‘Smartphone’, forthcoming (2015) on Making Things International Vol II, edited by Mark B. Salter, University of Minnesota Press. Peter Chambers The theory changes the reality it describes. Philip K. Dick, Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said RIOT In February 2013 a friend sent me a link to an obtained video hosted on The Guardian’s website, detailing a datamining tool developed by Raytheon1, called Rapid Information Overlay Technology (RIOT). 2 RIOT allows the user to quickly assemble a clear picture of a person’s network of associates and their movements, as revealed through their habitual, normal smartphone use, the repeated patterns of which can then be visualized in a number of ways to accurately disclose their networks of association and predict their future behaviour. The smartphone is an extremely subtle and complex device whose uses, agency and affects depend greatly on the assemblages in which it is an actant. The effectiveness of the smartphone in RIOT’s marketable surveillance assemblage, for example, depends on the interoperation of a large number of programmed systems, with interested group agents such as the Raytheon corporation and the US government at various ends. It also depends on the broader, shifting social interaction between smartphones and their human 1 and nonhuman users in their average, everyday dealings with one another via their smartphones – for this is, after all, why the precise pattern of data is there in the first place and for the foreseeable future. Careful consideration of the surveillant assemblage visible through RIOT prompts us to rethink agency and causality: is any ‘one’ in control here? To what ends are these tools being put, and what are their probable and possible futures? To what do individual smartphone users and system-agents of their surveillance tend to pay attention? What kind of control might they seek, and what might they have? Considering the smartphone’s enmeshment here also encourages us to think very carefully about the possible political dangers this engenders, encourages and normalizes. These are political dangers which, the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures3 amply demonstrate, are no longer science fiction, the cool-but-creepy imaginings of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, or even marginal practices that are only the obsessive worry of paranoid cranks and conspiracy theorists. Rather, they are the by-now-normal political technologies of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its project of total planetary surveillance through PRISM, Boundless Informant4, and the many other projects, programs and applications of which large numbers of people are not yet aware, may never be, and may not even care to know about. So far, the repercussions of the mass surveillance disclosures have appear to have perturbed the NSA5 without functionally altering its strategic programme and its various programs. Nor has it upset smartphone use, which continues to increase, emanating from affluent young and business 2 users, but diffusing globally as the price of handsets and data continues to fall. In 2014, global smartphone uptake sits at approximately 1.75 billion users6. By 2017, most people in wealthier countries who wish to have a phone will have no choice but to have a smartphone7: it will be the only consumer choice. In the same year, smartphone use is projected to hit 2.5 billion users, 33.8% of the world’s population. The further speculative assertion in this paper is that the smartphone is a paradigm shift in computer use, not just an advance from mobile telephony. This is evidenced by the business models of Apple, Google, and Facebook, now predicated on increasing consumer reliance on smartphones: Apple through the app-hardware-ecosystem, Google through Android and search, and Facebook through manipulation of attention and emotion8. The smartphone, I contend, is the qualitatively dominant new paradigm for pervasive computing. Along with the tablet, it is reshaping what networked computing means, and thus what it means to be surveilled. The imbrication of our mundane culture of everyday smartphone use in smartphone-predicated surveillance has global reach and profound implications for our life in common. In this chapter, I read the smartphone as an actant whose modulating agency and meaning is intelligible through a number of moments, which have been chosen for their value in helping us better understand the emergent power relations that now appear visible through assemblages like those to which smartphone uses like Facebook, Twitter, webmail, RIOT, PRISM, and Boundless Informant are now attached and interact with. These power 3 relations are also international relations: they upset conventional understandings of the international while remaking relations anew. From one perspective, smartphone-predicated surveillance and its implications indicate that adding Niklas Luhmann’s conception of the international to our existing understanding is appropriate. For Luhmann, the international no longer refers to “a relation between two (or more) nations but to the political and the economic problems of the global system”9. This is not to say that the international of old, predicated on regional differences, institutionalized hierarchies of governmental authority, enforceable territorial monopolies on physical violence, diplomacy and (thus) the political sovereignty of nationstates no longer exist or matter. They do, and greatly: but their precise meaning, as well as the extent to which they matter, are also being partially transformed through smartphone predicated-surveillance. It is this making and remaking of the international that this chapter works toward better understanding. What follows also raises the question of the United States as a nation in its sovereign relation to its others, for both the smartphone and the NSA are American inventions and American projects. Vladimir Putin was wrong to describe the Internet as a ‘CIA project’, but perhaps only because he incorrectly named the central agency and device10. Connecting the smartphone to its relations also means considering what citizenship means: ‘inside’, ‘outside’ and in relation to this nation-state in particular and the nation-state form in general. Seeing the NSA’s tools and techniques as ‘merely that’, and not as political dangers as suggested above, is about trust. It means trusting government agents who say they are acting in the name of the United 4 States, which nonetheless still professes to be a liberal democracy. But as the NSA’s practices affect every smartphone user globally, it also means trusting that the US’ interests, even if they still are the liberal democratic interests of its citizens, are international interests, global interests, our interests. As Putin’s remark says in its own way: this is asking a lot. The enmeshment of our smartphone use in the NSA’s machinations should lead us to question what USA stands for. Do Internet users have a right to privacy and anonymity online (did we ever)? Do we have a right not to be killed – globally, locally, overseas, or at home – for what traces of our online operations reveal as suspicious to the NSA? What does citizenship mean when the leaders of powerful nation states and US citizens all alike are the target objects of this new surveillance? What does citizenship protect us from when certain among them are assassinated – even as citizens – based in part upon what their smartphones told the NSA about who and where they were? These questions guide what follows. This reading of the smartphone’s power effects and political implications will be done in three stages. In the first section I take a phenomenologically inspired approach, touching on what may be significant and different about the way we tend to pick up, hold and use smartphones, as well as how we may subjectively understand this experience. The gambit behind the conjoining of ‘the thing itself’ and the far more general account of power effects is that we cannot understand the surveillant networks that the smartphone is entangling increasing numbers of us in without first ‘picking up the phone’ – not, for a change, to send a message or check the contents of 5 one just received, but to try to encounter those other aspects of it which, as Heidegger would say, remain veiled in our concernful everyday dealings with smartphones as ready-to-hand equipment11. This is a matter of understanding how it is that smartphones have come to pervade so many people’s lives so quickly, as well as why it might be that so many people seem stubbornly unworried about their involvement in what are always also potentially the NSA’s activities. The second section focuses on the way big data interacts both with subjective experiences and culturally normal habits and patterns of smartphone use and surveillant attentions. This provides a bridge and door onto the third section on emergent power relations. Here, I focus on two salient, broader effects produced when the cultures of use engendered by everyday interactions of smartphones become entangled in smartphone-predicated surveillance: control and spectacle. The assumptions underpinning the particular importance accorded to the smartphone for understanding power relations are as follows. There is no NSA without big data; there is no big data without pervasive networked computer use. This happens once computers are connected to the Internet by default, part of the ‘always on’ concept that accompanied the switch to broadband, then wireless, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The only simple, effective safeguard against the NSA’s techniques is an air-gapped computer,12 a computer physically isolated from unsecured networks. However, pervasive computing is increasingly being conducted through smartphones, devices which are constitutively networked and networking. This means that smartphones are always disclosing their users’ patterns and whereabouts to the NSA, while it also means that the 6 patterns of data are more telling, as RIOT indicates. The further importance here is that smartphones are very difficult for most users to modify and hack. Even judicious and well-informed use is no guarantee against the NSA’s methods, and no guard of privacy and anonymity. In this assemblage, the smartphone is a surveillant device. These difficulties are also relevant for understanding tablets. But one thing distinguishes the smartphone from laptops and tablets. Smartphones follow their users around. Users carry them everywhere – many even take them to bed. This means they disclose dynamic locational data, a rich, relational, accurate topography of moments, places and people. This now-central topography of power relations re-making the international is where we have to get to, but to begin with, let us first pick up the thing itself, these telling companions of everyday affluent life. picking up the smartphone Smartphones are magical devices to use, to have and to hold. The smartphone is not merely subtle, complex and magical, it is an extremely seductive piece of technology. The world in which a smartphone is central, crucial, and necessary to so many people is vastly different to the one in which the stirrup occupied a similar place.13 Yet the smartphone’s subtlety and complexity is belied by the presented unity of the device itself: the user sees, picks up, holds, and interacts with the tactile graphical user interface of a thoughtful, even beautiful piece of modernist industrial design. This hides what, following Benjamin Bratton, we might call a ‘densely stacked architecture’14, that labyrinthine genealogy of theories, engineering, circuitry and labor that every manufactured handset holds within its frame. The smartphone is an 7 embodied idea, an enacted metaphor; and it is brimming with over a century’s worth of deep and careful thought. The presented unity of the unit effaces this extraordinary work of design and development, the predicates and predecessors of each of those smoothly integrated elements, the obstacles of thought, materials, design and manufacturing that stood between its past and its presence. The smartphone is also an interface that effaces its traces, as Derrida might playfully put it. In other words, part of what’s amazing about the paradigm for smartphone design – set by Apple – is the way the presented unity takes all that twenty-first century complexity and renders it perceptually invisible and functionally irrelevant. This is fundamental to generating an end-user experience that encourages continual smartphone use for a large and growing number of functions: telephony, email, messaging, photography, social media, logging in, notetaking, cross-platform data input, storage and retrieval, etc, etc. The intuitive, appealing ‘simplicity’ of the smartphone’s interface, regardless of the function or app, leaves the user free to intuit self and world by calling forth actions, notifications, calculations, information and sociality all just by stroking and tapping its tactile graphical user interface. This is, indeed, very smart; but a further part of how it works so well and so subtly is also about what disappears. Smartphones are better thought of as mobile computers, not phones. To the extent they become ubiquitous, smartphones involve pervasive mobile computing over digital information networks through the tactile graphical user interface of a device that is handheld, pocketable, and highly portable. 8 Smartphones are about pervasive computing, which as Galloway notes, “seeks to embed computers into our everyday lives in such ways as to render them invisible and allow them to be taken for granted.”15 The laptop liberated the computer from the desktop and the plug outlet, first for the time dictated by battery life, then for the space dictated by access to Wi-Fi. The smartphone has done more than liberate networked computing from the lap: the tactile graphical user interface places any number of computationally-possible functions behind the touchscreen’s glass in the hand of the user, who is ‘liberated’ not only from having to sit at a desk and type data into a computer, but from even thinking about the smartphone as ‘a computer’ in the sense made conventional by the desktop metaphor of computing. The net effect is already this: in an actant network in which computing is omnipresent, the computer appears to have vanished. As the computerness of the smartphone is has been rendered largely invisible, the valid prepositions16 of computer use are changed, and our relations and dispositions of computer interaction with it. Smartphones are used for any number of tasks, all of which – though they involve automating, databasing and networking actions through a graphical user interface – do so in such a way that is so unobtrusive that it no longer need be recognized as computing at all. Smartphones are ‘used with’ and ‘used while’, and here, crucially, while to an outside observer (or a frustrated loved one, pet, or public spacesharing commuter) our attention is all-too-involved with the device, subjectively our attention is given over to whatever tasks the device is performing for us, and not the device as the device, or the device in its implications for surveillance, or our intimate lives – or the future of humanity. 9 When we use it as equipment, the smartphone in its equipmentality17 recedes into the background, precisely in order to be available to us as equipment. All that computing we’re doing becomes both pervasive and unobtrusive. The smartphone not only means that the computer vanishes, it also means that the smartphone itself recedes into the background as we focus on the task at hand. We not only do not think of the smartphone as a computer, very often we do not think about the smartphone at all. Having a computer unobtrusively compute while one performs any number of tasks in a way that is not seen as computing not only renders invisible the omnipresence of computing. It also seems plausible to suggest that it would tend to make people unaware that any computing is going on at all – precisely where-and-while computing is going on all the time. This becomes significant when so much of this computing amounts to data entry being performed for corporations in exchange for access to their services. How many of us think of our messaging practices as ‘doing data entry work for Facebook’, and by extension the NSA? Facebook’s business model is based on a wager here: that we will continue to perform the data entry, while never experiencing this as performing labour for a corporation (or really caring even if we do), but rather as simply interacting with the people we ‘like’. The NSA’s surveillance model is based upon a second order wager of sorts: that not only will we continue to perform the data entry work without experiencing it as producing the elements of value and profit for a corporation, but that we will never enquire how that data is being used, or by whom, nor will we think of it as performing data entry for the NSA. We will not know if we are being surveilled, not as we perform our data entry, nor 10 afterwards, if our inscriptions are found to contain suspicious patterns. Pervasive computing using a smartphone according to the double wager always contains the potentiality for unobtrusive intrusion. Everyday smartphone use in this assemblage is ambient surveillance, both in the moment, and in retrospect. As well as being powerful, handheld, mobile computers that involve us in ambient surveillance, smartphones, following Christian Licoppe, are notification devices that are designed-to-occur. They summon subjects to respond to a huge number of requests, and the momentum generated through these summons is, if you will, what makes the world go round. This world precedes the contemporary human subject: the world of the employee, student, daughter or friend is a world which we all must respond to our summons, and the smartphone is becoming the de facto device through which the summons appears. This goes toward explaining why it is that smartphones have become so pervasive so quickly18in the affluent West. Among other reasons, smartphones have been enthusiastically inserted in these actant networks because of intense social pressure from human actants. For increasing numbers of these globally diffused groups and classes of people, you cannot not have a phone; unless you are an eminent old technology theorist like Paul Virilio – who famously refuses to have a mobile phone of any kind – it is very difficult to choose not to choose. Sherry Turkle’s recent research in Alone Together shows clearly that (affluent Western) parents make their children carry them for their own safety, just as bosses expect their employees to have 11 them – and have them within earshot and arm’s reach, at all times. Being within reach of a phone, and being flexibly available to respond promptly to any and all notifications that arrive through it – in a way that only doctors and drug dealers were available in the early 90s of the rich West, via pagers – has become an absolute social responsibility for all, whose nonnegotiability must nevertheless somehow be negotiated. The culturally normal social pressure to be reachable to negotiate timely responses via a mobile phone that is increasingly a smartphone tells us something important about contemporary affluent capitalist human centers of attention. Most people enmeshed in these assemblages are too busy coping with their summons to worry about the global implications of smartphonebased surveillance. The combined power of the summons and social pressure offer two further reasons why people are unwilling or unable to stop using their phones. Firstly, most people so enmeshed cannot stop using their smartphones. Smartphone use is a matter of obligation to friends, family and work19. Secondly, smartphone users can’t or don’t stop, in spite of whatever misgivings or ambivalence they may have20. This is because, having become the intermediary that interfaces between the many spheres of people’s lives, smartphones are also that which is used to cope with the coping. Smartphones are that through which the heavy summons to work keeps arriving, but they’re also that through which many people choose to lighten the load of the work summons – by gossiping and bitching about it. Christian Licoppe’s empirical research around this conjuncture helps us zoom in on subjective centers of smartphone attention with greater precision. 12 Licoppe’s research demonstrates that people recover agency in these pressurized contexts by enacting a very complex intersubjective patterning around the negotiation of being available to communicate. This is one key place where the conscious work of coping takes place. Cellular phones, ‘dumb’ and smart alike, offer ways and means of coping by enabling human actants to negotiate their availability or make others available to them. In this context, Licoppe argues, people learn ways to cope, playing within the protocols, but between the rules. This inter-action materializes a key tension.21 The tension is in the attentional involvement the phrasing and timing of a communicated response; the involvements are in our relationships; and our relationships, work and play, are profoundly shaped by the anxiety of having to do things and the subjective necessity of arranging this in such a way that we can keep coping. In the background is, of course, work under capitalism, but in the foreground there we are with the phone in our hand – thus these negotiated moments of coping are key points where the work takes place, again and again. In their various functions as part of pervasive computing, smartphones are also about augmentation22: and this speaks to their subtlety, their subtle, ongoing additions to our lives. As mentioned, the smartphone is a computer liberated from the functions, tasks, settings and dispositions that computing was formerly paradigmatically understood to involve. This also means that the smartphone can accompany a large and increasing number of everyday human activities that it adds to by augmenting. That is: providing information and guidance, keeping records – storing, transmitting, processing 13 things, while we pay attention to what we’re typing, to ‘the content of content’. One means of facilitating this augmentation is through the use of an app. Aside from the institution of the touchscreen mentioned above, one of Apple’s other paradigm-shifting innovations here was in facilitating the shift toward fast, searchable app stores. This revolutionized phone use by transforming the smartphone into a single-interface life augmentation device that can solve any number of problems through the quick, effortless, cheap purchase of an app: ‘there’s an app for that’, as the phrase goes. As Charles Arthur reports, this encouraged the use of larger quantities and different forms of data, not just text messaging, within what was mobile telephony. This transformed the mobile telephone market, “where mobile internet connectivity had previously been parceled in per-megabyte allocations, to screens with tiny displays”23, ‘data’ became a saleable commodity, driven by insatiable consumer demand. This transformation, along with increasing processing speed and screen real estate, further opened the market for apps. More data and speed, more apps; more apps, more need for data and speed. Augmentation has fed a recursive loop of data supply and data demand – all of which, barring government imposed limits on their data collection practice, offers an ever richer data set to NSA. This brings us to its other specificity: the interface, and how it’s used both to bring the face close and keep it at a distance. My interpretation of findings from Licoppe and Turkle’s research indicates that smartphone use can be read as affording many users a sense of safety by 14 securing a sense of effective control: used in this way, the smartphone becomes a control interface24. To follow Turkle a little further, one of the key patterns within this general culture of use is that many people use their smartphones to ensure that only some people and things can get close, while using it as a way of staying in touch – at a distance determined by the controller. The control that interests individual users most is the control of social distance: the smartphone allows some to get very close, while keeping others as distant as possible, or only as close as is absolutely necessary. Many of these distances are smartphone generated, such as the location-aware gay dating and cruising app GRINDR25, which makes visible a heretofore invisible proximate landscape of sexual desire which is both local and between strangers. GRINDR is a way of using smartphones to make globally mobile sexual desire local. These paradoxical relations of intimate distance central to our smartphonemediated social lives are aptly captured by Turkle’s central phrase and title ‘alone together’. To say ‘alone together’ suggests an interface as both a connection and a gap, and we should add this controlling notion of interfacing to the notions of pervasive computing and augmentation just developed. For those involved in this culture of control, the interface becomes a separation that keeps things together. As Peter Sloterdijk notes (and we should certainly think of Facebook here): It is no coincidence that the most distinctive new place in the innovated medial world is the interface, which no longer refers to the space of 15 encounter between faces, but rather the contact point between the face and the non-face, or between two non-faces26. This distinctive new place is, moreover, a control interface that needn’t be about faces at all anymore, and might even increasingly be about actively defacing face-to-face intimacy in preference for the placid apparent controllability of the non-faced Gorilla Glass™ tactile graphical user interface. If power relations consist in the conduct of conduct (to paraphrase Foucault), then pervasive computing through smartphone control interfaces is surely one increasingly important ‘contact point’ where that conduct is conducted. In this section I’ve suggested that this conduct is conducted here for a number of reasons, key among which is re-establishing relational agency over social distance. These are subjective practices related to a certain culture of use. Yet regardless of how we subjectively experience or practice this interfacing, objectively it is currently a part of Raytheon’s business model and the NSA’s surveillance model. But how does this person-specific, locational, relational, dynamic disclosure of and by smartphones and their users in these actant networks become the kind of resource that makes the NSA’s methods “the easiest most efficient and most valuable way”27 to achieve surveillant ends? This can be seen clearly by looking at surveillant smartphone assemblages’ entanglement with big data. surveillant smartphone assemblages’ entanglement with big data Surveillance is a form of attention to data. With mid-century modern forms of surveillance (cold war espionage) good data was difficult to obtain, extremely 16 dangerous to transmit, and often required meticulous decryption if and when it was finally recovered. With RIOT we can see within the space of a few minutes how the smartphone’s surveillant interaction with big data means, first of all, that information about a subject of interest is no longer a scarce resource. Surveillance here – making good on that data by transforming it into legible information – becomes a question of access, retrieval, and making easily intelligible sense of a hyperabundant resource. It also means turning a vast quantity of data into instantly visualizable, easily legible, quality intel, which requires computer power, smart coding, and creatively solving many design problems, including data visualization. Yet RIOT’s skimming of a mass of publicly available data indicates a further transformation engendered by pervasive smartphone use. Here, data is a hyperabundant resource that is easy and legal to obtain, aggregate, and transform into a saleable commodity. Surveillance in the era of big data and smartphones already looks more like routine software development than espionage, more geek than spook. This semblance of technical, defensibly legal surveillant skimming is itself generative. Big data and smartphones engender a dynamic of reciprocal ease that feeds recursive increases in data input and data-based surveillance. As analyzed above through augmentation, the smartphone has lowered the investment, cost, and effort of the increasing number of actions it enables for the user, to such an extent that it has actually transformed the mobile phone market into being about providing cheap, abundant data reliably accessible at high speeds, while generating a new, multibillion dollar market for apps. The existence of cheap data, its high speed delivery and beautiful, near-instant presentation and the prevalence of an enormous number of high-quality, 17 useful apps feeds the recursive development of big data, simply because it makes it ever more compelling to use a smartphone for almost everything. To the extent that it’s accessible to the automated datamining analytics and human analysts of the NSA, this means that a rich source of constantly updated, highly detailed ostensibly public data has become available for a number of surveillant purposes limited only by the resources and creativity of the cybersecurity industrial complex. Data only becomes information for human purposes to the extent that it is rendered useful, readable, communicable. Big data is only a resource because it is capable of becoming decrypted, legible information at various points in a communication network, and communication networks only exist because there are faces and/or non-faces ‘on the other end’ (thus far). Dwelling on the technology in the smartphone, between smartphones, as part-and-parcel of what they do, shows that in practice it’s impossible to separate what it is from what it does and who’s using it: it’s entanglement all the way down, all the way out. That is to say, data’s intelligibility as good information for surveillant purposes rests upon seeing the functional relation between parts of a greater entanglement, and the implications and uses thereof. Government agents are applying inductive reasoning and reflexive understanding to the smartphone and using it socially according to culturally-agreed surveillant purposes or ends. With this in mind, we have to consider the making of the international through surveillant smartphone assemblages: in order for there to be surveillant attention such as has been discussed so far, there has to be 18 reflexive understanding that a global network exists and can be used in this way. Smartphone-based surveillance in its various applications, through its many tools, all manifest ways of imagining the Internet and social relations. They are an implemented social theory of control – and it works. The fact that RIOT exists and that there is a lucrative government market for it tells us, moreover, that this is a reflexive understanding firmly in possession of a large number of agents working in the name of states such as the United States and its allies. We may not think of our normal Internet and smartphone use being about surveillance, but increasingly large numbers of state-attached actors already do. That Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, shows us that the international of old still matters greatly, but in the light of what Snowden has disclosed, it matters with a difference that makes a difference to the international. Snowden’s living body is safe in Russia, but Snowden’s disclosures teach us that no one connected to the Internet is out of reach of the NSA, and everyone, anywhere with a smartphone is capable of being tracked and traced. To the extent that we become conscious of this and it shapes our conduct in any way, this means we are all being governed by the USA as the NSA. Consider also Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ‘Hackberry’ experience. Notwithstanding its usual functions and the datatrail left by her everyday smartphone use, Merkel’s Blackberry – a system marketed as being immune from normal smartphone surveillant attention – was deliberately designed and intentionally manufactured with exploits that made it a bugging device28. According to the NSA’s own guidelines, these actions must have been approved by the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General. 19 More recent disclosures show “that the Obama administration obtained a topsecret court order specifically permitting it to monitor communications related to Germany”29. This opens profound questions about the surveillant use of the smartphone in contemporary international relations in the conventional understanding of the term, especially as more recent revelations show that Merkel was one of over 122 world leaders targeted: on one list, Merkel’s name appears between Mali’s Amadou Toumani Toure and Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad30. As it involves reflexive understanding of the surveillant purposes of smartphones by high-level government employees, it also renders suspect the meaning of conventional definitions of the international. Angela Merkel’s ‘Hackberry’ is an instance of the international as a problem of the global system of society seen within the global system of society. It is also about the use of the global system of society by US interests in full knowledge that this is what the international now means. To be sure, surveillant attention through smartphones is not the only conception or practice of the international being practiced globally, but it is remaking it in its form. It is the application of a new understanding to old practices that is transforming the form, substance and meaning of both, while raising profound questions about the form sovereignty and liberal democracy being professed and practiced in the contemporary USA. Consider, finally, the assassination of ‘militants’, ‘terrorists’, or people otherwise identified as killable categories of person by the United States, dealt with according to the Disposition Matrix. Throughout the Global War on Terror, a key distinction that remained intact – for all its expedient blurring – from the US side was the distinction between citizens and foreigners. This 20 distinction was consequential for many detained, tortured and killed by the United States who – arguably – would not have been so treated had they been US citizens. The application of many GWOT techniques to Chelsea Manning perhaps shows that the US now only extends the privileges of citizenship to those who behave in US interests. As for the Disposition Matrix, if the suspect is abroad, not coming back, cannot be arrested by a reliable government, is important enough to warrant action overseas, is an operational leader, and is deemed to present an imminent threat to the US, then he or she can be targeted with lethal force. There is nothing in the Disposition Matrix about citizenship, only location. This is its first question: where is the suspect located31? Where this question becomes a key question for the smartphone’s entanglement in surveillance is that, much more than earlier iterations of mobile phones, the smartphone gives precise, ongoing locational data. The means that the only rational strategic response within a terrorist organization that does not wish to have its members assassinated is the complete non-use of the smartphone, while it also means that the smartphone is, in effect, a bug, a tracker, and a great improvement on earlier missile guidance technologies, all rolled in to one – not least of all because the target fits themselves, carries the beacon without having it stuck to them, and pays for doing so. the effects of surveillant smartphone assemblages: spectacle and control If smartphones can be thought of as a key conduit for the conduct of conduct, then understanding their characteristic power relations means rendering intelligible the predictable broader effects of their use; what their use does. In other words, what might characterize the politics and power relations of a 21 possible world in which pervasive smartphone use becomes ubiquitous , and which surveillant attention thereof by NSA is accepted as normal, or unstoppable, or even acceptable? In what follows I develop these possibilities, always necessarily speculative, as spectacle and control. Deleuze’s famous conception of control power32 re-reads Foucault’s account of panopticism33 in order to apprehend an emergent post-panoptic dispositif. The operability of control power is, first and foremost, about a reflexive relation to networks and networking, as well as a know-how that harnesses this understanding to shape the field of action of others.34 This accords well with the way in which the surveillant purposes of smartphone use interface with big data, as explored in the previous section. In every way control power is about positively harnessing networking by letting agents connect, fostering conditions of connecting, and promoting mobile connection and active collaboration as a normative way of being. Where discipline was about keeping the grid locked down, control is about letting the network free. Control is not an intentional agent here. Rather, smartphones provide technical affordances that enable effective control, while their imminent ubiquity means that effective control is, as it were, now approaching total network coverage. A fundamental insight I take from Postscript is that a central political question of our time is not “who are you?” but “where are you”? Control power is a know-where, and pervasive computing using smartphones has allowed this topology of power/knowledge to arrive in a workable form. As Deleuze wrote, “[In] the conception of a control mechanism, giving the 22 position of any element within an open environment at any given instant... what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation.”35 At the time of writing, Deleuze couched these assertions as speculative, remonstrating that this conception “it is not necessarily one of science fiction.”36 For us, the point is a fact of average, everyday life with the smartphone, even if, as explored, much of this escapes human possibilities of perception and habits of attention. Geolocation, most commonly used at the time of writing in conjunction with maps and tagged photos, means that an increasing number of agencies have near-instant access to a rich relational topography of moments, places, and interactions. Smartphones don't just describe where they are because they are networked (though this is part of it: IP addresses, cell tower triangulation), but they do so with an extremely high level of precision because of GPS, accelerometers etc,. It is this dynamic locational data that allows RIOT to so accurately map habitual movement and predict future behaviour, and this is predicated on the ubiquity of GPS and triangulation technology in smartphones, and their use in conjunction with maps, photo apps, and certain kinds of social networking apps. The majority of smartphone users, thus far, use location services37, and do so for an increasing number of functions: Foursquare, to give one example, relies on a small but growing and apparently influential market of people willing to disclose their location to their social network38. This is not a matter of accident or a lack of consumer awareness, it is, rather, a feature built into smartphones that has produced an industry coding, designing and marketing apps that some consumers are very happy to pay for and use on an everyday basis. Is 23 control something that repels people, or attracts them39? Or, perhaps: which people are so attracted to control, and why do these groups matter to marketing? The pervasion of this uptake has the following power effects. That which is trackable and traceable is controllable, to the extent that it is reachable. This means that pervasive mobile computing through smartphones is enabling an effective response to the “where are you?” question. Tagging and tracking is how control is effectuated; it is now a normal way in which mobility is transformed into secured circulation. The Disposition Matrix is one practical governmental application of this power of know where. Control does things, it achieves conditions (not least of all itself): and it does them lightly, easily, effortlessly. It is a question of reducing impedance to effect a universal modulation. Control is also non-coercive in that it enables various agents to know subjects of interest without breaking (into) anything or anyone. In this sense control power is about modulating circulation to ensure it continues safely and softly on its accumulative, consumptive path. This, in turn, is effective in a more diffuse sense, because it is feeding and shaping a re-assembly of the relations between power, knowledge and the body. Control allows actions and functions of the body to be engaged in virtually unimpeded (unlike discipline); and this also facilitates a partial realization of the fantasy of the body’s liberation from its own human limits (an escape from discipline and abjection). This is – yet another – fantasy of control. It is also fundamentally about pain. 24 Just as it enables control to become effective, the smartphone takes the pain out of being human by taking discipline into itself. Humans have always outsourced discipline to their favoured nonhuman objects: outsourcing hardness to our hammers, sharpness to our knives, and the effort required to plough to the plough horse. In a sense the smartphone is one continuation of a whole trajectory of prosthetic technologies. What’s specific about it is the way it functions as a memory prosthesis: as far as control power is concerned, the smartphone is a mnemonic device, both for the end user holding her phone and, as it turns out, for the NSA. Remembering is a pain, it requires effort, it fails. The smartphone is eminently capable of sparing its users this pain of remembering, and provided our data entry practice is sensible and sensical (and we have the appropriate apps to enter that data into), users can relax and just follow the smartphone’s instructions, messages, reminders (or for that matter tag and follow a subject of interest, whether friend or foe). The fact that we still have to conduct data entry and rendezvous in realtime in timespace may be one aspect of why this feels stressful to many people. But in a Marxian spirit, consider what this entanglement does to the working day. The discipline of the smartphone does not fade over the course of the day; it remains resolutely attentive, not bored, and comprehensively accurate and complete in its reports, until its battery dies. If it’s on, it works, and if it works, it totally works – so unlike the human who carries it. What we have to consider here is how habitual involvement in the smartphone assemblage is transforming the meaning and value of attention, and how this contributes to control effects. 25 Human attention is an economic relation, a scarce resource in societies oriented toward perpetual increases in GDP growth. Here, the netting of individual attention for capitalism and its tethering to networks of distribution and consumption is a key potential for the capture of profit. Attention is the key value that advertising and marketing seeks to attract and shape, and it is difficult to get people’s attention, and even harder to keep it. The stream also has to constantly renew itself, because the novelty wears off. Content production, in Paul Leslie Thiele’s phrasing, routinizes novelty40, which devalues novelty itself as it becomes expected, demanded, sooner, more, and for free. Human attention also tends to dissipate; retaining it over time becomes increasingly difficult. Smartphones continually solicit human attention, and they are also good at holding all-too-fickle human attention by allowing it to divide between several tasks, each of which, being the bearer of continual notifications, summons the subject again and again to look and respond.41 It matters profoundly who and what smartphones enable us to pay attention to. Yet for the purposes of maintaining accumulative circulation, the content of content is objectively indifferent – content is merely a matter of subjective interest. What counts is where you click through. The user may be profoundly invested in the notion that their chosen content is positively contributing to making them who they are, an individual unlike others. Fresh content refreshes the individual’s sense of herself as uniquely interested and interesting, and indeed, Google’s business model is predicated on generating meaningful, marketable patterns from the big data this produces. However, from a systemic point of view, what or whether we are watching, playing, 26 working or communicating with does not matter as much as that the users keep using, as long as we remain a society of content consumers. With Jonathan Crary’s interpretation of Debord, I want to call this aspect of the smartphone assemblage spectacle. 42 Here, spectacle would be the generic relation of separation maintained by our attention to the smartphone, a relation that contributes to the maintenance of accumulative circulation. Crary’s work on this set of critical theoretical connections gives us a novel way to think about spectacle and control together. Spectacle is the generic social relation of separation engendered by this mobile architecture, and control is the power-effect generated. Spectacle is not primarily concerned with a looking at images but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. In this way attention becomes key to the operation of noncoercive forms of power.43 Spectacle and control: light, mobile, separated, alone together. Turkle aptly sums up what may become of everyday lives involved in this assemblage: “[w]e fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream. Busy to the point of depletion, we make a new Faustian bargain. It goes something like this: if we are left alone when we make contact, we can handle being together”44. 27 A critical theory of the smartphone has to dwell upon the fundamentally paradoxical, thoroughly ambivalent outcome of all this. The smartphone enables many novel, useful, fascinating connections, by capturing human attention and tethering it to networks of associates who seek, intentionally, to leverage that attention for profit – and the constitution of this network has also enabled the generalization of a form of surveillant attention that achieves spectacle and control in a way more effective than previous governmental attempts here. It’s true we nominate our apps, select our settings, and can disagree to the terms and conditions, but the common denominators of control and spectacle apply societally regardless. Moreover they are conditions that require us to think differently, because they are nonhuman, trans individual, infrastructural, and systemically integral, all at once. Apprehending the many intelligible aspects of this assemblage together really shows us is how something that feels so light and free can also be a form of domination. What this analysis of the smartphone has pinpointed is two cultures of control. The first of these is a subjective, individual culture of control in which the smartphone is used to summon others and regulate social distance according to a user’s needs, desires and anxieties. The second of these is an object-oriented open system of control that uses the data generated by individuals in order to know, govern and treat them as suspicious objects that can be tagged, tracked, followed, found suspicious, and in some locations, for certain persons, once certain conditions have been met, be killed. For individuals and systems alike, the smartphone is a valuable, cherished device that enables us to find and treat one another according to our needs, desires and anxieties. It is a device in which the other 28 is transformed from a stranger back into a subject or object of interest based upon what their retrievable, transmissable, computer-archived transcriptions say about who they really are, where they are now, who they know, where they might be, and what they intend to do to us. This tells us something interesting about who we are to ourselves and each other, what we value, and the worlds of ambient surveillance in which we now live. This may seem like a dystopian picture. To the future reader, what I want to note by way of conclusion is that, at the time of writing, my distinct impression is that most people I talk to are stubbornly unworried about this. Few people are sufficiently concerned about the mass surveillance disclosures so as to cease using their smartphones, or even modify their habitual use. Smartphones do elicit moments of reflexive worry, but they also solicit hours of seemingly unworried immersed attention as a matter of everyday life. Where this will lead, not even our smartphones can tell us yet. 1 As of 2011 Raytheon are the world’s fifth-largest arms producing company. See: http://www.sipri.org/publications (accessed 30 June, 2014). 2 Ryan Gallagher, “Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm”, guardian.co.uk, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence (accessed 29 March, 2013). 3 “Edward Snowden, World News”, guardian.co.uk, http://www.theguardian.com/world/edward-snowden (accessed 24 August, 2013). 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_mass_surveillance_disclosures 5 I use the term ‘NSA’ here more broadly than strictly to refer not only to that agency but the whole project of planetary ambient surveillance, taking in GCHQ, the Five Eyes, and more diffusely all those directly and indirectly conspiring, colluding, cooperating or otherwise working with NSA – including, in circular fashion, all smartphone users. Throughout the piece NSA is used in a tonally sharp way to remind readers about involvements and implications which, as ambient surveillance, tend to keep slipping into the background. 6 “Smartphone Users Worldwide Will Total 1.75 Billion in 2014”, http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Smartphone-UsersWorldwide-Will-Total-175-Billion-2014/1010536, (accessed 30 June, 2014). 7 Charles Arthur, “Think smartphones are ubiquitous now? Just wait a few years”, guardian.co.uk, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/27/smartphones-iphone-mobile-market, (accessed 30 June, 2014). 8 cf. Robinson Meyer, “Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment”, www.theatlantic.com, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulationexperiment/373648/ (accessed 30 June, 2014). 29 9 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Globalization or World society: How to conceive of modern society?, International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 7:1, 1997, 67. 10 Ewen MacAskill, Putin calls internet a 'CIA project' renewing fears of web breakup, guardian.co.uk, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/24/vladimir-putin-web-breakup-internet-cia, (accessed 30 June, 2014). 11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarie and E. Robinson. Blackwell, 1962. 12 The crucial importance of this was impressed upon Glen Greenwald by Edward Snowden in their initial correspondence. See Glen Greenwald, Nowhere to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the Surveillance State, London, Penguin, 2014. 13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine’, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, 2004, 440. 14 Benjamin H Bratton, ‘iPhone City’, Architectural Design, 79:4, July-August 2009, 90-97. 15 Alexander Galloway, ‘Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city’, Cultural Studies, 18:2, 2004, 384 385. 16 cf Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford University Press, 2000 and Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, University of Michigan Press, 1995 for two explorations of the centrality of the preposition to understanding relations. 17 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarie and E. Robinson. Blackwell, 1962, 97. 18 cf. Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘How Australia uses the Internet’, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Features~How%20Australia%20access es%20and%20uses%20the%20Internet~175 (accessed 25 August, 2013). 19 On the centrality of obligation, as opposed to naïve accounts of ‘freedom’, as a prompt to social presence, I am indebted to the insights of John Urry. Cf. John Urry, Mobilities, Polity, London, 2007. 20 Turkle’s work uncovers significant amounts of ambivalence, as well as specific and organised forms of resistance, especially among the young, who are notionally the white middle class ‘kids these days’ ‘digital natives’ supposedly embracing these technologies with the most enthusiasm and the least circumspection. 21 Licoppe, Summons..., 289. 22 Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, ‘Software, objects, and home space’, Environment and Planning: A, 41, 1344-1365 23 Arthur, ‘Think smartphones…’ 24 . Smartphones need not be this, they could be so many other things – and to some people they are. It is a question of a culture of use. Why and how this culture emerged is beyond the purview of this small contribution. 25 cf. Courtney Blackwell, Jeremy Birnholtz and Charles Abbott, ‘Seeing and being seen: Co-situation and impression formation using Grindr, a location-aware gay dating app’, New Media Society, published online 7 February 2014 26 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres Volume One: Bubbles – Microspherology, semiotext(e), 2011, 190. 27 Edward Snowden’s wording. See: Lara Poitras and Gleen Greenwald, ‘NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' – video’, guardian.co.uk, http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video, (accessed 30 June, 2014). 28 cf. ‘Privacy Scandal: NSA Can Spy on Smart Phone Data’, www.spiegel.de, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/privacy-scandal-nsa-can-spy-on-smart-phone-data-a-920971.html (accessed 30 June, 2014). 29 Ryan Gallagher, ‘Der Spiegel: NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders’, The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/29/der-spiegel-nsa-ghcq-hacked-german-companies-put-merkel-list-122targeted-leaders/ (accessed 30 June, 2014). 30 Gallagher… 31 The Atlantic has visualized the Disposition Matrix on its website. See: ‘How Obama Decides Your Fate If He Thinks You're a Terrorist’, www.theatlantic.com, http://www.theatlantic.com/misc/disposition-matrix/, (accessed 30 June, 2014). 32 Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October, 59, Winter 1992, 3-7. 33 Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Penguin, London, 1975, 195-228. 34 Foucault, The Subject and Power’, 789-80. 35 Deleuze, Postscript..., 7. 36 Deleuze, Postscript..., 7. 37 cf. Kathryn Zickuhr, ‘Location-Based Services’, Pew Research Internet Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/12/location-based-services/ (accessed 30 June, 2014). 38 Ki Mae Heussner, ‘Why Geolocation App Users Matter to Marketers, wwww.adweek.com, http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/why-geolocation-app-users-matter-marketers-136950 (accessed 30 June, 2014). 39 Again, this raises the political question of a specific contemporary culture of use, which is contingent, and should be further analyzed and compared to the many other possible worlds of smartphone-enabled sociality. 40 Leslie Paul Thiele, ‘Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology’, Polity, 29:4, 1997, 489-517. 41 Christian Licoppe ‘“The Crisis of the Summons”: A Transformation in the Pragmatics of “Notifications”, from Phone Rings to Instant Messaging, The Information Society: an International Journal, 26:4, 2010, 288-302. 42 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, MIT Press, 1999. 43 Crary, Suspensions..., 74-75. 44 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, 2011, 203. 30