| A Life of the Dead makes historical connections between information technology on the one hand, and the contentious social and political concepts of privacy and surveillance on the other. My argument, first, is that labor is the missing conceptual link in contemporary studies of this relation. Drawing on Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, contrasting it with the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, and of Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis (authors of the essay "The Right to Privacy"), I view both the claim of individual persons to a "right to privacy" and the practice of data-surveillance by state- and corporate entities who collect data on individuals (as consumers, citizens, and patients) as attempts to appropriate information-capital generated in and through everyday activities. Data-surveillance makes it possible to collect, store and analyze data, and thus generate value from the everyday activities of shopping and traveling, as well as from the more familiar financial, medical and marketing data handled by state and corporate entities. Secondly, I argue that this translation of everyday activities into data, and into information-capital, is part and parcel of a broad historical trend in the English- and French-speaking context, towards reducing scientific and cultural objects of study to code, what Michel Serres has called a "dream of a mathesis universalis." I study a range of texts from the 1950s and '60s, from the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, the psychoanalysis-seminars of Jacques Lacan, to the satirical fiction of Kurt Vonnegut and the futurology of Daniel Bell. I study specifically a widely circulating idea of information technology taking over most labor, making human workers redundant. This idea is, in turn, relevant to the case-study which closes the dissertation, of a planned database, the Icelandic Healthcare Database, licensed to deCODE Genetics Inc., in which the population of Iceland would be effectively simulated by feeding their medical data into an extensive database for locating hereditary disease genes and possible treatments. |
