The Use of Implants in Ethical Surveillance Infrastructures: Towards a Transdisciplinary Ontology

An Intensive Workshop. September 3-5, 2008, ZiF, University of Bielefeld.

[Introduction] [Rationale] [References] [Schedule] [Location] [Team] [Links]

Rationale

The proposed project has significant material and theoretical relevance. In the introduction, we outlined six main reasons why the area of implantation is so important. Here we will expand on each in turn.

The Political Economy of Implants

The political economy of implants includes growing advances in biotechnology across several sectors, reaching approximately US $100 million in 2003. Some applications are particularly profitable, such as implanted drug delivery microchips and other type of implants as well as technologies closely related to implants (e.g.: tissue engineering). In the next 5-10 years, the total volume of nanotechnology products used in medicine will grow to more than 2 billion US dollars. However, only 10% of the research budget in the US is spent on the medical sector. We can only speculate as to the remaining 90%, however, military applications are likely to be a major area of development, and one that is especially significant for surveillance.

Technocentrism

Currently discussion of implants is dominated by technocentric and posthumanist discourses (c.f.: Hayles, 1999) about desirable futures and better living. A key example of this is the populist techno-utopianism of experts like K. Warwick or R. Brooks. This discourse treats the development and widespread use of implants as desirable for curing a whole range of social ills, what G. Marx (1995) calls the 'silver bullet' conception of technology, and indeed as an inevitability. Such an approach is to be found in current studies of electronic tagging of offenders. This discourse will also gather strength as previous 'silver bullet' technologies fail to hit their targets, for example, implants may be applied as a technical solution in ubiquitous computing, particularly if other currently fashionable technologies, such as facial recognition, continue to underperform. Cultural issues such as technocentred science-fiction and engineering utopianism is key here from the ongoing importance of popular utopian visions of man and machine in harmony like Star Trek through the popular futurism of the Wired generation like Kurzweil's (2005) 'singularity' of humans and machines and academic projects like W. Mitchell's (2000) 'E-topia'.

Thus result is that discussion in this area focuses on material questions, efficiency and functionality rather than the ethics of implantation and the diverse social and spatial consequences. Discussion of social and ethical consequences is beginning, and there is a pressing need to add greater momentum to the debate, and to define it more precisely.

Emergence and Diversification of Implants

On the other hand, it is precisely because implantation is still an emergent technology and most of its potential applications remain undefined that ethical interventions can find a place, and indeed can be crucial to trajectories of development and use. There is a huge range of range of what we can currently call 'implants' from simple access technologies (RFID to open doors etc.) through drug delivery systems in medicine to 'brain machine interfaces'. Key technological issues include function creep (as new uses are progressively 'discovered' for implantation technologies), and systems are increasingly embedded in us: reliability, maintenance and repair, infrastructural and corporate collapse and lack of support.

Responsibilization

The technocentric discourse for implantation, along with other technologies of surveillance and control, also fits with the growth of responsibilization discourses. This moral discourse derives from the retreat the state from regulation (and the removal of regulation from the private sector) in many areas in the context of increasing globalization, privatization and neoliberal economic policy. Responsibilization thus means that there is a distribution of responsibility, a move to shift responsibility from institutions to the individuals, who should take care of themselves (Monahan, 2006b). Examples include such diverse areas as the privatisation of state infrastructure and relative distributed responsibility for maintenance of machines (Thrift/French, 2003) the use of genetic information in insurance and healthcare (Nelkin/ Tancredi, 1994) and the move to 'hypervigilance' in the child protection industry in the US (Katz, 2006). In this context the continued blurring of public-private boundaries is vital (Graham/ Wood, 2003; Weber 2006a; Weber 2006b; Nagenborg 2005).

Socio-spatial Consequences

Human beings exist as part of immersive environments, sensory worlds, and created spaces which support a great diversity of human experience. Locational and territorial knowledge is becoming key to contemporary social life. New forms of digital territorialisation are enabling or disabling new mobilities and practices, and increasingly these are regulated indirectly through the defined by the way surveillance and control systems work rather than tacit knowledge of locality. Cities are thus increasingly made up of obligatory points of passage or pinch points, through which people (and things) must pass subject to verification of rights or identity. In a society obsessed by risk, these rights are increasingly categorical, based on qualities of the person over which they have no control. (Barry, 2001; Norris, 2005; Wood/Graham, 2006). Automated Socio-technical Environments (Lianos, 2001; 2003) are spreading and invisible but ubiquitous computer systems (Weiner, 1991) are increasingly able to interface with locatable objects (Cuff, 2003), including implanted human beings.

Implantation as Empowerment?

Finally, implantation is finding growing acceptance and diffusion through society, not just amongst the 'disadvantaged, vulnerable, deviant and non human'. Implants are becoming a culturally symbolic lifestyle choice for 'personal enhancement', self expression and exposure (in a manner similar to webcams). They are becoming fetishized in ways that seem potentially empowering or at least involved in changing power relations, and in creating new forms of resistance to institutional (state and corporate) interests. This involves different ways of thinking about implants, their diffusion to more general use, and what kind of meanings and values will cluster around different forms of implantation. Examples can be found in settings as diverse as: the voluntary use of implants to carry medical data at Hackensack Hospital in New York, the VIP cashless membership scheme at the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, the use of RFID toys, and the self-implanting enthusiasts of the Tagged Forum. The choices involve issues of aesthetics as much as technological 'necessity.' Implants are linked to wider subcultures of personal enhancement that have varied communicative and performative aspects (Phillips, 2005), which have been examined within corporeal sociology under the rubric of the corporeal schema (Ball, 2005). They also link to the subversive and resistant, for example 'sousveillance' and 'counter-surveillance' (Mann et al., 2003; Monahan, 2006a). The big questions are: whether individuals will be more empowered or subsumed by a generic surveillance infrastructure; what does this mean for ideas of agency and control; what new forms of resistance will emerge and will implantation contribute to such resistance or be resisted?

Last change: 07/03/2008.