Being Watched Watching Watchers Watch: Determining the Digitized Future While Profitably Modulating Preemption (at the Airport)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gilles Deleuze once wrote in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992) that in the future (our present) our societies would be controlled or “disciplined” using subtly unobtrusive and strategically applied forms of “modulation.” That is, the rigid physical enclosures of Foucault’s disciplinary society would inevitably yield to more flexible, immaterial, and imperceptible forms of modulation that continually respond and adapt to life’s unpredictability. In this paper I describe how the use of naked body scanners at today’s airport is a most suitable expression of this dematerialized form of discipline, seeming at the same moment to both threaten and protect privacy, to be both non-intrusive and invasive, to both prepare for and determine seemingly unknowable but inevitable futures. The flying public, meanwhile, is caught in the confusing middle, not knowing what to believe. They find themselves trapped in an undefined surveillance grid that both threatens and protects their freedoms. Will the scanners see through clothing and catch underwear-bombs, or won’t they? Will security agents scan, save, and distribute their naked images or won’t they? The public is left with questions rather than answers. This whole (visual) apparatus which was designed to create clarity and transparency seems opaque. I suggest, then, that the opacity both of the issues at stake as well as of the scanned images of our naked bodies, confounds our categories and challenges long taken for granted social conventions about, for example, habeas corpus, privacy, security, the present, the future, potentiality, etc. Appearances, it seems, are still deceiving – even if what’s being made to appear are high-resolution scans of our naked bodies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".