CS213 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Shoppers Drug Mart, Gilles Deleuze, Panopticism
Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks” -
Deleuze, 1992
● We are rendered infinitely divisible and recombinable
○ Shoppers drug mart tracking purchases to find drug dealers
○ Target knowing when people will have a baby based on purchases
● ‘Below’ the Individual
○ Individual targeted by power → panopticon
○ Now dividual target by power
● Surveillance by Algorithm
○ Look for triggers → increasing development of concern as they are detected
○ Surveillance tied to automated process
○ Not individuals being tracked, but behaviours that are triggers
● Dispersal of Surveillance
● Screens Look Back
○ Screen that could tell if you are male or female and change ad accordingly
○ New screen in UK that can change its advertising depending how many people
looking at it, weather, male or female
● Predictive AI (artificial intelligence) and Databases
● Continuous control and instant communication
○ “One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated
from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way
to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-school kids or
bureaucrat students”
○ Control has introduced new logic of management → different than disciplinary
management (eg employer has access to you while at home)
● Control modulates the dividual (rather than molds)
○ “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a
self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other,
or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”
○ We are willing participants - feel empowered by it
● So how free are we?
○ Have free choice - but can only choose from what we are offered
● Martinez
○ Norman Macintosh
○ Analysis of organizations thru the lens of Panopticism
○ Disciplinary technologies or techniques are proposed as an important feature of
management control systems
○ Examines the interrelationship between accounting, discourses, institutions and
mechanisms to monitor and normalize
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Document Summary
Individuals have become dividuals, and masses, samples, data, markets, or banks - We are rendered infinitely divisible and recombinable. Shoppers drug mart tracking purchases to find drug dealers. Target knowing when people will have a baby based on purchases. Look for triggers increasing development of concern as they are detected. Not individuals being tracked, but behaviours that are triggers. Screen that could tell if you are male or female and change ad accordingly. New screen in uk that can change its advertising depending how many people looking at it, weather, male or female. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-school kids or bureaucrat students . Control has introduced new logic of management different than disciplinary management (eg employer has access to you while at home) Control modulates the dividual (rather than molds)
