<nettime> The Zombie Public – Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.

[Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl>]

dear nettimers, please note:
 
This for me rather unusually opinionated text has just been published on the Open! platform. The essay explores the insistent somatic turn in technologically enabled scrutiny of public spaces and its acceleration in response to the COVID-19 crisis. It argues that the very core of public space and the public domain is under threat as it is anonymity that allows a collection of individuals to transform into 'a public', One of the most vital corner stones of open and democratic civic governance is thus under imminent threat. 

An edited and slightly shortened version of this text has been published on the Open! platform for art, culture and the public domain (September 18, 2020), and can be found here: https://www.onlineopen.org/the-zombie-public 

––––––––––

The Zombie Public

Or, how to revive ‘the public’ and public space after the pandemic.

Our media channels have been flooded with projections about possible futures, with or without ‘the virus’. [1] Not surprising given the unprecedented 2020 lockdown across large parts of the planet. In both dystopian and utopian accounts, as well as more level-headed attempts at taking stock and extrapolating future scenarios, a recurrent motive is the attempt to describe a possible future in definite terms based on a set of extreme contingencies that essentially preclude a clear judgement – given the tide of uncertainties such predictions are up against. Rather than simply writing these accounts off as nonsensical they should be understood as what they are, ideological projections that attempt to shape rather than predict possible futures. As such traditional questions can then be asked: Who is ‘shaping’? Under what prerogative? In service of which ideological a-priori? Serving which material (political / economic) interests?

Any critical reader can fill in this ‘questionnaire’ for themselves, and answers will undoubtedly overlap and to some extent be predictable. It may, however, yet be more productive to shift away from these predicted (contingent) futures altogether and focus instead on that what has already happened. We can then ask ourselves the question what can be done right now to thwart the ‘shapers’ endeavours? How can we open up this contingent future to the public interest, that is to say to that which concerns us all and which should be subject of an open, critical, and truly public debate, rather than the object of flawed and illegitimate attempts at social engineering.  Another way of stating the same would be to say, let’s trace the associations of all the agents involved in determining these contingent futures (human and non-human), and try to establish the most beneficial forms of living together in a continuous feedback loop of ‘composing the good common world’ (Latour, 2004). [2]

Given the complexity of this question it is clear that such an undertaking needs to be a collective effort, comprised of an infinite assemblage of individual actions, not necessarily at all points coherent, nor even commensurable. Rather, it involves an explication of an unending succession of ‘matters of concern’ that bring us together exactly because they divide us (Latour, 2005). As such this essay is not an attempt at (another) comprehensive analysis. I will focus here on an interrogation of the shifting spatial dynamics and regimes of urban space, as they pertain in particular to a specific ‘matter of concern’; the demise of public space and the zombie-status of ‘the public’ that still tries to inhabit this ‘disassembled’ space. The shifting spatial dynamics I am referring to have been underway for a long time, but have been greatly intensified and accelerated by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the (state and corporate) policy responses towards the ‘global pandemic’.

The shifting spatial dynamics and the potentially lethal effects they have, amplifying the demise of public space, result from the increasing entanglement of physical (urban) space, digital networks, and the biological body, and the ways in which these dynamics are operationalised politically. In the context of Open! we have already investigated different aspects of this dynamic in depth, mostly through our successive engagements with the emerging ‘techno-sensuous spatial order’ of Affect Space.[3] But what must be emphasised more decidedly here is the increasing shift towards the somatic, the tendency to bind the biological body ever more tightly into this emerging spatial order, which also connects this exploration more or less directly to the current Open! research on touch and feel in the digital age.
 
The lockdown in many countries in response to the COVID-19 pandemic might seem at first to contradict everything that we had so far theorised about Affect Space. One of our crucial areas of attention had been the increased densification of urban public spaces as they become overlaid with mobile media and digital communications and media networks (3G, 4G, 5G). These new types of urban densities, simultaneously directly embodied and electronically mediated, produce a constant sense of being overwhelmed by unceasing flows of information and sensation. This ‘overflow’ (Mackenzie, 2010) privileges affective relations (in urban space) over more deliberative forms of social interaction. Such interaction at the affective level is characterised by a highly non-linear and unpredictable dynamic, we found. But in no way are these interactions arbitrary. Thus we could understand more of the erratic collective behaviours we had observed in urban (public) spaces at moments of grave political and social tension. All these ideas, it seemed, were now contradicted and apparently declared obsolete by the international lockdown and the remarkable absence of public protest against it.

The most recent turn of events, however, has revealed the continued vitality of Affect Space – its unpredictable but in no way arbitrary non-linear dynamics that generate the capacity for exponentially growing collective actions that seem to appear as if ‘out of nowhere’. Fuelled by an urgent political issue, a divisive, and through that divisiveness, assembling matter of concern, the affect-driven dynamic of these collective actions quickly exceeds the original issue at stake – meanwhile drawing in a multitude of previously unrelated actors. Here, quite obviously, I am referring to the suffocation of an unarmed (Black-American) citizen by Minneapolis’ police officers and the subsequent outpouring of anger and frustration, evolving into a global chain of protest gatherings in (previously locked down) urban public spaces around systemic racism and police violence. Suddenly not the dynamics of Affect Space, but the lockdown and social distancing policies themselves were declared obsolete overnight. 

Still this recent turn of cards does not relay our worries about the demise of public space as a result of the technologised politics of touch and feel in urban space. Nor does it account for the sudden transnational mobilisations, which are even more remarkable than the international lockdown they transcended, and the initial lack of public contestation. The question here is if the analysis of Affect Space can help to elucidate some of these contradictory dynamics?

What has happened already?

So, what has already happened? Let’s remind ourselves briefly of what we all already know. Most important, with the lockdown the freedom of assembly has been suspended. This freedom has been curtailed by limits on the amount of people allowed to gather in public space - in the most severe cases down to 0, but in all cases limited by the scale of open spaces and the regulations of social distancing that determine how many people can occupy any given open space legally. Mass gatherings have thus been rendered illegal (what the recent anti-racist protests showed is that they are not impossible, but they are in violation of the legal framework). Local regulation is translated into national laws, and serious concerns have been raised about the supposedly temporary nature of this often hastily compiled legislation.[4]

Borders have been closed, also within the European Schengen Zone designed to enable freedom of movement in and between its signatory states. In general the response to the looming COVOD-19 pandemic has been a return to the archaic nation state[5], which is deeply unsuited to deal with a paradigmatically transnational calamity.   

The most problematic response has been te announcement and deployment of mobile and wireless tracing technologies that trace every movement of individuals in public space. The pretext for developing and deploying these technologies is to enable authorities to trace and isolate contacts of a contaminated individual to contain spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. While the effectiveness of this intrusive measure is still very much under debate, what the technology does is to identify every individual in public space, all their movements, and their interactions with others. With that anonymity in public space is eradicated. It is however exactly this anonymity in public space that allows a collection of individuals to transform into a ‘public’. What these technologies thus translate into is the abolishment of public space altogether.

Open access to public space has always and ever been only one aspect of the publicness of that space. It is the ability to act collectively, as a ‘public’, i.e. untraceable as individuals, that constitutes the vital democratic function of public space. It is exactly this public political function
 that counterbalances the expansion of private, corporate and state control of the public domain. This vital political function of public space is at the edge of extinction.

From Affect Space to Somatic Space

The concept of Affect Space was first proposed in a long-read essay written specifically for the Open! platform and published in 2015 (Kluitenberg, 2015). In this essay the contours of a model were suggested that builds on three constitutive elements:

A technological component: Interconnected communication networks, in particular internet, mobile media and wireless networks perform a crucial function to mobilise large groups of people around ever changing ‘issues at stake’.

An affective component:  A recurrent characteristic is the affective intensity generated and exchanged in these mobilisation / activation processes in overlapping mediated and urban public spaces — instantiated in the body of the physical actors at the screens and in the streets. Reasoned arguments seem to play much less of a role here than affective images, aphoristic and suggestive slogans and embodied collective rituals.

A spatial component: The affective intensities generated in the activation process cannot be shared effectively in disembodied online interactions at the screen. This lack stimulates the desire for physical encounter, which can only happen in a physical spatial context — paradigmatically in (urban) public space, where mobile media then feed the action in the streets immediately back into the media networks.

This model was then used as a conceptual starting point for the public research trajectory Technology / Affect / Space (2016-2017), which resulted in a series of public gatherings and commissioned essays, including the follow up long-read essay (Re-)Designing Affect Space, which detailed the conceptual model of Affect Space based on the findings in our public research trajectory.

What we diagnosed at the time was that the increasing densification of urban spaces, resulting from the massive presence of a great diversity of people, skills, knowledges, and economic and political functions, intensified by the growing presence of mobile media and communications devices and dense wireless communication networks, introduces the principle of an affective threshold: Once connections in these urban concentration zones exceeded a critical density the overwhelming sensory exposure produces a shift from deliberative towards primarily affective relations in public space.

Crucially, the passing of the affective threshold is not only determined by a spatial densification, but also by a temporal intensification. Intense events, protests, calamities, collective shock, violent confrontations (military, police violence, violent mobs), many distributed in near real-time, all contribute to an acceleration of communicative exchanges (post, tweets, live-feeds, text messaging, photo and video sharing, televised reports) that quickly overwhelm the human capacities for cognitive processing. Within the new constellation of mobile and wireless media both production and reception of these messages happen simultaneously on site and remotely, where all these message streams feed into each other, unleashing an autocatalytic intensification that can only be felt but no longer qualified. 

Group formation under these conditions determined by the primacy of affect, tends to coalesce around shared affects rather than around shared socio-political issues (‘matters of concern’ - Latour, 2005), or shared beliefs. The density of connections allows for a very rapid activation / mobilisation of previously unrelated social actors - accounting for the impression that such massive gatherings, as we have seen over and over again since at least 2011, and most recently in the mobilisations around the Black Lives Matter movement, seem to appear ‘out of nowhere’. The dynamic of these gatherings is indeed highly nonlinear and unpredictable, yet in no way arbitrary.

Philosopher Brian Massumi, whose approach to affect informed this research, observed about this dynamic that there may still be an issue or a specific event that produces a suspense resulting in a collectively shared affect. The massive protests in response to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris in 2015 are a clear example. The event is experienced collectively based on the suspension of narrative continuity that the Hebdo attack produced and the intensity of the attack itself and its mediated representations. However, what then unfolds from this shared affect, expressed in the Hebdo case in spontaneous massive public gatherings in several European cities, depends entirely on the capacities and tendencies with which each individual enters these collective situations – it unfolds differentially from there. Narrative coherence or ‘sameness of affect’ does not exist in these situations. There is only affective difference according to Massumi. He qualifies these situations as a process of ‘collective individuation’. (Massumi, 2015, 109-110). As a result the original issue / matter of concern is quickly surpassed and what remains is the intensity of the collective event (the shared affect) and its differential unfolding.

The Somatic Deficit

It was clear from the outset that this dynamic of affective activation / mobilisation would not go away with the lockdown that was implemented (with varying degrees of strictness) across many countries and regions in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Particularly not because mediated online connections became the primary replacement for embodied encounters under the lockdown conditions of social separation. 

The combination of social separation and density of mediated connections inevitably produces an affective gap, an experiential lack of physical connection to the events witnessed on the screen. In our previous research we observed that there is quite obviously an enormous difference between witnessing an event, particularly intense events, physically up close or instead mediated from afar:

“Both types of experience may be charged with intensity, but the mediated experience is necessarily characterized by delimitation, a lack of physical cues or proximity, an absence of participation in full. The more dramatic the witnessed action, the more anaemic the mediated experience feels. It is this tension between a charged event witnessed from afar and its intensity unfolding in the immediacy of embodied space that fuels the desire for physical encounter.” (Kluitenberg, 2017)

This experiential and affective gap between the embodied and mediated experience can be called the Somatic Deficit. The paradoxical situation many of us, billions in effect worldwide, found ourselves in, mediated up close and physically distanced, produced a massive collective somatic deficit. Not the sudden emanation of public protests ignoring and transcending the lockdown measures came as a surprise, but much rather the long period of apparent lack of contestation against the rushed measures imposed to curtail the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease it can cause. However, this delayed response may account for a gradual build up of intensity, an intensified somatic deficit that could ultimately not be contained.

Rather than eliminating the dynamics of Affect Space, the lockdown may well have laid the foundations for these dynamics to reinstate themselves with unprecedented vigour. That the new wave of public gatherings in dissent manifested themselves  through massive protests against institutional racism and police violence towards singled-out ethnic groups – a long overdue outpouring of collective indignation – might first and foremost have provided a focal point for the expression of this somatic deficit. The implication to take from this is that the somatic deficit might henceforth express itself in and through a variety of ‘matters of concern’ and thus constitute a continuous factor of political and societal instability, but it also indicates a potential for change. 

Contact Tracing: Some technologies should simply not be developed

Though perhaps not exactly in the terms as employed above, it is clear that authorities around the planet, both in supposedly democratic and more authoritarian political constellations, are keenly aware of these conditions and the unsustainable nature of the lockdown measures. We might conceive of the global lockdowns, slightly tongue-in-cheek as ‘Temporary Strategic Zones’ with a limited life-span. Therefore new control mechanisms needed to be implemented under the intense time-pressure  exerted by a growing collective somatic deficit. The extraordinary but not entirely unpredicted conditions of a rapidly spreading global pandemic provided the tactical momentum (likely desired for a long time) to push through new legislative and technological interventions that would otherwise be immediately dismissed under justified public outrage.

The inherently authoritarian response to the pandemic has been to increase the scrutiny of public space in an attempt to create the conditions for a complete traceability of the actors operating in that (formerly public) space. It is important to emphasise that the SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 crisis has not so much ‘created’ these new tendencies in the control and extermination of public space, as that it has accelerated and intensified a set of existing tendencies around the scrutiny and control of urban space. 

There has long been a relentless drive to use personal communications media to trace individual and collective movements in public / urban space - to render as it were this space entirely transparent. This tendency by now exceeds by far the mere capture of people’s sentiments and views, or their movements and associations in (public) space. With the new technological capabilities of always-on networked devices and new sensor technologies, combined with machine learning based automated pattern recognition techniques and high capacity wireless data-networks (5G), the attempt is made to encapsulate as many as possible somatic markers into this system of continuous and pervasive surveillance.

Part of these new wireless and network enabled sensing devices come in mundane guises: fitness trackers and their immediate link up with online dashboards where movements, heart rate, temperature, breathing patterns can be analysed in real-time as well as after the act (usually some sportive activity or exercise). Smart watches fitted with increasingly sophisticated sensor technologies as well as optional add-ons that can monitor virtually every aspect of our bodily functions. Part of this locates itself in the mundane practices of every day life, while others are linked to inconspicuous health platforms.[6] With the integration of these technological capabilities in health apps installed by default in most smartphones these types of meticulous somatic self-surveillance become pervasive and truly ubiquitous.

This trend is taken to an altogether other dimension, however, by the development and deployment of so-called contact tracing apps that monitor person to person associations and proximities of an a-priori limitless number of actors (devices / bodies) operating in urban (public) space. While the apps are introduced as voluntary, using device-based wireless networks (bluetooth) and anonymised data stored exclusively on the device, there is absolutely no guarantee that the apps, once tried and tested, be made mandatory (for instance to be allowed to enter public transport, public buildings, the workplace, etc.), or that the data are retroactively de-anonymised. Indeed as a leaked UK government memo published in The Guardian newspaper of April 13, 2020 revealed, “ministers might be given the ability to order “de-anonymisation” to identify people from their smartphones.”[7]

The partnership of Apple and Google to jointly develop COVID-19 contact tracing technology emphasises the focus on user privacy, and intends to certify this by allowing only storage of contact data on the individual device and not via an online database or platform.[8] This, however, can also give no guarantee that these companies will not be simply ordered by various governments in countries where the technology is  deployed to make these data accessible for relevant health and policing authorities.

Furthermore, once in operation it will become very simple and attractive to link the contact tracing technology to the somatic sensing technologies discussed earlier, as both are integrated into the same devices and so-called eco-systems (combinations of integrated hardware and software). Thus, textual, auditory, visual and audiovisual exchanges, as well as physical movements, shared spaces, the number of contact moments with one or more identified actors, heart rate, breathing patterns, body temperature, blood pressure, (changes in) galvanic skin resistance, the number of steps taken, the periods of inactivity, hormonal cycles, respiration levels, and many other somatic functions can be rendered entirely transparent. Meanwhile identity can be verified by voice analysis, retina scans, facial recognition, finger print scans and other bodily markers.

Once in place all these different data points can be correlated by any government or authority that is willing to deploy these technologies for such uses, which is to say by any and all authorities, regardless of their political signature. The only option to avoid this scenario is not to develop these technologies and reverse them where they have already been deployed. The step by Apple and Google to integrate these contact tracing technologies into their respective operating systems means, however, that they have become in effect virtually unavoidable for all users of smart phones based  on the iOS  and Android platforms, which is the vast majority of citizens in the more developed economies.

The proposition that there could be such a thing as a privacy sensitive tracing app is preposterous. The tracing process facilitated by the technology, even if applied voluntarily, negates the essence of the very idea of privacy.  The public discourse surrounding these tracing technologies is entirely disingenuous. It should be made very clear that there is only one choice: the choice between traceability versus privacy - both notions are mutually exclusive.
 
The extermination of public space results exactly from this drive to render the actors in that space entirely transparent and traceable - with it the possibility of entering public space and the public domain anonymously is eradicated. It is however the very possibility of anonymity in public space and the public domain that allows a collection of individuals to transform into ‘a public’. With it any idea of democracy or of open governance is lost as it depends on collective action that is not reducible to an individual act.  

Sociologist  Noortje Marres has argued concisely in the Open Journal (Marres, 2006) for the requirement of the public being untraceable, as part of the investigation into public agency in hybrid space conducted here in 2006:

Marres: “(..) the agency of the public derives in part from the fact that this entity is not fully traceable. That is, the force of the public has to do with the impossibility of knowing its exact potential. And this for the following reason: when a thing is publicized in the media, whether a person, an object or an event, this involves the radical multiplication of the potential relations that this entity can enter into with other things and people. Thus, when something starts circulating in public media, this brings along the possibility, and indeed the threat, of an open-ended set of actors stepping in to support this entity, and to make it strong. The fact that the public cannot be definitively traced back to a limited number of identifiable sources is thus crucial to the effectiveness of the public: this is what endows publics with a dangerous kind of agency.
This also makes it clear why the wish to concretize the public, to boil it down to the real actors that constitute it, involves a misunderstanding of the public.”

The citizen assemblies post-2011, the so-called ‘movement(s) of the squares’ have demonstrated the importance of physical encounter with the unknown other as the fundamental ‘basis’ for civic sovereignty and open civic / democratic politics. It is exactly this principle of not knowing who is assembling that enables a multiplicity of different people to enter into a new social relation. The drive for absolute transparency and traceability of public space and the public domain renders this function impossible. The failure of the ‘movements of the squares’, their lack of political efficacy, has been their inability to translate these insights and experiences into effective forms of civic governance. However, this has in no way invalidated the importance of such open, impromptu forms of citizen assemblies for establishing new forms of pluralistic civic governance.

Another Post-COVID-19 World is Possible

Finally it is important to emphasise that the problem of traceability of the (former) public is not technological, and that the problem of the COVID-19 pandemic (or others that are certain to follow given the excessive human demographic pressures on this planet), is not medical. Both are political problems that rely on political choices that need to be made and were necessary reversed or redirected – with Latour we might say ‘redesigned’ (Latour, 2008).  

A few necessary and concrete steps can be proposed here: 

1) All restrictions on the right to freedom of assembly must be suspended as soon as possible.

2) The further development of tracing technologies and their deployment in public space must be aborted. The technology is too dangerous. Its adverse effects far outweigh any possible benefit.

3) The right to disconnect must be enshrined in law - as a constitutional right.[9]

4) All eventual SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 vaccines must reside in the public domain so that the vaccine(s) can be efficiently reproduced by local producers and made available to an as broad as possible share of the global population.
Private actors who may be deemed essential to this efforts can receive a reasonable retribution for their efforts and investments - the allocation of which is a political decision (i.e. what is ‘reasonable’ given specific local conditions?).  

5) In the absence of a vaccine or effective treatment the capacities of care systems must be dramatically increased. Testing capacities must be scaled up, as well as traditional forms of contact tracing by health agencies. Protective measures for vulnerable sections of the global population must be radically extended.

6) These measures must be sustained for as long as required. The absence of a vaccine and / or treatment cannot be an excuse for the suspension of democratic and civil rights and principles, including anonymous acces to public space and freedom of assembly.

7) The primacy of public interest over private interest in political decision making must be asserted.


NOTES:

1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sars-cov-2/ 
2 - See also: http://modesofexistence.org/ 
3 - See the two previous long-read essays:
     Affect Space - Witnessing the ‘Movement(s) of the Squares’ (2015) 
     https://www.onlineopen.org/affect-space 
     (Re-)Designing Affect Space (2017)
     https://www.onlineopen.org/re-designing-affect-space 
4 - See the advice of the Netherlands Council of State of June 10, 2020, on the “Tweede Verzamelspoedwet COVID-19” (Dutch only): 
     https://www.raadvanstate.nl/adviezen/@121311/w05-20-0168/  
5 - Also Bruno Latour observed this in his column for Le Monde and Critical Inquiry “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?”
     https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/ 
6 - A good example of such health applications are Apple’s HealthKit, ResearchKit, and CareKit.
     See: https://developer.apple.com/health-fitness/
7 - The Guardian, April 13, 2020: “NHS coronavirus app: memo discussed giving ministers power to 'de-anonymise' users “ -
     https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/nhs-coronavirus-app-memo-discussed-giving-ministers-power-to-de-anonymise-users 
8 - Press release, April 10,2020: Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology
     https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-and-google-partner-on-covid-19-contact-tracing-technology/
9 - See also: Howard Rheingold & Eric Kluitenberg (2006): Mindful Disconnection- Counter powering the Panopticon from the Inside.
     https://www.onlineopen.org/mindful-disconnection 


REFERENCES:

Kluitenberg, Eric (2015): Affect Space - Witnessing the ‘Movement(s) of the Squares’, published March 10, 2015 by Open! Platform for Art, Culture, and the Public Domain:
http://www.onlineopen.org/affect-space 

Kluitenberg, Eric (2017): (Re-) Designing Affect Space, published September 19, 2017 by Open! Platform for Art, Culture, and the Public Domain:
http://www.onlineopen.org/re-designing-affect-space 

Latour, Bruno (2004): The Politics of Nature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Latour Bruno (2005): From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public, in: Latour, Bruno & Weibel, Peter eds. (2005): Making Things Public, Atmosphere of Democracy, ZKM / MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Latour, Bruno (2008): A Cautious Prometheus ? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design: (With Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), lecture, in: In Fiona Hackne, Jonathn Glynne and Viv Minto (editors) Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society – Falmouth, 3-6 September 2009, e-books, Universal Publishers, pp. 2-10.  
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/69 

Mackenzie, Adrian (2010): Wirelessness - Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.).

Marres, Noortje (2006): Public (Im)potence, in: Kluitenberg, Eric & Seijdel, Jorinde (eds.) Hybrid Space, Open!, Amsterdam, 2006.
https://onlineopen.org/public-im-potence 

Massumi, Brian (2015): Politics of Affect, Polity, Cambridge (UK) / Maiden (Mass.). 

Rheingold, Howard & Kluitenberg, Eric (2006): Mindful Disconnection – Counter powering the Panopticon from the Inside, in: in: Kluitenberg, Eric & Seijdel, Jorinde (eds.) Hybrid Space, Open!, Amsterdam, 2006.
https://onlineopen.org/mindful-disconnection

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