Reclaiming Visual Sovereignty: A Theoretical Critique of Facial Recognition Technology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a critique of facial recognition (FR) technology contributing to both surveillance studies and the anti-security literature -and pacification theory in particular.In this study I engage in a critical discourse analysis to deconstruct the historical relationship between identification and the human face.I argue that identification is a form of pacification because it translates and compresses the human condition into something which can be subject to police powers, and reduces personal and political expression to categories which can only be articulated through their relationship to security and capital.Therefore, the face, and by extension FR software, can be seen as an extension of the pacification process, as faces provide an efficient and accessible way to translate the human body through the material gaze of security.I conclude, therefore, that challenges to FR technology are best rooted within a more material understanding of identification and surveillance.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".