Max Berwald – Core Post #3

“What would a queer technics look like? One that is explicitly situated within the logic of information systems but refuses this gesture of capture and extraction?" (Gaboury 2018, 145)

Credit has to be given to Gaboury for presenting the problem of how to become illegible in a way that more or less recognizes its difficulty, persistence, intransigence. Thinking inside of SQL in this way is also a creative move. However, codifying oneself as NULL within a coercive, surveillant informational system remains at best a paradox. This seems like a different kind of issue than that presented by Keeling’s “Queer OS.” Whereas the idea of the queer OS was formulated most provocatively as broken and glitched (and therefore incapable of being effectively instrumentalized by power) the NULL marker seems to be a way of rendering oneself fully legible (NULL is a valid marker within SQL that SQL is unambiguously capable of interpreting). Within power, incorporating the agency of those who would “make use” of SQL (those who query the database), NULL markers may present as a problem to be solved, but they are still eminently legible. It is easier to imagine that the agencies querying a database in surveillant ways will simply ask a slightly different question than to imagine that NULL markers will “infect” so many database operations as to render it instrumentally useless. I don’t see NULL as being in the “middle” between outside and inside surveillant informational systems. Rather, the NULL marker is a way of accounting for the interstitial terrain between “inside and outside” in a way marginally more effective than, say, the binary model of a value having or lacking an equivalent value. The gap between this digital way of knowing and the infinite plurality of the world surveillant information systems seek to control is vast, and NULL is not in this “excluded middle.” 

“I am suggesting that the NULL marker corresponds with the epistemological condition of queerness as an excessive illegibility collapsed into an unwieldy frame, an aberrant thirdness…” (Gaboury 2018, 153) [Emphasis mine.]

However, this not to say that I think there is no tactical utility to resisting surveillant systems of knowing: I can see how it is far better to populate a database with NULLS than to populate a database with data that is somehow richer, or that facilitates more vigorous forms of exploitation and oppression. It is only to say that we should avoid at all costs conflating (1) failing to appear before or be recorded by surveillant systems and (2) appearing as “an aberrant third”  within those surveillant systems. To put this in the language of Siva, “meaningful freedom implies real control over the conditions of one’s life” rather than the freedom of the menu (2011, 89), the ability to appear aberrantly within a surveillant infrastructure. The ubiquity of SQL is, no matter how intransigent, still the problem that demands to be grappled with. 

This comes out, I think, in both the Browne and the Andrejevic. When Andrejevic writes about the “becoming environmental” of surveillance (2017, 887–8) it is difficult not to think of LAPD’s own now-defunct LASER program. (The program is defunct although of course LAPD’s experimentation and implementation of predictive policing technologies continues.) LASER of course preemptively sought “problem” individuals, but it also sought to identify “crime hotspots”: neighborhoods, all the way down to individual blocks, where police resources should be concentrated. Surveillance intensifying surveillance. These neighborhoods and blocks were, of course, often those historically marginalized, or even produced by, racist policies, calling to mind the historically raced quality of contemporary surveillance Browne describes. The examples of historical sousveillance given by Browne (such as the tripping of the horses of slave patrols or the production of false papers) (2015, 21–2) offer a useful way of thinking into the middle space between the world and recorded, instrumental knowledge about the world, to think about what contesting surveillance might look like. But, as I think all these authors would agree, there is something very different about the surveillant quality of relational database management systems and older analogs that relied on, say, a patrol, and part of the problem is the very “softness” of the power Gaboury describes: the ever increasing distance between the surveyor and the surveilled.