Monthly Archives: May 2014

Bruno Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence AIME

The ambitious project of an ethnology of the Moderns that has previously been known as Actor-Network Theory has entered a new phase. The industrious ANT has ceased following the actors through the tedious empirical underbrush and is now AIME-ing high. If not for the stars then at least for a vantage point from which the comparative anthropologist is able to describe the Moderns in such a way that they can find themselves in the description as well as permitting the pre-moderns, non-moderns, and anti-moderns to discover mutual concerns. The purpose is to bring the battling parties in the War of the Worlds, the Clash of Civilizations back to the negotiating table with some hope of success. This is what Gaia wants, global cooperative action on the basis of mutual understanding. There is otherwise no chance of healing the Earth’s wounds and overcoming the ecological threat.

Under the title of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME www.modesofexistence.org) Latour offers an interpretation of Modernity in which the apologetic universalism of Enlightenment, Critique, Science, Technology, Progress, and Democracy that has left the post-colonial world alienated, angry, and without a vision for the future is replaced by a revised and more diplomatic interpretation of Modernity. Instead of demanding the non-moderns to choose between science or superstition, civilization or barbarism, the Moderns – so Latour’s proposal – have reached a self-understanding in which “beings” of all sorts and not merely subjects and objects can inhabit the world. Ontological pluralism now lends cultural pluralism a helping hand. There are many different kinds of beings, not just matter and minds, but beings with strange names like REF, REP, REL, MET, HAB, FIC, TEC, NET, PRE, ORG, LAW, POL, DC, …, 15 in all at present with the prospect of more, since the AIME project is “open source,” that is, all are invited to BYOB (bring your own beings).

If you have become fed up and impatient with post-modern critique, systems theory, and even the fashionable talk about networks, and if you had been wondering Where does it go from here?, What is the next big thing in philosophy?, then this is it. There is no more daring, more novel, more rewarding enterprise at this juncture in the realm of thought than the inquiry into modes of existence. Indeed, there is room for everyone!

Continue reading →

Share

Is Informational Privacy a Matter of Contextual Integrity?

Leave a reply

It is no secret that theories of informational privacy based on defining privacy as restricting access to information or maintaining control over information are losing credibility. This is because they think of information as a kind of thing that can be locked up in a safe place, whose ownership can be clearly ascertained, and whose control is possible. These are assumptions typical of an industrial society based on personal property rights and markets of exchange. The digital revolution has made many of these assumptions obsolete. Information is not a thing, there is no “place” where information can be locked up, and ownership as well as control is vague and contestable. Among those thinkers searching for new interpretations of privacy Helen Nissenbaum (Privacy in Context – Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, Stanford University Press, 2010) has elaborated a theory basing privacy on what she calls “contextual integrity.” “What people care most about is not simply restricting the flow of information but ensuring that it flows appropriately…” (2). Consequently, when we talk about a right to privacy, we are talking about a right to “appropriate flow” of information and not as is often assumed about a right to secrecy or to absolute control of personal data.

Legal practice has in fact relied more on what people expect than on abstract definitions of privacy. Being left alone, as Warren and Brandeis described privacy, is a matter of reasonable expectations within a certain social situation. Such a situation Nissenbaum calls a “context.” Society is made up of many different contexts, such as education, health care, politics, business, family, etc. In every context there are norms and rules that govern the flow of information. When functioning properly, these “informational norms” “define and sustain essential activities and key relationships and interests, protect people and groups against harm, and balance the distribution of power” (3). When people feel that their privacy has been violated, it is always with reference not to abstract concepts of access and control, but to the informational norms governing the particular context in which they are acting. What privacy means varies from context to context.

Continue reading →

Share

The Ontological Interpretation of Privacy

Leave a reply

Luciano Floridi is one of the few philosophers of the digital age who radically reinterprets issues such as informational privacy on basis of an informational ontology (see The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy, in: Ethics and Informational Technology, 2006). Being is information. The world consists of information and not things or people. People do not possess their personal information, they are their personal information. Privacy therefore should not be understood as an issue of possession and control of data, but as a matter of personal integrity. Stealing and misusing personal data should not be compared to stealing and misusing someone’s possessions, for example, their automobile, but instead to kidnapping. My data is not the same as my auto, but rather much more like my body.

If information is a state of being and not a state of having, then what constitutes privacy? Floridi defines privacy in terms of the “ontological friction” regulating the flow of information in the “infoshpere.” The more friction blocking, disturbing, slowing down, and attenuating the flow of information, and the more effort it takes to bridge the gaps between information, the more privacy can be ascribed to information. Correspondingly, the less the flow of information is regulated, slowed down, hindered, the less this information can be considered private. Private and public are not different spaces, for example, the privacy of my home as opposed to public spaces like the shopping center or the train station. Digital media do not knock at the door and ask permission before entering. They are ubiquitous. Privacy is neither a space, nor a thing, but a state of being.

Continue reading →

Share

Privacy

Leave a reply

Nobody likes to be told what to do. And nobody wants to be intruded upon. These feelings make privacy something to be valued and something that should be protected by law. We are all convinced that in some way autonomy, self-determination, and personal integrity are linked to and depend upon privacy. This is why Warren and Brandeis in their influential Harvard Law Review article of 1890 argued that there should be a “right to privacy” which in their view amounted to “the right to be left alone.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (G.A. res. 217A III) extended this right to all human beings: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, not to attacks upon his honor and reputation.”

Both Warren and Brandeis and the UN knew that privacy was a tricky matter, a grey area, something that could not be easily defined. When it comes to taxation, military service, investigation of criminal acts, education, health care, financial credibility, and many many other social situations, whether we like it or not, we will be told what to do and we will be intruded upon; and no one can claim this amounts to a violation of their privacy. And if they do, then what counts before the law is whether or not an “expectation” of privacy can be considered “reasonable” and “legitimate.” Expectations of this sort vary from time to time, from culture to culture, and depend on many different factors. Above all, under today’s regime of Global, Mobile, Cloud, Apps, and Big Data most traditional expectations about privacy are obsolete and no longer based on the realities of the digital age.

Continue reading →

Share