With Image Creep it is as if the predatory male gaze, which has offended and objectified people for millennia, has suddenly run amok as if, in Freudian terms, the ego had been universally subsumed by the super-ego, leaving no middle ground between the id's chaos and the super-ego's authority. It begins with Google Glass, says Keenan, with everyone recording everyone else and all of it stored, tracked and analyzed by forces inimical to freedom and privacy. So advanced is facial-recognition software that, when combined with a technology like Google Glass, one can expect "that you will soon be able to point smartphones at someone and learn quite a bit about them in real time." This likelihood has already spawned a counter-industry in 'facial weaponization'. One company, Realtime Glamofage, "helps people create masks with weirdly-morphed versions of their actual face, hoping to bedevil the recognition software." Do we want to live in a world where every day is Halloween and our identities are the treat to be fought over by corporate predators hungry for a taste of your face?
Perhaps the most disturbing Creeps, however, are in Keenan's Bio and Body categories, where final physical and psychical barriers are breached, and the synthesis of operator stimulant on operant flesh is most fully realized. The celebratory hoo-ha that resulted from the astonishing work of the Genome Project, with its definitive and triumphant production of DNA-sequencing knowledge, is also the stuff of totalitarian wet dreams, a yearning eugenicist's Siegfried moment. This DNA capture begins at birth in a hospital, when samples of blood are drawn from the newborn, put on filter paper and stored. Keenan puts it in all its inglorious perspective: "In fact, newborn screening may actually be the Holy Grail that many governments have been lusting for - a national database of all its citizens." The NSA revelations of Edward Snowden may be the proverbial tip of a melting iceberg.
Another study under way by technologists delves into the nature of human memories and how they can be manipulated by external stimuli. Keenan cites Steve Ramirez, a researcher from the RIKEN-MIT Centre for Neural Circuit Genetics, who says, "Our data demonstrate that it is possible to generate an internally represented and behaviorally expressed fear memory via artificial means." That is, it's possible to make a sensible, rational person suddenly terrified of the Bogey Man. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is actively working on truly invasive "narrative network" technologies that can essentially hijack a brain, the way remote assistance controllers can now take over the functions of a pre-wired automobile, planting false memories and performing other tricks of the mind.
In perhaps the single most warped example of coming creepiness, Keenan cites contemporary French philosopher Rebecca Roche, who sees a time when, say, a prisoner's mind can be uploaded to a computer and their mental cycle manipulated. By such means, she notes with only a touch of French jocularity, one could take the mind of a killer sentenced to 1,000 years and provide the equivalent experience of imprisonment in something like eight hours. As Roche puts it, "the eight-and-a-half hour 1,000-year sentence could be followed by a few hours (or, from the point of view of the criminal, several hundred years) of treatment and rehabilitation." Keenan adds, rather less dryly, "So that vicious serial killer or hardened terrorist could be home in time for supper." And he doesn't say it, but presumably a way will be found to reconstitute the victim's body, their memories downloaded from the cloud.
This, of course, leads to other philosophical considerations. If such memory manipulation, along with the synthetic reconstitution of the body (or a trade-in for a better model), is probable in the middle future, then it raises questions of immortality, and a kind of time travel. But if time travel happens in the future, wouldn't it already be happening now, our descendants revisiting old stomping grounds, and, if so, what then constitutes the real?
Given the enormous stakes of all this technocreeping, one might expect considerable popular resistance to the current war on privacy. For, whatever else it may be, the War on Terror, with its unleashed global-surveillance apparatus, most certainly is, in effect, a war on subjectivity and the private, whereby the government watches all and feeds their corporate sponsors, who turn around and manipulate the desires of the universal gaze. "Aside from the occasional blinking light," Keenan says of the surveillance apparatus, "they tell us nothing. We tell them everything." And yet, aside from the usual roundup of leftwing complainers, there seems to be a resounding celebration of the Internet of Things, with its ubiquitous sensors and data recordings, designed to tell us what we need; we don't seem to mind apps that allow a nosy neighbor to point an iPhone at someone's home and see what the occupants are doing; most will blithely accept being sprayed with GPS nano chips the way they now shrug at being sprayed with insecticide by flight attendants as they enter highly-restrictive countries, such as Australia. A lot of the acceptance has to do with how the invasiveness is packaged, of course. As Keenan points out, a sensor that casually allows you to monitor your neighbor "would have been greeted much differently if they had called it the 'Anne Frank Finder.'" Perhaps, but then again, this is the age of irony.
Keenan, a deeply experienced technologist who has worked for both government and private interests, reckons that the deterioration of resistance to digitalization and the consequent dehumanization of personhood, which is summed up in the actions of the computer conquistadors, have been steady and irresistible since the 1950s. Keenan is not the only observer of this trend, of course. French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul's seminal work, The Technological Society (1954), described how the tools and techniques of technology have gone from being an important means to an end (i.e., the betterment of the human condition through the gradual development of civilization) to becoming an end in themselves, and in the process the dialectical activity that has defined humanity and given it breadth and reason has been subsumed into technological activity, from which there is no escape. The system is the solution, Marshall McLuhan once said (a meme Bell Telephone was quick to co-opt and use in its ads of the mid-70s), and the system no longer requires politics, or the staggering inefficiencies of democratic choice.
Perhaps the weakest part of Keenan's Technocreep comes when he sets up some cursory counterarguments to his thesis. He ventriloquizes the optimist dummy who notes only, in so many words, 'but technology will save and enhance humanity by curing cancer, replacing body parts, lengthening our lives, keeping us safe and entertained!' Perhaps Keenan felt that any reader who had gone through his book and reached this late stage of his study and still maintained a blind optimism was probably too delusional to worry with further reasoning. Likewise, he poses the commonly heard pop tart's lisp, 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.' And rather than get into a debate about tossing the Bill of Rights, with its guarantees of privacy, to the wind, he merely reminds his lispeners that today's model citizens could easily be tomorrow's national-security threats.
Keenan closes his book by offering up a chapter meant to lift the spirits, presumably, with a series of steps that techno-citizens can take to reduce their vulnerability to the System: various ways to ward off trackers, digital predators, government snoops, neighborly eavesdropping, and the whole carnivalesque rompin' stompin' of the machine matrix of processed desire. Some of his advice includes living your digital life in a sandbox, using encryption to store data and communicate, and living with multiple identities. But such precautions, such necessary fortressing and deceiving, serve to accentuate the notion that real war is not on terror, but on what 'terrifies' the System: the unpredictable spanner-in-the-works known as individuality. Keenan's remedies hardly inspire confidence. After all, these solutions suggest a fait accompli whereby democracy is finished and future survival depends on how one adjusts to the Machine's requirements. Perhaps it is as philosopher Donald Verene posits in his essay, "Technological Desire," (Verene, 1984):
Things in history, like human lives themselves, come to ends. The question is not the reform of technological society; it is the question whether human meaning is possible in its world... The technological society reduces the human spirit to desire, just as an individual life can be reduced to one of its dimensions.
Though one might be inclined to draw a similar conclusion after reading Keenan's work, the book is clearly written with activists in mind. Indeed, it concludes with an exhaustive reference section that allows the reader to re-trace the author's steps and access primary materials to study. In that sense, at least, it ends on an upbeat note.
This review originally appeared in Rumpus magazine.
(Article changed on Jul 22, 2021 at 11:40 PM EDT)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
