Planning to Flee from Profiling
My project in world-making has four dimensions to it, each dimension being a different project in fugitive planning. Thus far, I have only introduced three of the four dimensions, three of the four projects in fugitive planning. These three run as follows:
The project of “planning to flee from schooling” or, in other words, planning direct actions to live and learn otherwise than being schooled;
The project of “planning to flee from financing” or, in other words, planning direct actions to make sense of life and learning otherwise than making money;
The project of “planning to flee from calendaring and clocking” or, in other words, planning direct actions to measure rhythms and tempos of life, learning, and sense-making otherwise than calendaring and clocking time.
The present dispatch introduces the fourth and final dimension, the fourth and final project in fugitive planning — that is, the project of “planning to flee from profiling” or, in other words, planning direct actions to make life, learning, and sense-making communicable otherwise than being profiled.
A nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults found that about 39 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting their partner using an internet dating service, making internet dating services the most popular way for heterosexual couples to meet in the US.
Internet dating services are automated and networked profiling services, which is to say, in other words, that they are services that work by and through employing the administrative technique known as profiling. Individuals seeking romantic and sexual partners via such services are required to compile and upload information about themselves into profiles — (data) structures used to capture certain characteristics of the individual. These profiles are then fed into automated and networked systems that record, sort, filter, and, most importantly, match profiles. The increasing prevalence of internet dating services in the US points to the remarkable prevalence and pervasiveness of profiling techniques and technologies in today's world, as it it can now be said that profiling techniques and technologies are among the most common initiators of intimate social relations in the richest and most heavily armed nation in the world.
Profiling is evermore rapidly becoming part and parcel of every aspect of individuals’ lives in today's world. Once upon a time it was the paid administrator’s task to profile subjects under administration. In today’s deathly world of suffering, subjects under administration are tasked with profiling themselves without pay. We are all becoming unpaid administrators, engaged in compiling and reviewing profiles about ourselves and others, and desperately trying to find ways to advantage ourselves in administrative rat races by exploiting the (mal)functioning of automated and networked systems that record, sort, filter, and match profiles. You are made into an unpaid administrator when you fill in a dating profile on OkCupid, when you search for products and make purchases on Amazon, when you perform searches on Google, when you like posts on Facebook, when you heart songs on Spotify, when you rate films thumbs up or thumbs down on Netflix, etc.
The so-called “Big Tech” firms (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.) are in the business of cajoling people into profiling themselves for the purposes of submitting to and receiving the “benefits” of greater administration and supervision. These firms engineer and maintain automated and networked systems for recording, sorting, filtering, and matching profiles, and they design lures that make it appealing and easy for people to compile profiles on themselves and to feed their profiles into the firms’ automated and networked recording, sorting, filtering and matching systems. Amazon was built to facilitate the recording, sorting, filtering, and matching of people’s shopping profiles. Google was built to facilitate the recording, sorting, filtering, and matching of people’s internet search profiles. Facebook was built to facilitate the recording, sorting, filtering, and matching of people’s social network profiles. Spotify was built the facilitate recording, sorting, filtering, and matching of people’s music listening profiles. Netflix was built to facilitate the recording, sorting, filtering, and matching of people’s film and television viewing profiles. OkCupid was built to facilitate the recording, sorting, filtering, and matching people’s dating profiles. LinkedIn was built to facilitate recording, sorting, filtering, and matching people’s career profiles. The list goes on…
An individual’s profile is never properly their own; rather, it is only ever the profile that they happen to fit according to the (mal)functioning of systems that record, sort, filter, and match profiles. One doesn’t ever really compile a profile that is unique to oneself as a concrete individual; rather, one compiles one’s life, learning, and sense-making in a (mis)representative manner so as to fit oneself to an abstract profile that many other individuals may also fit themselves to. One does so because one must fit a given profile in order to benefit from a given system of administration and supervision that dispenses access to resources by recording, sorting, filtering, and matching profiles.
The individual who doesn’t fit any dating profile whatsoever will get poor dating placements from an internet dating service. The individual who doesn’t fit any internet search profile whatsoever will get poor search results from an internet search provider. The individual who doesn’t fit any shopping profile whatsoever will get poor product placements from an e-commerce provider. The individual who doesn’t fit any viewing profile whatsoever will get poor viewing recommendations from a streaming film and television provider. The individual who doesn’t fit any listening profile whatsoever will get poor listening recommendations from a streaming audio provider.
The hard work of compiling a profile for oneself is the hard work of making oneself fit a given profile so that one can derive some “benefit” from administration and supervision, and fitting a given profile means diminishing one’s idiosyncrasies so as to facilitate the easy and rapid recording, sorting, filtering, and matching of profiles. Indeed, here we have the proper aim of all profiling powers: to make subjects diminish their idiosyncrasies so that they can be more easily and rapidly administered and supervised, which is to say, in other words, more easily and rapidly recorded, sorted, filtered, and matched with the resources that they “deserve”.
Mastered Instagram 'cause you can instigate a follow…
Leaving aside “Big Tech”, I would like to return to my previous dispatches on planning to flee from schooling and planning to flee from financing. As I see it, these dispatches were very much also about planning to flee from profiling. For what is an individual’s academic transcript if it isn’t an educational profile? And what is the individual’s credit report if it isn’t a financial profile? The aim of the maintenance of academic transcripts as educational profiles is to diminish the idiosyncratic needs and abilities of learners so that it becomes easier to administer and supervise their learning; and the aim of the maintenance of credit reports as financial profiles is to diminish the idiosyncratic needs and abilities of earners so that it becomes easier to administer and supervise their earnings.
In my previous dispatch on “planning to flee from calendaring and clocking”, I proposed that clocking and calendaring have become ever more prevalent and pervasive parts of life, learning, and sense-making because capitalist power formations have become evermore prevalent and pervasive. In this dispatch, I want to propose the very same thing with respect to profiling. All power formations engage in profiling of some sort or another and the increasing pervasiveness and prevalence of profiling is part and parcel of the increasing pervasiveness and prevalence of power formations in general. That being said, however, capitalist power formations are uniquely defined by the fact that they cannot maintain themselves without becoming evermore pervasive and prevalent, and the ever increasing profiling that we are subject to has a great deal to do with capitalist power formations becoming evermore pervasive and prevalent. If we have only recently begun talking about surveillance capitalism, this is not because ever increasing profiling is a new feature of capitalism; rather, this is because capitalism now infiltrates almost every part of our lives and, as a result, every part of our lives is now profiled.
To recap, being profiled means having one's life, learning, and sense-making compiled in a (mis)representative manner so as to be more easily and rapidly recorded, sorted, filtered, and matched with resources. In every instance, being profiled involves the diminishment of the idiosyncrasies of the profiled subject's life, learning, and sense-making for the sake of easing and speeding the administration and supervision of access to resources. It follows that, to be otherwise than profiled means accentuating one's idiosyncrasies by compiling one's life, learning, and sense-making in a non-representative manner. Or, in other words, being otherwise than profiled means making one's own life, learning, and sense-making increasingly more difficult to record, sort, filter, and match so as to defy administration and supervision.
So, let’s say we plan flee from profiling after deconstructing both the academic transcript as a statement of one’s educational profile and the credit report as a statement of one’s financial profile. This would mean (re-)constructing alternative statements that enable individuals to conduct and log experiments in living, learning, and sense-making otherwise than being schooled and making money, yes… But this would also mean that whatever alternative statements we (re-)construct must enable individuals to log their experiments otherwise than being profiled. This is the great challenge and difficulty…
All of the above demands further elaboration, and this will come in (un)due time. However, lest you be left believing the challenge and difficulty is too great, I will leave you with a quotation from a piece by John Berger on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat that suggests a way forward.
[Basquiat’s] painting Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982) is a screen of splashes spelling out the excitement, the fury, the fun of a boy and dog on a stifling summer day in Brooklyn dousing themselves with jets of cold water from a fire hydrant. But neither dog nor boy can be identified. They have very strong and precise features, but none of these features can be accommodated on an identity card. And all the features demanded by IDs have been scratched out or painted over. This doesn’t mean that the dog and the boy are being evasive; it simply means they are free.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982)
Banksy, After Basquiat’s Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (2017)
