Re: <nettime> Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

Hey Brian, folks,

the question is well put - thanks for this.

One aspect to add is that most of these data are already available to 
the GAFAM complex, and (more or less) voluntarily delivered to them by 
smartphone users all the time; so one may want to ask just _how_ making 
them available to governments, or publishing them, is worse, or different.

I would say _that_ these are definitely different trajectories of 
subjectivation, not least in the politico-philosophical perspective that 
you suggest; but I also believe that it will be worth specifying _how_ 
they are different. (Something that will also have to factored in is 
that, for various reasons, people have more or less trust in their 
respective governments, and in their fellow citizens.)

A question regarding the described activities to "use mobile phone data 
to monitor public health efforts": would they be superfluous (and the 
necessary data readily available) if the GAFAM complex (at this point, 
against the rules) collaborated with the respective governments, or if 
their accumulated data were requisioned?

Just speculating about who knows what...

-a


Am 18.03.20 um 20:34 schrieb Brian Holmes:

<snip>

> Presumably the app connects the individual's phone account and all its
> associated location info to a purpose-built database, while at the same
> giving the state the legal authority to use the data. Some accuracy gain in
> the geolocation is also claimed. The aim is to use the app after
> full-population lockdown is over, in order to halt the formation of new
> clusters. This would allow for the epidemiological management of individual
> mobility over the 18th-month period before a vaccine can be rolled out
> massively. Mobility-management enforced by the police, if you did not
> gather that already. 

<snip>

> In South Korea where this kind of app was first developed, all the
> information is made public, apparently to promote public trust in
> government (???). People have made map interfaces to visualize the data.
> Check it out:
>
> https://coronamap.site

<snip>

> If applied in the Western societies - as the Italians intend - this would
> represent a fundamental change in the social contract. Combine it with
> unlimited state intervention in the economy and the mobilization of
> corporations and the military for production, health care and border
> closure, and you're looking at social changes far beyond what happened
> after 9/11.
>
> It has been obvious for years that Anthropocene conditions were going to
> force a transformation of the state, in order to deal with new problems
> emerging at the level of the population, and ultimately, of the species.
> Just as the neoliberal globalization paradigm is now clearly over, it seems
> that political liberalism itself will now undergo a sea-change in terms of
> the theoretical inviolability of individual rights. In the face of this,
> there seem to be two broad options for civil society response:
>
> -- Publicly refuse any infringement of previously existing rights, while
> privately maintaining the psycho-philosophical stance of the autonomous
> individual; or
>
> -- Participate critically in the elaboration of new population- and
> species-level norms for the being-in-common of a fully cybernetic society
> -- but on the ethical basis of what kind of "general intellect"????
>
> If anyone is looking for a core problem in philosophy or political science
> to work on over the next few months, maybe this is it. I reckon the
> questions above are not exclusive alternatives. Instead they begin to mark
> out the contested/consensual space in which the new social paradigm will
> emerge. No ready-made answer on the basis of preexisting concepts and
> attitudes can fill that space.
>
> thoughtfully yours, Brian


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