Oppression :: Architectures of Control

Mosquito controversy goes high-profile

Published February 13th, 2008 in Arbitrary, Architectures of Control, Audio, Britain, Built Environment, Children, Civil rights, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Design, Design philosophy, Designed to be unpleasant, Discrimination, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Erosion of liberty, Exclusion, Intrusive technology, Liberty, Mosquito, Non-lethal weapons, Oppression, Orwellian, Philosophy of control, Political design, Ringtones, Social engineering, Sound weapons, Technology policy, Teenagers, Underclass and Urban. 10 Comments

The Mosquito anti-teenager sound device, which we’ve covered on this site a few times, was yesterday heavily criticised by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, launching the BUZZ OFF campaign in conjunction with Liberty and the National Youth Agency:

Makers and users of ultra-sonic dispersal devices are being told to “Buzz Off” today by campaigners who say the device, which emits a high-pitched sound that targets under 25 year olds, is not a fair or reasonable solution for tackling anti-social behaviour. The campaign… is calling for the end to the use of ultra-sonic dispersal device. There are estimated to be 3,500 used across the country.

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“You do not enumerate the freedoms you want”

Published April 22nd, 2007 in 1984, Architectures of Control, Civil rights, Consumer rights, Control, Copyright, Design, Design philosophy, Discriminatory Architecture, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Erosion of liberty, Freedom to tinker, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Oppression, Orwellian, Philosophy of control, Political design, Regulation, Social engineering, Software and Technology policy. 9 Comments

Crosbie Fitch, in the Atom feed summary for this post looking at how ‘freedom’ can and should be defined, says:

You see copyright’s suspension of your freedom to perform particular activities, and so for each activity you demand a specific freedom. This is how the GPL arose.
This is an inverted perspective from which to define ‘free culture’ (and free software).
To define freedom you define its constraints – you do not enumerate the freedoms you want.
This is because freedom is what we start off with in the first place. We constrain it to make it better. It is when we under or over-constrain it that we make it worse.

It’s the “To define freedom you define its constraints – you do not enumerate the freedoms you want” which especially stands out to me. This seems such an important principle, yet one which so many politicians entirely ignore when they talk about their commitments to ‘human rights’.

Am I being overly simplistic to equate this to the contrast between a ‘planned’ society - where everything is banned unless specifically permitted in an enumerated list of freedoms - and an ‘evolving’ society - where everything is permitted unless specifically banned? (Also: how does the contrast between codified Roman law and ‘evolving’ common law compare to this?)

Whatever the political and legal comparisons might be, the principle is certainly pertinent to the rise of architectures of control in technology. Up until just a few years ago, most technology was effectively ‘open’, assuming you could get hold of it. All of us had freedom to do what we wanted with it - take it apart, modify it, repurpose it, improve it, break it, even if the originators had never expressly intended anything like this, and even if it were ‘illegal’. Now, though, we have (some) technology into which intentions can be codified. We have products with hyper-restrictive End-User Licence Agreements which we must accept before we use them, and which can report back if we don’t abide by them. We have products which are intended to provide one-function-and-nothing-but-that-function, and are designed to frustrate or punish users who try anything different. We have politicians seeking to specify exactly what technology can and can’t do. How do I know what freedoms I want until I’ve experimented? How can I even explain them until I’ve experienced them? Should the progress of tomorrow really be shackled by registering as law the prejudices and errors of today?

Of course, in the context of this blog, I’m merely striking the key-note once again, and that can make for a very dull tune. But that phrase, “you do not enumerate the freedoms you want,” will stay with me. It’s important.

A vein attempt?

Published October 28th, 2006 in Architecture, Architectures of Control, Britain, Built Environment, Cargo cult, Civil rights, Control, Deleuze, Design, Design engineering, Design philosophy, Designed to be unpleasant, Designed to injure, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Embedding code, Engineering design, Erosion of liberty, Forcing functions, Foucault, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Killjoy technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Oppression, Orwellian, Panopticon, Political design, Propaganda, Public money, Regulation, Sneaky, Social engineering, Spatial, Specious arguments, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, Technology policy, Technology underclass, Teenagers, Underclass, Urban, User Psychology, User experience, Vague rhetoric and Worldwide. 5 Comments

Blue lighting is sometimes used in public toilets (restrooms) to make it more difficult for drug users to inject themselves (veins are harder to see). The above implementation is in Edinburgh, next to the Tron Kirk.

It was more difficult to see my veins through my skin, but there was normal-coloured lighting in the street outside, and one would assume that the users would thus just go outside instead, though the risk of detection is greater. (An additional result of the blue lighting is that, on going outside after spending more than a few seconds in the toilets, the daytime world appears much brighter and more optimistic, even on an overcast day: could retail designers or others make use of this effect? Do they already?)

So the blue lighting ‘works’, but is it really a good idea to increase the risk that an injection will be done wrongly - maybe multiple times? This is perhaps a similar argument to that surrounding delibrately reducing visibility at junctions: the architecture of control makes it more dangerous for the few users (and those their actions affect) who ignore or bypass the control. This seems to be an architecture of control with the potential to endanger life, although the actual stated intention behind it probably includes ’saving lives’.

Without knowing more about addiction, however, I can’t say whether making it difficult for people to inject will really help stop them doing it; it would seem more likely that (as in the linked Argus story), the aim of the blue lighting is to move the ‘problem’ somewhere else rather than actually ’solve’ it - as with the anti-homeless benches, in fact.

Another example in this kind of area is the use of smoke alarms specifically to prevent people smoking in toilets, e.g. on aeroplanes (the noise, and embarrassment, is a sufficient deterrent). There’s even been the suggestion of using the Mosquito high-pitched alarm coupled to a smoke detector to ‘prevent’ children smoking in school toilets (I’d expect that quite a few would deliberately try to set them off; I know I would have as a kid). A friend mentioned the practice of siting smoking shelters a long way from office buildings so that smokers are discouraged from going so often; this backfired for the company concerned, as smokers just took increasingly long breaks to make it ‘worth their while’ to walk the extra distance.

Bruce Schneier : Architecture & Security

Published October 20th, 2006 in 1984, Architecture, Architectures of Control, Bad design, Built Environment, Civil rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Deleuze, Design, Design philosophy, Designed to be unpleasant, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Engineering design, Erosion of liberty, Exclusion, Foucault, Future, Health and safety, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, London, Oppression, Orwellian, Panopticon, Philosophy of control, Political design, Privacy, Protest, Public money, Security, Sneaky, Social engineering, Spatial, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, US, University and Urban. 19 Comments

Bruce Schneier talks about ‘Architecture and Security’: architectural decisions based on the immediate fear of certain threats (e.g. car bombs, rioters) continuing to affect users of the buildings long afterwards. And he makes the connexion to architectures of control outside of the built environment, too:

“The same thing can be seen in cyberspace as well. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig describes how decisions about technological infrastructure — the architecture of the internet — become embedded and then impracticable to change. Whether it’s technologies to prevent file copying, limit anonymity, record our digital habits for later investigation or reduce interoperability and strengthen monopoly positions, once technologies based on these security concerns become standard it will take decades to undo them.

It’s dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.”

Indeed.

The commenters detail a fantastic array of ‘disciplinary architecture‘ examples, including:

Pierce Hall, University of Chicago, “built to be “riotproof” by elevating the residence part of the dorm on large concrete pillars and developing chokepoints in the entranceways so that rioting mobs couldn’t force their way through.” (There must be lots of university buildings like this)

“The Atlanta Fed building has a beautiful lawn which surrounds the building, and is raised 4 or 5 feet from the surrounding street, with a granite restraining wall. It’s a very effective protection against truck bombs.”

The wide boulevards of Baron Haussmann’s Paris, intended to prevent barricading (a frequently invoked example on this blog)

The UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Procurement Agency site at Abbey Wood, Bristol, “is split into car-side and buildings; all parking is as far away from the buildings (car bomb defence), especially the visitor section. you have to walk over a narrow footbridge to get in.

Between the buildings and the (no parking enforced by armed police) road is ‘lake’. This stops suicide bomber raids without the ugliness of the concrete barriers.

What we effectively have is a modern variant of an old castle. The lake supplants the moat, but it and the narrow choke point/drawbridge.”

SUNY Binghamton’s “College in the Woods, a dorm community… features concrete “quads” with steps breaking them into multiple levels to prevent charges; extremely steep, but very wide, stairs, to make it difficult to defend the central quad”

University of Texas at Austin: “The west mall (next to the Union) used to be open and grassy. They paved it over with pebble-y pavement to make it painful for hippies to walk barefoot and installed giant planters to break up the space. They also installed those concrete walls along Guadalupe (the drag) to create a barrier between town and gown, and many other “improvements.”"

I’m especially amused by the “making it painful for hippies to walk barefoot” comment! This is not too far from the anti-skateboarding corrugation sometimes used (e.g. the third photo here), though it seems that in our current era, there is a more obvious disconnect between ’security’ architecture (which may also involve vast surveillance or everyware networks, such as the City of London’s Ring of Steel) and that aimed at stopping ‘anti-social’ behaviour, such as homeless people sleeping, skateboarders, or just young people congregating.

BBC: Surveillance drones in Merseyside

Published October 17th, 2006 in 1984, Architectures of Control, Bad design, Britain, Built Environment, Bureaucracy, Cargo cult, Civil rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Deleuze, Design philosophy, Designed to be unpleasant, Designed to injure, Discrimination, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Embedding code, Entropy, Erosion of liberty, External Control, Foucault, Future, Greasing palms, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Intrusive technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Norms, Oppression, Orwellian, Panopticon, Philosophy of control, Political design, Privacy, Prophecy, Public money, Social engineering, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Technology underclass, Teenagers, Underclass, Urban, Vague rhetoric and Worldwide. 2 Comments

From the BBC: ‘Police play down spy planes idea’:

“Merseyside Police’s new anti-social behaviour (ASB) task force is exploring a number of technology-driven ideas.

But while the use of surveillance drones is among them, they would be a “long way off”, police said.
…

“The idea of the drone is a long way off, but it is about exploring all technological possibilities to support our war on crime and anti-social behaviour.”

Note that “anti-social behaviour” is mentioned separately to “crime.” Why? Also, nice appropriation of the “war on xxx” phrasing.

“It plans to utilise the latest law enforcement technology, including automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), CCTV “head-cams” and metal-detecting gloves.”

This country’s had it.

We’ve got Avon & Somerset Police using helicopters with high-intensity floodlights to “blind groups of teenagers temporarily” and councils using tax-payers’ money to install devices to cause deliberate auditory pain to a percentage of the population, again, whether or not they have committed a crime. Anyone would think that those in power despised their public. Perhaps they do.

Has it ever occurred to the police that tackling the causes of the problem might be a better solution than attacking the symptoms with a ridiculous battery of ‘technology’?

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What are Architectures of Control?

Audi A2 : The user cannot open the bonnet; Bench designed to prevent lying down: 'redesigned to face contemporary urban realities'; Some HP printers shut down the cartridges at a pre-determined date regardless of whether they are empty

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

This site aims—with readers’ input—to examine and analyse the ideas and techniques of these architectures of control in design, through examples and anecdotes, and by keeping up-to-date with relevant developments... More