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Apparently,
our previous economist is
the root evil after Terrytown,
Puritani, and
origins of
whatever goes on the guns, masturbation.
So
we now have a researcher working
at Columbia University in
political science to,
well, tell us
how Facebook, the social
networks and all that nice
digital stuff that we build around
us might be
enforcing a new preliterate
in law and time.
So
not sure if that's going to be nice,
but.
Well, anyways, please give a warm round
of applause to Charlene Biondi.
OK.
It seems like there's a Puritan
conspiracy in Silicon Valley.
No, really, I mean, it really seems
like the iCloud was actually
invented to punish, to
punish the unfaithful lovers
like Apple figured out all the best
way possible to catch
the misbehaving husband and wives
and hang them in progress.
Or at least that's what my
friend Matt thinks.
Last Christmas last year, Matt,
but an iPad for his seven year old son.
And so he enters his password in iTunes
so that the kid can download
the apps and all the games that he
wanted.
And the next morning,
the kid walks into the living room
where Matt and his wife are sitting
holding the iPad
and he goes, Daddy,
who's Jessica?
And before Matt could grab
the iPad, his wife did.
And she read all the text messages
that Matt had been sending to Jessica
on his iPhone, but now
popping up on the iPad, iCloud
magic.
And so, needless to say, that is not a
married man anymore.
And so this story made me delete my
iCloud account, but.
It also bothered me for
a very long time because
it shed light on digital surveillance
from a perspective that I had never even
considered before a Puritan
conspiracy.
I mean, I knew that surveillance,
especially digital surveillance, had
normalizing effects on people, meaning it
forced people into certain norms and
conduct.
But could it be that it
also had a moralizing
effect on people?
Could it be that the great actors of
digital surveillance, Facebook, Google,
the NSA, you name it, were
exerting upon us a
power similar
to the power of Catholic priests?
The power of the guilt trip, a
power that would force us into
confessing our sins.
So especially in this room,
I guess it would be.
Really banal, if I reminded you
that digital surveillance invades
your privacy and that
it also violates your intimacy.
But what exactly
is the most intimate activity
that a human being can do?
A human being mean men, women and
children included?
When I asked this question yesterday
to prepare for this dark, someone
answered, Praying is
the most intimate activity a human being
can engage in, and that's very
interesting. But it doesn't really work
because if you're praying and I walk into
the room, are you praying?
I'm not really invading your
intimacy. You can just keep praying.
So I'd love to have you guess, but since
my speech was introduced, you already
know the answer. So I'm just going to say
it quickly.
The most intimate activity that a human
being can engage in is masturbation
and masturbation.
My friends has a history
that actually tells us a lot
about surveillance.
And the point of my
talk today is going to be
the digital surveillance has similar
mechanisms and similar effects
on us as a crusade
against masturbation.
This was launched in the 18th century
in Europe.
And first and above all.
The first thing they have in common is
that both the events of the 18th century,
surveillance of the masturbators and
digital surveillance are arbitrary
and ineffective.
So why was
surveillance in the Asian century
arbitrary?
Because actually before the 18th century,
nobody cared about masturbation, not
even the Catholic priests.
I mean, they
barely said the Catholic priest said it
was something that should be avoided.
It was a very minor concern and it only
concerned adult men and monks
until the beginning of
the seventeen hundred and the publication
of that tract, a medical tract
by a British doctor
that says Bonnano,
the Heinsohn of self-delusion and
its frightful consequences in both sexes
considered and this tract
started a crusade against masturbation
in all of Europe.
For the first time, a masturbation became
an abnormal thing to do that was
dangerous not only for the individual,
but for society.
And that idea arrived and
changed things almost from one day to the
next.
But what's important for this, for us
with that crusade is that it took
one form and one form only
surveillance.
But this said was a domesticated
masturbators should be watched.
They should be watched constantly
until their bad habits, their bad habit
was crushed and until they would go back
to normal behavior, meaning not
masturbating.
So structurally, if not technologically,
18th century surveillance
is very similar to today's digital
servant.
Another crucial resemblance that they
have is that they're both
multipolar.
So you know why today surveillance is
multipolar. We have on one side
states of an interstate agencies.
We have on the other side private
surveillance with all the Jeffares
with Internet
telecom companies.
And we have a third role today,
which is us, us
who participate willingly or not
by giving out our data every day when we
use technology and in the 18th
century. So when it is also multipolar
because masturbators I watched
by their priests, their watch
by the doctors and their watch by
their family.
So let's start to talk about doctors,
so as I said, they are the ones who
started the crusade against masturbation
following the ANANYA tracks that I just
showed you.
Many other doctors across Europe and
especially in France and Germany,
published medical medical treatises,
other tracks that explain that
masturbation was not only a disease, it
was also the cause, the origin or in
medical terms, the etiology of
all other diseases that
could exist at all.
Possible disease could eventually be
provoked by masturbation.
So if you masturbated,
doctor said, you would get sick,
your body would degenerate
and you would eventually die in horrible
suffering like your skin would.
So these images actually
show very well to type of long
term effects of masturbation.
So you see that even a 16 year
old on the top left who masturbates
is actually sort of degenerates who looks
completely stupid.
And so basically,
for doctors at the time, preventing
masturbation was actually a
matter of life and death.
You know, the masturbators, therefore,
had to be watched for their own good,
for their own safety, for their own
security.
And those doctors, they convinced the
parents in a family that they had to
put in place inside their homes
a very pervasive type of surveillance
in order to make sure that the children,
the adolescents of the house and the
young adults would not touch themselves.
So there were guide guidebooks that
are written and published for the good
family men such as this one published
by a French Dr. John Batiste d'Aboville
that says, I'm translating the title, The
Memento of a father, an educator
or intimate advice on the dangers of
masturbation.
And there's also a very nice telling
subtitle on the bottom of the page that
says, Masturbation exhausts,
it irritates, it bastardizes
whatever that means.
It does the mind this organizes and
kills.
They also the doctors were recommending
using corsets as this one,
the part of the genital is in metal.
And they also
say that you should wear that for a whole
week and then just take it wants to wash
it. They are also recommending using
cross tying children on a cross in their
bed to make sure that the hands
could never touch the body.
And the hips were also put together so
the legs could not be spread.
That this is a more modern version that I
found on Google, but it actually exists.
And there were also also all type
of, you know, very inventive techniques,
like, for example, attaching
a string that would connect
the children's hands with the little
bells on it to the father's hand
or to his brothers and sisters.
And so when he moved, when he would move
his hand at night, you know, it would
wake the other people in the household
wake up.
So basically what was happening
in these homes in Europe
in the 18th century was
a surveillance culture with where
everybody was encouraged to watch
everybody. The children would watch each
other, the parents would watch the
children.
And then what about the priests?
So, as I said, surprisingly, at
least for me, it's not the priests who
started that crusade against
masturbation, but they still played a
very crucial role in
in this crusade.
In fact, by the 18th century,
the Catholic Church had completely
reformulated its understanding
of the sin of the flesh.
Originally, the sin of the flesh,
which is the Sixth Amendment, was
referring to very specific rules
to very specific infringed infringement
of sexual rules.
For example, you should not commit
adultery.
You should not commit incest.
You should not have sex
with animals.
But between the 16th and 18th
century, so after the Catholic
reform, the priest
started to be more and more interested
in the body itself.
So it was no longer so much about the
acts that you committed.
So whether or not you fornicated
slept with animals, but it was more about
the sensations that you might have had
even if you didn't commit any fault.
So to give you an example,
the priests would inquire
about the way a young woman
built into a fresh pair.
Was the boat too sensual,
was the boat too languorous,
did biting on that pier give her
a sort of arousing pleasure that
she should not allow herself to have or
to feel?
So you see, it's not at all about sex
anymore.
But about auto eroticism.
It's about the body as
a potential infinite source of pleasure
and desire and as Fuku
puts it, but it's really about as
Mestrovic.
And so the priest were told during
the seminars that what they should really
inquire about, the questions they should
ask was not only to avow
your fault, but it should be
about the thoughts that were formed in
your head, about the images
that came to your mind and about the
sensations that these images provoked.
So really, it was a form of surveillance,
there was a confession
of ones of all of one's
acts and thoughts.
And now if I just strike
out strike at the 18th
century actors and this beautiful diagram
and replace it with today's
actors of digital surveillance,
you see that the mechanisms in place
are exactly the same.
Both are done in the name of security.
By someone responsible for your safety,
but most of the actual information that
is gathered is gathered by actually
a third act or a third party
in the form of regular,
maybe even daily
complete confession of your actions.
And in both cases, the surveillance is
constant because it is fed
by us, by the people who willingly
participate in it.
So I started
by telling you that surveillance
of the masturbators in the 18th century
and digital surveillance today are both
arbitrary and ineffective.
What I meant by ineffective is
that pervasive surveillance
in the 18th century never stopped
masturbation, just as
mass surveillance never stopped a
terrorist.
So you probably have more data
than I do on Mr. Vincent terrorists, but
last time I checked on my data is from
2015 to bulk collection programs
of the NSA has never been efficient
in preventing any terror attack.
Now, there's still a question that
remains, at least for me, is do the
people who work at the NSA end this bulk
collection program? Do they really
believe they they work?
Because what's for sure is that
in the 18th century, the doctors
who worked on that sort of anti
masturbation surveillance, they
knew they really knew it didn't
work. They even admitted it in some
treatises.
They wrote down that actually
none of those measures that I told you
about were efficient.
The only radical solution would be to
excise women and to
torture men by injecting baking
soda into the urinary tract.
But
but they agreed that it was not really
a plausible or nice solution
yet.
Even if they knew everything they were
doing and saying was completely
inefficient, ineffective,
they still kept playing the game, they
still kept leading
the crusade against masturbation.
And the question is why?
So there's a very simplistic
answer.
It's because they were making money with
new patients coming in with a new
disease, masturbation,
but it's not only that,
obviously there were
also applying
the new and pervasive
economic logic of the time.
They were simply acting
sorry I.
The slide.
Were simply acting as Russell
Marcuse or highish argue,
as the first sons of capitalism.
In fact, the 18th century was also
the time when economic liberalism
was born.
And with it, the human body
was supposed to become a tool of
performance and
an instrument of productivity.
And Thomas Laqueur, which is an American
contemporary philosopher, goes even
further.
And he says the reason
why masturbation became such a huge
problem in the 18th century is
because it contradicted the very
principle of economic liberalism,
which is that private Vyse
is always translated into public
virtue if it goes through
commerce, if it goes through the trade
with the other.
And obviously masturbation is by
definition the human activity
that excludes
the other or any type of commerce with
other.
And this liberal principle,
so the virtue of trade,
of course, still applies today, maybe the
place today more than ever.
It's in fact, at the core
of the digital surveillance,
because we are so inured
to the liberal economy, we don't even
realize anymore, but we have
applied market rationalities to
every single facets of our life.
In fact, the only reason why digital
surveillance is possible is because we
consider everything, including our
privacy, as a good
as a commodity that could eventually
be traded for about.
However, despite
the great similarities between Asian
century of
surveillance of the masturbators
and today's digital surveillance, there's
one crucial difference.
In the 18th century, both
doctors and priests agreed
that in order to be cured or to
be forgiven, the masturbator
had to confess.
It had to confess to the priest, to the
doctor, and preferably to both.
But confession was really meant as
a relief of the soul.
It forced the subject to
reflect on himself, to have an extremely
active relationship to himself,
to develop what Fuyuko
calls an internal gaze,
meaning to watch his own thoughts,
to watch his own feelings.
And, of course, the mandatory confession
that was imposed to everyone in the 18th
century often had a counterproductive
effect because it produced guilt and
produced self-censorship, not necessarily
a flourishing internal case,
but at least the confession of the 18th
century had one merit
is that they let the subject
speak for himself and
create his own narrative of himself.
And today, when Siva Vaidhyanathan,
who wrote a great book called The
Googlization of Everything, writes
that to search for something on the Web
using Google is not unlike confessing
your desire to a mysterious power.
Well, that's how he makes a very
compelling point by saying that.
But he also misses an essential
difference in today's
surveillance.
There's no such thing as a confession in
a Christian sense of the term.
We may well be laying out all of our
desires, intimate
hopes and fears on
the Google search box that
first, very often we don't
do it willingly, meaning
we don't mean to confess them when we
type in Google, we just typing.
We just really searching for something.
And second, we don't reflect on
them or on ourselves when we do so.
And third, some of us,
maybe even most of us, are not even
aware that when we do
so, when we type on Google,
there's a mysterious power,
as he calls it,
that might be listening or reading
confession.
So Google certainly
has a similar power
and probably a much better knowledge of
who we are than the priests
of the 18th century.
But we as subjects
have mostly abandoned the internal
gaze that I was telling you about,
this foundational relationship
with oneself that comes with conscious
confession.
So as a conclusion,
I want to suggest.
Why, to me, this comparison
with 18th century crusade
on masturbators is meaningful
and not merely titillating or just funny.
I've always felt that.
What is really at stake with surveillance
and not only targeted surveillance, but
bulk data collection, mass data
collection?
What's really at stake with that
surveillance is the self.
This very little black
box that we all have inside and that
humanists believe
it should remain untouched, should
remain free and should be sanctified.
I really felt that this very inner
self that makes us worthy
human beings, that's
what is ultimately at stake
with mass surveillance, and that's why we
should care.
But the problem is, and the
difficulty as I have, is
that this argument is extremely difficult
to make.
I mean, even when I'm talking to
a crowd of philosophers
and I say, you know, using all types
of references, surveillance
changes our relationship to the self.
I mean, of course, some might agree,
but it's actually
nobody really knows what the self is.
And so nobody's
moved if I say that.
There's no gut reaction.
And on the other hand,
when we talk about masturbation,
the gut reaction is immediate.
Even if we don't know what the self is,
even if we still don't know what the self
is, the idea
of being watched while masturbating.
And for some of us, just the idea of
masturbation itself
mortified is immediately I mean, we all
we always immediately feels invaded.
So it's very I understand it's
very easy to understand.
It's revealing masturbation
is the ultimate violation,
not because it's bad
and not because it's shameful, not
because we doing anything wrong if we do
it, but simply
and only because
it is one little part
of that little black box of the self.
Thank you.
Thank you, Charlie.
We have six microphones on ground level
and we have a few minutes for a quick
Q&A. So if you have questions, please
line up at the microphones at ground
level and
shoot.
Are there any questions?
Yes, we have one microphone number
one, thank you very much for your
talk and I
I want to make a short introduction.
I am Greek and then
in Greek we have a very common insult
that is not allowed.
Please keep your questions short.
We have limited Malakas
that means masturbator, and it's a very
common insult.
Maybe stemmed from your time,
the time you described.
So I wanted to ask you about the
geographical place of this
crusade and its relation
in time with its position in time
with with the Renaissance
period and the
confession. It was the confessional ready
structure that was in place or it was
adopted with this.
Yeah.
So
the crusade actually started not in
Catholic countries, but in protest
in countries. It started in in
England and then in Germany, and
then it moved to France, which was
mostly Catholic at the time.
And so that was really beginning of the
18th century and it lasted until the end
of the 19th century.
And when it comes to the
Catholics,
what's really interesting is that both,
you know, the like the medical rational
crusade and
the Catholic Church, they became to be
interested in Trevelyan's.
They happened at the same time, but for
different reasons.
So the doctors, as I say, the only
plausible explanation is that the
interior is the new economic
approach to life in general,
to science, to rationality, the
Christian priests. On the other hand,
what really change things is
the 16th century, the kind of reform
that happened with the Council of Trent.
I think I was 16.
I forgot. Yes.
Anyway, no, fifty,
fifteen, thirty two, I think.
And sort of Trent.
And so that, you know, the Christian
Church and the Catholic Church had to
reinvent itself after the reform
of the Protestants.
And so the priest
for United and they decided
on new ways to
just exercise their own religion.
And one of the first thing that they
thought of was confession,
to make sure that people were not
participants, that there were not
heretical.
They made sure that confession would
become mandatory and
to be efficient in knowing if people
were really good Catholics or not,
they could not just ask people as
they had been doing until the 16th
century. Did you commit a false did
you commit a sin because there was not
enough?
They had to know what was going on in
their head, in their mind.
So that's why they transformed
confession into not simply
avowing your fault and your sins,
but into speaking
your whole self.
You had to be able, during your
confession to represent your own self,
to to think, reflect on your
whole life, even the the things
that were not false.
Then why not? Since you had to analyze
yourself completely, this is almost,
you know, the beginning of
psychoanalysis.
I think we have another question from our
signal angel who was monitoring Iasi on
social media.
Thank you. One question from the
Internet. Do you think that the
surveillance and self regulation
will become normal as government
realizes that we are no longer
ungovernable by their,
you know, conventional means?
I almost want to answer another question
if cell surveillance really
becomes the norm and if
we self surveil ourself, uh.
With the norms that are imposed upon us,
then, of course, we don't need to be
governed, governed by any other type of
government. I think that's you know,
that's one of the key arguments of
totalitarian regimes.
The point of any totalitarian
regime is to not even need to
exercise any power except exert
any power upon the people because they'll
just do it themselves.
Next question from microphone number
three.
Hi, thanks for the talk.
I have a question.
You talked about the
when I go to the priest and I confessed
my sins, then I tell a story about
myself.
And when Google is telling my story
so I don't have my own
toll with narrative me, it's
my Google told narrative me.
How does this affect my blackbox?
Well.
You know, it's very.
I'm trying to think of the best example
for just, you know, if I just gather
the metadata that I get about you for the
next three days, for
the for the sorry, for the last three
days, I gather the metadata about you,
your Google search, where you went, your
GPS, etc.
Anyone can probably picture
you as a crazy person,
as a criminal or as
a, you know, just the person you are not
because we can make this data talking,
you know, any way possible.
And this actually is happening in certain
courts.
You know, the metadata becomes
used as a proof of
as an evidence of who you are and
what you did and against the data
that is so easily readable, you
can't really defend yourself.
Your own word has
less power and
is considered less truth than the
data that is officially
gathered black and white on paper.
And it's, I think,
extremely violent to not be able
to tell who you are yourself.
It's extremely violent to
be confronted to that double,
you know, that data double of us
that speaks louder than we could ever
speak ourselves.
So I think that's that's the violation of
the little black box that you can be
you can be convinced of what is
into your little black box.
You can maybe not be even sure, because I
think no one is really sure.
But I mean, until now,
you know, you always had
the possibility to let
it talk and let it speak, you know
as well as you could.
Narrate your own story yourself,
and the existence of those data doubles
forbids that or it doesn't forbid it,
but it makes it very complicated
to be taken seriously when
we have that existing double.
Thank you very much, Charlene Biondi,
we're sadly out of time again.
Please give her a warm round of applause.