In answering a
hypothetical posed to me, I found myself defending the Miranda decision (“you
have the right to remain silent...”) against Congressional overhaul. I argued that Miranda should be kept as a
field tested, though imperfect, solution to the problem of police coercion,
instead of a technocratic solution hashed out in the halls of government. Based on several anecdotes I am familiar with[1]
I asserted that technocrats inevitably fail to accommodate for the complexity
of the systems they are struggling to manage.
This is true across the board, from economic regulation to environmental
systems to human migration. The fundamental
flaw with top-down solutions is the lack of information and the inability to
manage it. Imperfect information has
been the bane of economists since the dismal science was begun. Humanity´s information about the natural
world is painfully inadequate (the closer we come to hard and fast rules the
more complexity we uncover – think string theory and genomes). The chalice of all social scientists, of whom
technocrats are a particular and comparatively well-paid subspecies, is the
ability to collect and systematize oceans of data. Sample size, everything. The following blog post is a diversion into
science fiction, but a compelling notion that merits brief mention.
The nexus of
the original declaration grew out of an unrelated conversation about Michel Foucault’s
conception of biopower and biopolitics and new ways of configuring sovereignty
away from territoriality. One of the
central ideas was shifting the idea and focus of state control entirely onto
the individual. This idea would mean a
world without borders, but it would also likely mean extreme intrusion into the
physical bodies of the subjects. In some
respects this corpus-centric state already exists. Consider the US tax regime, which is one of
the few[2]
tax systems that follows it citizens wherever they roam. While most countries only demand taxes from
people physically within the territory of the state, the US attaches its tax
reporting obligations to the body and family of its citizens. For many, this type of body-attaching state
is repelling and even insidious and the specter of George Orwell’s 1984
super-state looms in the shadows.
Ignoring for the moment these overwhelming concerns, I posit the
following supposition:
Imagine the implications on the
social sciences of knowing where every person on the planet was and being able
to track and manage the information.[3]
This
is clearly science fiction, but it is not too wild of an extrapolation given
the day’s news. The National Security Agency
has been striving for the technocrat’s prize by collecting vast swaths of
information about people’s electronic communications. It is unclear to what degree the NSA is able
to manipulate and understand all of that data, but the Utah Data Center is clearly a
best effort. Now, what if 100% accurate
GPS data on every single human being could be gathered and tracked. This would either involve some sort of massive
dystopian compulsory chip implantation scheme similar to what we in developing
countries are inflicting on our cats and dogs or the development of extremely
sensitive biometers capable of registering tell-tale signs of each individual
human body from space. That´s the
science fiction bit.
Beyond
a good set up for a short story, this possibility reveals just how important
the location of human bodies is. It
would be possible to infer massive amounts of information just by knowing
exactly where a certain person was at any given time and then tracing their
patterns of movement. This information
would have revolutionary impacts on all of the social sciences from economics,
urban development and sociology to psychology, political science, criminology
and media studies among others. Consider
subject K: We know K is most likely a male because we can track him regularly
going into the men’s bathroom and standing at a urinal. We can also tell that K is an adult by his
movements to an office and bars. We know
that K has children because we can track him at a local elementary school at
regular intervals each morning and his frequenting of certain stores every
December. He is also most likely
overweight because he spends little time in the vegetable aisle at the grocery
store and zips around town so fast that we know he isn´t walking or riding a
bike. It also appears that K is having
problems with his prostate, given his frequent trips to a medical facility as
well as those trips to the bathroom. We
would know his religion and his drug habits, just by tracking the location of
his body. The possibilities for this
type of speculation are endless. Could
we determine K’s political affiliations by compiling and analyzing a lifetime
of movements? What about his ethnicity? Could we predict his favorite music or sports
team? The implications of this
information for social scientists, not to mention marketing agencies and
tyrants, are staggering.
It is
extremely unlikely that this potential future will ever come to pass. However, I will close this reverie with this
context. It is important to remember
just how important the movement of the human body is, on all levels, micro to
macro. To come full circle to Miranda,
consider the second-worse punishment society can conceive of after the
infliction of physical pain or death; confinement. Constricting a person’s movement is a
devastating blow to their personhood. I
think all of this bears keeping in mind when we consider human migration. How we move is who we are. Foucault was very aware of the state’s
interest in controlling our bodies.
Clearly states are interested in controlling the movement of our bodies
across their international borders. It
bears questioning why and considering what the costs and benefits are.
[1] One
of the most compelling has been the Transantiago public transport system overhaul undertaken by then-President
Michelle Bachelet in 2007. The system
was designed by her government to replace a hodge-podge system that evolved driven
by small bus companies operating independent lines. The integrated system launched to
overwhelming criticism and now six years later Transantiago is still plagued by
problems and overcrowding. One of the
lessons learned from this experience has been that the technocratic designers
failed to fully consider and anticipate the needs and flows of people using
public transport in the city of 7 million.
Other examples of this type of top-down design failure are forthcoming,
but not really the point of this blog post.
[2]
One of the only? I am not an
international tax expert...
[3] The
thought experiment also requires knowing minute detail of the environment as
well, but given the advances of google, I wouldn't be surprised if one could
locate not only your backyard pool, but also your bathroom in the near future.
