Controlling Our Society
While the last couple of weeks we’ve explored philosophical figures and concepts, this week we dove into political theories of power. Being born and raised in Honduras meant I had to get immersed in politics from a young age. Honduran kids experienced the coup of 2009, economic disaster in 2010, and most recently the trial and extradition of our latest president at the beginning of 2022. We’ve seen our parents struggle to send us to good schools and the system fail us to provide basic human needs. I am one of the few lucky ones that was able to come to the United States and leave my corrupted and fragile Honduras.
This week the class was introduced to Deleuze and Foucaut, French philosophers who have studied earlier societies and believe we live in a modern one. It seems like even though we’ve moved on from sovereign soieties, philosophers still believe that society is controlled by a small group of people. This is not necessarily apparent to me in American politics, especially when each state operates mostly independently, but when you look at an extreme case like North Korea, or milder cases like Russia and China, it is easy to see how a small group of people (or dictator) can brainwash the masses into societies of control. This is a huge limitant in design, and frankly it saddens me that so many people are oppressed by their governments. An example of this is China’s ban on any pro Hong Kong media, the most notable one being ByteDance’s (Tiktok) algorithm banning this type of media everywhere in the world. When designing Tiktok, the Chinese government had influence on its designers. As a Tiktok user and consumer, I hate that I’m limited in my freedom of speech and content creation due to a government having massive control on the product. As a designer, I don’t want government impositions on my designs, especially when they don’t cause any harm. Tiktok however is well known for allowing harmful content such as antisemitism and pro eating disorder content. Why are these topics allowed on a platform full of underage users but pro Hong Kong videos are not? As Carl Schmitt puts it, ‘sovereign is he who decides on the exemption’, and in this case, the exemption is that Hong Kong is controversial in mainland China.
Big tech companies often aid the governement in providing private user information to maintain a surveillance society. The most recent story about this was Facebook’s scandal in late 2021, when whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed Facebook’s malpractices with users’ data. Manuel Abreu classifies this as necropower, which uses powerful tools for modeling, predicting, and manipulating human reality that have emerged from mineable (calculable) and unmineable (incalculable) events. Companies that started with good intentions, intentions to help humanity, have now succumbed to necropower. This is extremely disheartening, especially when so much of their workforce knows what’s happening inside close doors. Are these workers just as power/money hungry as their leaders? Do they consciously want to help the government manipulate the masses? I really hope that the answer is no to both of these questions, and if it isn’t, I hope many come out of these toxic environments like Frances Haugen did.
When thinking of accessibility, I often think back to what my class on Museum Accessibility has taught me so far: accessibility is often an afterthought. Our leaders don’t enforce laws on accessibility nearly as much as they do on control. The non-digital and digital lack guides and laws that ensure all people can navigate through a building or site. This leads to many feeling like they don’t belong or have been forgotten. An extreme case of this that has unfortunately been on the rise is the homeless population in NYC. Most of them have mental or physical illnesses that require special attention, but the government has failed to address those needs. These people often end up on the streets because shelters are not accessible or don’t meet medical needs. Our government tries to hide these people from the rest of the world by offering them bus tickets out of the city, displacing homeless camps, or simply ignoring the root of the problem. Yet the government is so fixated on control that it spends hundreds of thousands of taxpayer money to manage social media.
