Reflection — Week 13
This week, we delved into three forms of power that have emerged throughout our history and the role that technology plays in shaping these different power structures. We first examined the power of Necropolitics, or sovereignty, a form of power that determines the vulnerability of certain communities and abilities to establish exceptions through control over punishment and death, which was discussed by scholars such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agnmben, and Archille Mbember. We moved on to the study of biopower, or disciplinary power through the views of researchers like Michel Foucault, who believed that disciplinary power constrains our freedom by regulating social practices of our bodies or behaviors. Lastly, we explored the concept of societies of control proposed by philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who argued that technology has become a form of media for reinforcing the power of whoever has control over our information in today’s society.
The idea of societies of control is particularly relevant to us with the rise of technology, such as smartphones and social media. Although these technological advancements offer us great convenience and freedom, they have also posed a form of control over our physical and social lives in an invisible manner.
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One of the key characteristics of societies of control is surveillance and profiling through the use of analytical tools like AI. I find it fascinating how some apps downplay the negative impacts of such characteristics by subconsciously integrating behavioral profiling as an essential part of our social lives, causing us to willingly sacrifice control of our own data. An example that came into my mind was the annual music preference profile provided by music apps like Spotify, which summarizes our individual music listening habits in the past year. As a former user of Spotify, I found this feature to be both engaging and concerning. Each year, Spotify creates a profile of our music listening behaviors, detailing our patterns such as the number of hours we have listened to music and the types of music we have been listening to. This profile is created by collecting and analyzing our app data and automatically categorizing us into a specific type of music listener based on the machine’s logic.
As a user of many mobile apps, I wonder if it is possible for someone in our society today to fully escape the control of the tech companies behind them without sacrificing the convenience and efficiency that technology has brought us? I agree with the video’s discussion of Deleuze’s argument that our society now has become more machine-like and it controls us by regulating our access to information, which drastically shapes our lifestyles and limits our social capital within the capitalist system. In the use of music apps, we seem to enjoy their profiling by sharing the behavioral analysis of our media use with our friends on social media, which provides us with a form of social recognition that reflects in our social identity. It seems like we have no choice but to surrender control to those who hold power over our data and shape our future.
Nevertheless, as I am transitioning into a career as a UX designer, I can’t say that I am completely against the idea of collecting user data to design an effective user experience that is tailored to individual behavioral patterns. In fact, I have been learning more about the analytical technologies behind these features such as AI from the deep learning class I am taking this semester. However, the more I learn about AI, the more I recognize its power to transform our social lives and the actions we need to take as humans to “steer” its applications. As we UX designers apply technology to invade users’ privacy in the name of design, we should also keep in mind that our privacy could be controlled in turn. Significant changes to the current capitalist system could be a distant goal, but we as creative designers should try to minimize those invisible control over others by designing critically with technology.
