Deterritorial Investigations Unit

“HITO STEYERL. For me the experience of working with the archive was very limited. I was looking for a very simple example, and I only ended up writing about a single image that was published on the Intercept. It’s a single frame of scrambled video imagery, and I tried to connect that with some of the metaphors that the analysts themselves use to describe the job they are doing in SIGINT Today, published on the Intercept.

I used a couple of their metaphors, namely, the “sea of data” they described–which you also used, Kate, in your essay for the Whitney–to try to think through the sinking feeling of basically being surrounded by this data.

KATE CRAWFORD. What I loved–going back to our panel at the Whitney and thinking about your “Sea of Data” piece–is that we both hit on these singular images about the limits of knowing. For you it was that grainy capture of video. For me, back when I was writing for the New Inquiry in 2014, I was fixated on this image, which had been redacted, that simply says, “What can we tell?” and it’s effectively a blank space. It has that double meaning that you and I have both found very intriguing: the idea that they could tell and see everything, but also that there are domains where they can tell and see nothing. There are these hard limits that are reached in the epistemology of “Collect it all” where we reach a breakdown of meaning, a profusion and granularization of information to the point of being incomprehensible, of being in an ocean of potential interpretations and predictions. Once correlations become infinite, it’s difficult for them to remain moored in any kind of sense of the real. And it’s interesting how, for both of us, that presents a counter-narrative to the current discourse of the all-seeing, all-knowing state apparatus. That apparatus is actually struggling with its own profusion of data and prediction. We know that there are these black holes, these sort of moments of irrationality, and moments of information collapse.

HITO STEYERL. Blind spy”
rest @ http://thenewinquiry.com/features/data-streams/

View story at Medium.com

“Sarah Jaffe speaks with Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation Jackson, a cooperative economic project in Jackson, Mississippi. “The overall aim and intent is to create a vibrant social solidarity economy in Jackson and, more thoroughly, to use that to transform the local political economy of Jackson and the State of Mississippi,” Akuno said. In this interview Akuno shares more about Cooperation Jackson’s efforts to take over Mississippi’s political economy and move it in a more radical direction.”
http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/

http://www.ttbook.org/book/kicked-out-america
so it begins…
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/his-very-first-hour-office-trump-moved-screw-low-income-homeowners

“In 1989, Henri Lefebvre said that the right to the city is nothing more than a “revolutionary conception of citizenship.” This ideal of citizenship lies inside and beyond any passport rubber-stamped by an institution of a nation-state. It’s a citizenship involving a more spectral and clandestine passport, expressive of a citizenry yet to assert itself, yet to fly its flag. I will call this passport a SHADOW PASSPORT, the identity documents and travel papers of a SHADOW CITIZENRY. Shadow citizens are a minority that is increasingly a majority, a new majority: if anything, shadows citizens are the new norm, the new global default position. They’re the periphery in the core, the core of the periphery. So many people have been pushed off-limits that it’s extended the limit of limits, created an even larger social space for the concept of citizenship, for a new citizenship yet to be made sovereign.”