessarily spark them.
In part, Preciado’s essay focuses on ideas of immunization as protection, as exemption from risks others are made to bear, and how these kinds of exclusions become the basis for communities. "The management of epidemics stages an idea of community, reveals a society’s immunitary fantasies, and exposes sovereignty’s dreams of omnipotence—and its impotence,“ he writes. (This makes me think now of the “qualified immunity” that U.S. police are granted to protect them from legal accountability for their actions, as well as how Nextdoor permits neighborhoods to defend their whiteness.)
Epidemics are “sociopolitical constructions rather than strictly biological phenomena.” They don’t unfold according to some script dictated by a virus’s level of contagiousness; they enter into existing social relations and present an occasion for their rearticulation. Thus, Preciado argues, “the virus actually reproduces, materializes, widens, and intensifies (from the individual body to the population as a whole) the dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already operating over sexual, racial, or migrant minorities before the state of exception.” With Coivd-19, this is evident in the how white people have been disproportionately less affected, an index of their relative privilege. The refusal of some to wear masks reflects and celebrates this privilege as well, and helps explain why health officials who recommend masking have been harassed and threatened.
Similarly, “cures” for diseases don’t proceed inevitably to those who need them; they aren’t distributed any more evenly than power, wealth, or opportunity. They too must first reannounce the existing power relations, which delineate who deserves to become “well” or immune and who should be lastingly pathologized. (If a cure threatened existing power relations, those in power would seek to suppress it.)
For Preciado, the social course of pandemics and “cures” reflect the more general logic of “pharmacopornographic” forms of subjectivation — “microprosthetic and media-cybernetic control” administered through screens and drugs, visual and literal stimulants. As Foucault argued about power generally, these mechanisms of control are experienced not as restrictive but as subjectivity-granting, an apparent expansion of pleasurable possibilities that secure the subjects’ assent. Preciado writes: “These management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.”
I’m often tempted by this line of analysis to treat all forms of pleasure with suspicion — anything proposed as “fun” is probably a thinly disguised form of social control, enjoyment of which establishes just how much my psyche has already been formatted by the apparatus of domination. It then follows that anything that makes me uncomfortable proves I’m engaging in a form of resistance.
But that unsustainable line of thinking leads nowhere. The point is not to demonize pleasure but to explicitly politicize it, to engage in political practices that sustain a different kind of subjectivity that knows other kinds of joy. In this conversation with Zoé Samudzi, Vicky Osterweil explains:
One of the things that scares police and politicians the most when they enter a riot zone — and there are quotes from across the 20th century of police and politicians saying this — is that it was happy: Everyone was happy ... The playwright Charles Fuller, who happened to be a young man starting out his career during the Philadelphia riots of 1964 ... talks about the incredible sense of safety and joy and carnival that happens in the streets.
I think riots and militant violent action in general get slandered as being macho and bro-y, and lots of our male comrades like to project that sort of image. That definitely happens, but I actually think riots are incredibly femme. Riots are really emotive, an emotional way of expressing yourself. It is about pleasure and social reproduction. You care for one another by getting rid of the thing that makes that impossible, which is the police and property. You attack the thing that makes caring impossible in order to have things for free, to share pleasure on the street. Obviously, riots are not the revolution in and of themselves. But they gesture toward the world to come, where the streets are spaces where we are free to be happy, and be with each other, and care for each other.
This is the obverse of the pleasure in consumption and individuation that Preciado describes, which in his analysis is anchored in the technologies that allow us to consume in physical isolation at home like would-be Hugh Hefners in our multimedia-enabled “soft prisons,” adrift in a fantasy of dematerialized insubstantiation.
The subjects of the neoliberal technical-patriarchal societies that Covid-19 is in the midst of creating do not have skin; they are untouchable; they do not have hands. They do not exchange physical goods, nor do they pay with money. They are digital consumers equipped with credit cards. They do not have lips or tongues. They do not speak directly; they leave a voice mail. They do not gather together and they do not collectivize. They are radically un-dividual. They do not have faces; they have masks.
There seems to be a lot of fetishization of “real” communication implied here — again as if digital communication were the main obstacle preventing people from collectivizing their bodies for revolution. But the events taking place now seem to suggest that while consumerism may have been an obstacle to political engagement (i.e. the right-wing talking point that the protests are popular because people can’t go shopping), digital technology, which many have been leaning on and living through more than ever under lockdown conditions, hasn’t been, at least not yet, and not in the ways Preciado is suggesting.
The threat posed by technology is not so much that it prevents people from having “real” encounters but that it can facilitate such encounters on terms that are already fully contained — imagine, for example, protests operating only within parameters deemed acceptable in advance by machine-learning simulations, or conversations that are pre-mediated to a degree that they can’t exceed the anticipated possibilities. Amoore poses what seems to be a key question: "How are algorithmic arrangements generating ideas of goodness, transgression, and what society ought to be?"
Preciado is right that such experiences will be pleasurable; people generally take pleasure in being accommodated, from being recognized and anticipated. But to detect the kinds of pleasure that are complicit with oppressive forms of social control, it is not enough to simply look for situations where screens are foregrounded and bodies are suppressed. It’s not enough to check our voice mail.