with the direct action wing of the left. Somehow these two things come together near the end of the twentieth century. Is there a reason for this? (ibid:3).
At the end of The Personalised Subject, I discussed the black box (Appendix G) and the Intellectual Property (IP) of Google’s proprietary search algorithm through ‘[in]visibility management’ (Flyverbom et al. 2016) and the ‘media arcane’ (Beyes and Pias 2019). This
‘blackness’ of the black box is also found in the Black Bloc that is analogous to tactics of
‘obfuscation’ (Brunto and Nissenbaum 2015), such as the Tor Browser, which hides the user’s IP address, as elucidated in Chapters 6 and The Anonymous User (7). Drawing on the results from my methods and by applying the IP address as a conceptual hinge, I demonstrate the following effects through a progression of human/algorithmic interaction. With Google Search the IP address swings open to collect data on the subject to produce various Subjectivities of Search. With the Tor Browser it also closes back, preventing the user from being identified and instead enables Agencies of Anonymity.
Figure 88: Data subject
The structure of both these ‘effects’ begins with search algorithms interacting with myself as a researcher collecting data online and as a ‘data subject’, who is protected by law. (Figure 88) Since May 25, 2018 the GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) has been implemented in Europe, which regulates the collating, processing, storage and transmission of personal data of EU citizens, or ‘data subjects’.152 According to Article 4, the ‘data subject’ is an end user whose personal data can be collected through ‘direct identification’ with an IP address. It is the
recognition of citizens as ‘data subjects’ by their IP address that facilitates certain effects and the organisation of those searching online––through degrees of personalisation (black box), or not, with degrees of anonymity (black bloc).
152 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
Figure 89: Subjectivities of Search
2.0 Subjectivities of Search (Black Box)
In the section, I incorporate my results from Google Search (Black Box) within a structured discourse analysis to postulate degrees of human-algorithmic interaction into a range of effects:
Subjectivities of Search. (Figure 89)
2.1 Technology of the self
As described in Chapter 4, the philosopher Michel Foucault acknowledges Montaigne and his oikos (Chapter 1)––the capturing of one’s private data in accounting books or registers––as a
‘technology of the self’. During my ‘experiment in living’, I interacted with Google Search algorithms and used tools, such as my computer, as memory extensions or hupomnemata, to
‘note down’ and collect data on myself––keywords and search results. This ‘technology of the self’ can be used as an instrument to analyse the relationship between subject and truth, where the ‘personalised subject’ explores power constructs––how the subject constituted itself in one form or another, where ‘power is games of strategy’. With my ‘critical ethnography of the self’
and following Foucault, I also showed that it ‘is precisely the historical constitution of these various forms of the subject in relation to the games of truth’ (ibid:290-291). As my search histories are constantly collected by Google Search, the ‘personalised subject’ is not a substance but a form, which is ‘not primarily or always identical to itself’ as it is changes in different contexts and situations. Through diverse practices such as online interaction with search
algorithms as a ‘truth game’, this modern day ‘technology of the self’ transforms me as a (data) subject.
As mentioned in the Introduction, Google ‘shapes the web’; concomitantly it shapes the subject–
–one needs to be indexed (Introna and Nissenbaum 2000) and found through search engines in order to accrue value in the reputation economy. Chapters 3 and 5 explained that the pages of results and the ranking of links determines the public visibility of the personalised subject to others using the web. These personalised subjects and content producers make themselves
‘algorithmically recognizable in all sorts of ways,’(Gillespie 2014:88), which reflect the accumulation of online social value and the building of a reputation economy.
But algorithms can also function as a particularly compelling “technology of the self”
(Foucault 1988) when they seem to independently ratify one’s public visibility. It is now common practice to Google oneself: seeing me appear as the top result in a search for my name offers a kind of assurance of my tenuous public existence (Gillespie 2014:186).
Personalised subjects google themselves at some point, either to measure their attention economy––where everything is based on visibility––or to see what has been written or published about them by search results and that they are indexed. It has become the meter to measure success: Appearing higher in Google’s ranking, adding to one’s visibility, is a
particular kind of attention seeking that embodies Foucault’s figure of the ‘Homoeconomicus’, or ‘economical man’(1988:16).
2.2 Homoeconomicus
Foucault was interested in the subject and more specifically, ‘the way a human being turns himself into a subject’ and part of his scholarship looks at the history of discipline and what he came to term ‘biopolitics’. Instead of a negative understanding of sovereign power, Foucault mapped out a new form of power, discipline, with ‘its starting point being the physical separation of individuals’ (Borch 2015:10).
Making the individual the object of attention facilitates intervention ––partly because isolating the individual enhances the potential for collating and generating knowledge about them…Consequently, discipline, this “political technology of the body”, is deployed at a level of detail (ibid).
As Foucault pointed out, the technology of disciplinary power was also carried out spatially, with the transition from discipline as a public form to power to an enclosed and hidden prison, as expressed through Jeremy and Samuel Bentham’s Panopticon (1791).153 The mere power of observation, where the subject (or prisoner) is aware of being watched, yet at the same time does not know if they are being watched, enables ‘self-discipline predicated on the mere possibility of being watched’ (Foucault 1977:201 cited by ibid:10).154 As shown by my results in Chapter 5, the contemporary condition of the Panopticon is that people are now aware of being watched as well as tracked when carrying out online Google searches in the Firefox browser, as
exemplified by the Panopticlick, (Appendix B).
153 This type of architecture enables a ‘concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up’ (Foucault 1977:202 cited by ibid:11).
154 Simone Browne’s book Dark Matters (2015) investigates the surveillance of blackness through various lenses, from slave ships, to the Bentham brothers’ Panopticon to the contemporary condition as a social and political norm.
Foucault (1975) described this ‘regularizing control’ of discipline, what has come to be ‘focused on the targeted control of individual conduct’ (Flyverbom et al. 2016:389) in regard to
institutions and bodies. Going beyond sovereign power and discipline, biopolitics ‘aimed to foster life’ and, similar to discipline, has a ‘productive form of power’ yet differs in the way it intervenes: whereas discipline was individual, biopolitics ‘strives to regulate individuals as an aggregated totality, as a population’ (Borch 2015:12). Later Foucault used the term
governmentality (1978), a portmanteau of government and rationality, to elucidate how populations are controlled through biopolitics. Additionally, governmentality is not part of a linear development after sovereignty and discipline; rather during the course of his research Foucault changed tack and came to present them as a triangle: ‘sovereignty, discipline and government management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism’ (Foucault 2007:107-8 cited by Borch 2015:13).
Foucault uses the term ‘biopolitics’ in order to elucidate how political power is carried out on every aspect of human life, making individuals and the Homoeconomicus someone who is eminently governable (Foucault 2008:226 cited by Mirowski 2013).
Calculated practices (such as Google Search), permit individuals to govern themselves, which epitomises the biopolitical and lies at the core of neoliberalism.
2.3 Neoliberal Subjects
Neoliberal subjects—small sovereigns—are always searching, rarely finding. Shifting from the zoom to the overview, from search term to search term, they defer and extend decisions: the end, like that mythic pot of gold, is never reached. At the same time, though, users’ searches produce data that make users findable, even as they wander (Chun 2016:77).
Although the Homoeconomicus is often considered a rational agent in pursuit of self-interest, these subjectivity-defined ends are part of an economic civil society that operates through production and exchange, which is part of the technology of liberal governmentality.
As Panopticlick shows, Google search facilitates online tracking and (self) surveillance, simultaneously optimising searching subjects. This biopolitics is organised by
the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating practices, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals (Foucault 2008:259-60 cited by Borch 2015:14 emphasis mine).
This prescient ‘optimization’ could nowadays be applied to personalised search results, which although declared individualised, organise the subject into categories based on others with similar interests, characteristics and behaviour patterns, as elucidated in Chapter 5. This is supported by Foucault’s analysis of power that concerned itself with subjectification, or the way in which ‘subjects are constructed as specific subjects’ (1982:212) where ‘on the one hand, one can be subject/subjugated to the control of others. On the other hand, one can subordinate oneself’ (Borch 2015:14). What is crucial to note is that Foucault focused on the
‘interrelationships between the two’ yet opposed the idea of a static, ‘ahistorical, autonomous core identity’ and instead contributed to the field of knowledge with how ‘new forms of subjectivity have been produced throughout history’ and with the proposal that power is
‘productive/creative by nature’ (ibid:14-15).
This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him [sic] by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him (Foucault 1982:212 cited by Borch:15).
Through this interaction, the subject is both recognised, and subject to, the law.
2.4 Interpellated subject
In Chapter 1 I presented the two primary definitions of address for this thesis, namely the physical address, which allowed people to be identified and assigned a location and the act of being addressed, in which the individual acknowledges that they are being recognised as a subject. In the early days of neoliberal capitalist ideology, before it was defined as such, Louis Althusser articulated forms of address through the framework of ideology, which he deemed
‘interpellation’ (1971). In his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation), Althusser put forth the relationship of power structures and the individual to the state through a Marxist lens. With the constitutive process of interpellation, this ideology is recognised by the individual’s acknowledgement of becoming a subject that complicates their domination and subjugation. According to Althusser, ideology is also a type of mediation, as is protocol and this middle role is ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (1971:162). Terry Eagleton described Althusser’s concept of ideology
as a particular organization of signifying practices which goes to constitute human beings as social subjects, and which produces the lived relations by which such subjects are connected to the dominant relations of production in a society (1991:18 cited by Mager 2014:31).
As members of society, systems of hegemonic power reproduce themselves by hiding governing factors as they simultaneously incorporate the subject into the structure of power. The classic example is that of Althusser’s policeman who shouts at a passer-by “hey, you there!” in public where the individual then responds by turning around. ‘[B]y this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he [sic] becomes a subject’ (1971:174).
Subjects are thereby complicit in their own domination and this form of self-governing is
incorporated into daily activities, such as responding to officials of the state when addressed and also when searching with Google. ‘The ideological superstructure and the economic base meet with and feed each other in every single Google query’ (Mager 2014:32). Previously it was the police who asked the question: ‘Hey you there?’ Nowadays ‘personalised subjects’ enhance the power structures of Google by recognising themselves as subjects when searching online, who are interpellated as ‘subjects’ by automatically acknowledging the ideology of Google Search by deciding to use it. It then becomes crucial for individual users to recognise their own
interpellation when using ‘transnational informational capitalism’ (Fuchs 2011a) and how they relate to the capitalist ideology of Google search algorithms (Mager 2014).
2.5 Trusted User
As argued in Chapter 3, the capitalistic ideology of Google is embodied by PageRank’s
‘authority’, where high rank reflects what is considered valuable or important, and ‘[m]ost likely, these are the pages to which someone performing a search would like to direct his or her attention’(Google 2014). In the Feedback section of The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1998), Brin and Page explain that parameters such as ‘type-weights’ and
‘type-prox weights’ need to be determined for ranking search results. Brin and Page further divulge that ‘[f]iguring out the right values for these parameters is something of a black art. In order to do this, we have a user feedback mechanism in the search engine’ (1998:110). It became Brin and Page’s ‘trusted user’ who interacts with the search engine and reinforces this
‘preferential attachment’ by clicking on links mostly found on the first page of Google. The
‘trusted user’ thereby actuates the ‘relevance’ and ‘quality’ of the search results by supplying feedback and data that Google saves and incorporates it into subsequent search results.
However, as discussed in Chapter 5, authority has transitioned to authenticity, with the language of Trusted Users’ queries determining not only ranking but personalisation. Brin and Page recount their experiments with PageRank of ‘increasing the weight of a user’s home page or bookmarks,’ thereby alluding to the notion of personalisation as another key innovation to Google’s search engine (ibid:112). As they mention in their Future Work section they planned to
support user context [locative data], and result summarization. Then when we modify the ranking function, we can see the impact of this change on all previous searches which were ranked (ibid:111).
These adjustments determined the ranking function, as did the previous searches [search history]
and the impact of these changes resulted in personalisation. Brin and Page also made it known they had not done an ‘extensive user study’ to test the quality; instead they invited the reader to test out Google, to click on links, some of which were advertisements.
2.6 Impressionable Subject
User feedback has always played a salient role in the history of advertising. As elucidated in Chapter 3 and 5, the way in which audiences were created for advertising in early ‘push’ media such as television was one directional and there was no possibility for immediate feedback. As Lucas D. Introna points out, the business model of advertising regarding the present-day internet is ‘historically contingent’, that is, it is ‘neither inevitable, nor the only possibility’ (Introna 2016:26). Introna draws on a Foucauldian genealogy of the technical practices that make up the history of online display advertising and breaks the narrative down into four ‘enactments’: the gazing subject, the animated subject, the individuated subject and the branded subject, in order to map out how the impressionable subject ‘becomes’. The gazing subject is captured and controlled by the GUI (which was invented in 1979, before the hyperlink) and unlike the push media curated by publishers of yesteryear, the pull or agency of the subject is enacted with their clicking on banner ads (the first currency of the internet) (ibid:29-32). With advances in
interface development, such as the GUI and personalisation, viewers could see advertisements that were targeted at them. At exactly the right moment the ‘animated subject’ shows interest by clicking and interacting, with the amount of revenue generated determined by the ‘conversion rate’ of impressions (ibid:32-35).