What was our grade/class notes

[HEATHER.HATTON]

Here are my notes from yesterday's class:

4 PAPERS DUE BY THE 19TH?

No fluff. Don't say the same thing twice.

Cuban prison - the architecture is all the cells around facing a central tower.

Foucau paper - 1300 words

Starts his discussion w/a comparison btwn a leper colony and a plague-stricken town. Lepers kicked out of their villages get put into leper colonies - islands or caves where they interact only w/other lepers. It's an infectious skin disease that causes your skin to fall off and eventually death. Your body rots. You stink. There is no cure back then, now we have antibiotics. The leper colony was how they dealt w/leprosy. It was a serious problem. It's an old-fashioned disease.

Every single rare disease in the world has had an instance in New York.

Then there came the Black Plague. No one can ever have any idea how horrific and terrifying this was. 60-80% of every town and city you know die of a single disease. It was literally the zombie apocolypse for 300yrs, especially in 13-15th Centuries. Entire towns died out. Death and rotting corpses were everywhere. People were burned alive. This era is where death and gloom and the grim reaper and morbid imagery comes from. No one understood how this plague was spread. There was nothing they could do about it. Imagine the mindset of these people. They were always at the edge of death. How did they deal with it? Instead of a colony they came up w/a method of organizing and controlling people who potentially had the black plague to help them. Ultimately for the better, greater good.

Focau tells us how this was set up.

First you get Magistrates, appointed temporary rulers of the city, to enforce the quarantine that was put on the whole town or city. They lock the door. They do this because anyone could be infected, so they don't want anyone to get out. They're limited in what they can do and where they can go because there's a potential for them to get sick if they leave, or to spread it if they're infected.

Not only were the citizens under duress and regulated, but the people appointed were also crazed by the situation. Something had to be done or everyone was going to die.

The magistrates ruled and controlled town syndates - they walked around with sticks, checking on people stuck in their homes. Food and water were brought in for them. They couldn't leave their home. The Syndates would go into homes every morning and inspect for symptoms of the black plague. Boils then fevers then throwing up black bile.

Ring around the rosie is the first sign of infection. Pocket full of posies were for the smell. We all fall down means we all die. Doctors that walked around had giant beaks full of herbs to block the disease and smell.

Violence and intimidation were used for control.

This didn't work. Rodents carried the disease. Fleas on rodents carried the disease. It was spread by flea bites. It wasn't the people spreading the plague for the most part.

Make out the contrast between the town stricken by the plague and the ponooptocon. The ponoptocon is an invention for controlling people with an ever more efficient and cost effective way. Not alot of syndates and guns - that needed serious methods of control, violence, courts, people to enforce things, pay so they wouldn't turn on you, food for the housebound... If you have a whole society, you won't be able to control it in this way.

You wouldn't have the resources to put an entire town in prison.

Architectural wonder! Panoptocon. 'The All-seeing-eye" - There is one tower in the middle. There could be one guard in there, or no guard at all. The inmates assume that they're being watched at any given point in time. Who is their guard? Themselves. They guard themselves. Authority enforced by the idea of authority. They're afraid of the guard coming by and cracking their skulls so they stay in line by the threat. Most of these prisons are closed because the inmates would go insane but some still exist in the US.

Focau thinks this is an improvement in controlling large amounts of people that's ultimately good for them. The method of controll changed over time. Exile was originally the way they do it, then violence and direct control more or less up until recently, now the prisons are the best way to control people for cheap.

This is a generalizable model for the functioning of power. It's not just about architecture or particular prison cells. It can be applied across domains of human activity. We are now in panoptocons everywhere we go. School, streets, work, parks, etc. We don't spit on the pavement because we think we might be seen and get in trouble. It prevents crime and makes people behave in a better way.

Religion is the original panoptocon. It's a way where you can believe you're always being watched by an omnipotent God.

The idea of watching yourself and being your own guardian and your own kind of policeman is pretty oldschool.

Step 1

What are the similarities? What's in common? Ex: rectangular, solid... basic stuff works. Any 2 things. You can use the lowest level of abstraction for a good argument of similarity. Find specific stuff.

What are the differences?

Consecutive descriptions are not a comparison. List similarities and differences btwn panoptocon and plague-stricken town.

Go through an extra level of abstraction when you can't find similarities.

Step 2

Talk about Lessig. He's a really big figure in internet law. He's a Harvard prof of law that invented the creative common license that allows us to post stuff on the internet and crazy youtube videos w/o getting in trouble. he's an advocate for internet freedom and open access and all the good stuff we should want on the internet. The paper we're reading is already dated. The world could go two ways he said. The right way was the way of the University of Chicago and the wrong way was Harvard. The comparison was the way these two schools handled access to internet for their students.

Lessig starts w/a Soviet Russian parable. Czar and peasants like surfs tied to the land, they don't have anything - they're dirt poor and work for the land owners to survive. It's kind of like slavery but like the working people had to pay taxes to let them work so they could eat. The system sucks if you're a peasant and it's great if you're a landowner. All the peasants did was work and their lives were nasty, short and brutish. Peasants started moving to an urban area for more opportunities and went to Moscow. The landowners needed a scheme to keep them from going to Moscow. They issued passports. Peasants needed the right kind of papers or they weren't allowed to go. He thought the way Harvard set up their internet was like Soviet Russia. You had to be a Harvard student that was registered with the system to use computers in the network or to plug your computer in. Lessig says it's like a passport way of doing it. How does Harvard do this and Chicago doesn't? Lessig realizes there are multiple things that govern human behavior on the internet.

Law, Social norms, market, and architecture exist. Don't be a 'troll'.

In some forums people just say stuff to piss people off. People diss people to get a rise and make others upset. If you're doing that, you're trolling. 'Don't feed the trolls' - don't instigate, don't answer them.

What other norms are there on the internet? Don't forward spam. Don't use capital letters when you're chatting or in emails, it's the equivalent of yelling at someone. Spoiler alerts. NSFW. Emoticons.

What laws are on the internet? Creative commons. No porn sites with children or accessible to children under 18. Copyrighted material.

The market controls behavior on the internet too - what sites get more traffic, what you have to pay for to access, etc.

Then there's architecture. How does this control behavior on the internet? What is it? THE CODE of the internet. The tubes, wires and programs. What you see when you open a website. How it all works.

All of these things control behavior on the internet.

What controls, changes or determines access to the internet? Chicago v. Harvard, the difference was the architecture, the way it was set up. The architecture was doing all the work.

Lessig said internet could go two ways - open access with no control, the way of Chicago, or limited the way of Harvard. He's pro Chicago. It empowers people! People getting together with common goals can go out and do something about it. People without money have access to the same information that people with money have. Anyone can learn information on the internet for free. This is unprecedented.

Control, limit, or open - what kind of level do we want the internet restricted at?

There are issues on the internet that make it seem more like the architecture of Harvard than Chicago... What are they?

Real architecture can enable certain behaviors. A handicapped person can access the subway because someone built a ramp or elevator. Similarly on the internet, if something is created for people to do something they couldn't do before, they're enabling a new behavior.

Code writers constrain what's possible.

The basic idea is that Lessig thought the fight would be about how the architecture of the internet was going to go. Currently there are limitations of the internet in place. 'The Great Firewall of China.' Just a gigantic passport for all of the people in China. Governments can monitor, filter and cut off traffic so only certain websites are available and the rest are completely invisible. These architectures are already in place in a variety of places. There are also ways the internet is a place of freedom. How can we direct the development of the architecture of the internet? Lessig thinks there's only one way to do this and left to its own the internet will become a place of total control bc market interests, govt interests, and so on and so forth. Why would the govt care about the internet? Because the internet has a way of controlling and governing our behaviors that is usually the province of nation-states. (Norms, Law, Market, Architecture). You don't have to be a citizen of a nation on the internet. You don't even have to pay with a currency outside of the internet. The world is accessible through the wire. The internet is a competing idea to nation states. It's a transnational system with a global market not constrained to particular geographic locations. This is an insane thing from the point of view of nation states. They depend on physical boundaries.

Breaking laws is almost unenforceable on the internet. You can't go after people in Kazistan who are posting Dexter to enforce Showtime's copyright laws. They don't have jurisdiction.

The govt and market is bound to create more laws to control. How do you prevent this creep? Some things are threatening to laws, markets and norms of the nation state. They need to protect themselves and they do this with the architecture. They create ways to limit access to it.

The only way you can stop this creep of limiting access is to put pressure on legislative bodies that forbid that kind of limitation of access. We can't do anything about it alone at home. The architecture of the internet is going to change regardless of how we think about it, and if we want to have any say there have to be laws to protect private data, information about internet surfing, etc. W/o laws it's a free-for-all and that's not necessarily a good thing because they may want to limit us. We need laws to prevent limitations.

Ponoptocon vs. potential architecture of the internet as described by Lessig.... what is the difference and similarities?