Modulation Harms and The Google Home

Deleuze’s (1992) modulation is frequently invoked to explain power relations in hyper-connected, sensorised environments. However, attempts to articulate the harmful implications of modulation—a critical step in the process of considering the need for legal intervention—have been modest. In this paper, we theorise four harms arising from the exercise of modulatory power: subsumption, amplification, vibration, and alienation. To do so, we outline the core features of Deleuzean modulatory power (Deleuze 1992), illustrated through contrasts with Foucauldian discipline (Foucault 1995, 1988). Then, drawing on Julie Cohen’s (2013, 2015, 2018, 2019) modulation as a two-way flow of predicted and prescripted modes of governance and knowledge production, we explore and situate our harms in the sensorised and smart home, employing Google’s patented vision as a concrete example (Fadell et al. 2020). We contend that modulation harms arise from the continuous flow and constant agitation of insistent modification (D’Amato 2019) enabled by sensorisation. The core power act that gives rise to modulation harm is the ability to harness, direct, and provide “frequency” to flows of sensor data to achieve continual behavioural modification and shape social norms about the purposes and benefits of such modification. The overarching harm we identify is subsumption, the infrastructural enclosure of all sensorised environments that enables social shaping to take place anywhere, which gives rise to the other modulation harms. Amplification harms regard auto-regulatory norms as an unquestioned facet of an automated human life. Vibration harms arise from the automated ability to prescribe changes in affect. Alienation harms regard subtle denials of access to informational networks. We show that the Google sensorised home both modulates and disciplines occupants concurrently, but more importantly, these concurrent power acts can take place wherever an individual is tethered to the modulation infrastructure and sensor data can be harnessed.

Laboratories of Universality

Carlos Fonseca Suárez read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph” as a reflection upon the limits of technological universalism as well as a reconfiguration of modern cosmopolitanism. Carlos Fonseca Suárez then explores the figure of José Arcadio Buendía—founder of Macondo in Cien años de soledad (1967)—who in his obsession with scientific innovation takes Borges’s exploration of technological modernity and the impasses of modern progressivism even further, proposing instead a new dialectical model of universalism. Finally, Carlos Fonseca Suárez concludes by adding a final star to this constellation by exploring how the character of Luca Belladona in Ricardo Piglia’s 2010 novel Blanco nocturno allows for a rereading of this Humboldt’s plainsman scene in the contemporary socioeconomic context, where the relation between the global and the local, center and periphery, becomes intertwined in the elusive informational networks of global capital.

Dennis Oppenheim and the cartographic expansion of American sculpture

Cartography was a model for Dennis Oppenheim’s territorial conception of sculpture and the road map was a site on which he sought to expand sculpture’s boundaries. This article focuses on five works conceived in the late 1960s in which Oppenheim built upon the proprietary claim to space implicit in cartography. Whether plotted on a map or constructed alongside the highway, Oppenheim viewed these sculptures as instruments of spatial orientation and territorial possession, as well as mechanisms to reroute the infrastructures and informational networks of everyday life. In Oppenheim’s sculpture, the liberatory aesthetics of minimalism’s phenomenology is marked with a territorial violence that plays out in cartographic and real space. He sought a way to force the body to register within abstract systems and, in turn, to imprint those abstract systems on the body. The road map was both a model and a site for this exchange.

The impact of disinformation on dangerous goods operation

It becomes increasingly obvious that the current social stage comes with unique challenges, so the definition of success as gaining advantages only to one party to the detriment of the other must be overcome. In the new era, highly interconnected and transparent, we must find solutions to raise ourselves together, or together we will collapse. Our goal is to build a global community, energized by the vast informational networks (which have canceled all distances), based on responsibility, creativity, common benefits and values. Using new approaches and solving problems not solitary but synergistically, effectively, principally, the new strong currency in the global business strategy will become the trust. This cannot be achieved either by fear or legal over-regulation, but only by higher moral values, assumed and followed as the only long-term sustainable solution.