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Clocked! Time and Biopower in the Age of Algorithms Geklokt! Clocked! Time and Biopower in the Age of Algorithms Geklokt! Tijd en Biomacht in het Tijdperk van Algoritmes (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. H.R.B.M. Kummeling, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 23 november 2018 des middags te 12.45 uur door Wan Pui Yin geboren op 20 augustus 1988 te Brits Hongkong Promotor: Prof. dr. M.A. Bleeker This thesis was accomplished with financial support from the R. C. Lee Centenary Scholarship administered by the Drs Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Charitable Foundation, Hong Kong. Clocked! Time and Biopower in the Age of Algorithms Wan Pui Yin, Evelyn Institute of Cultural Inquiry Utrecht University Colofon Copyright © 2018: Evelyn Wan Vormgeving: Evelyn Wan Druk en bindwerk: Probook, Zwolle Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... vii Introduction ..................................................................................................1 Part I: Theoretical Foundations....................................................................32 1 The Concept of Biopolitics ........................................................................33 2 In Mediated Time: Clockworks, Automata, and Computer Machines .......68 Part II: Biopower in Mediated Times .........................................................102 3 Historical Antecedents: Clocks, Discipline, and Performance of Labour ..103 4 Contemporary Ramifications: Time and Biopolitics in Twenty-first-century media ......................................................................137 Part III: Techno-chrono-biopolitics Today and Tomorrow .........................176 5 From Statistics to Big Data: The Ontopowers of Predictive Analytics .......177 6 On the Necropolitics of Quantified Selves and Uncounted Others ..........216 Conclusion, or a Genealogy of Dispossession ............................................259 Coda: An Incomplete Guide to Resistance in the Age of Algorithms ..........288 Notes ..........................................................................................................306 Bibliography ..............................................................................................330 Summary ...................................................................................................365 Samenvatting .............................................................................................368 Biographical Note ......................................................................................371 v Acknowledgements When I began working on this PhD project in September 2014, my friends and colleagues in Hong Kong took part in a week-long class boycott campaign to protest a controversial decision on electoral reform in Hong Kong by the Chinese National People’s Congress. Before long, the Umbrella Movement broke out and a large-scale occupation movement began. ‘Mobile democracy classrooms’ with lectures and discussion forums with university professors and intellectuals took place at protest sites, bringing knowledge usually locked within the halls of the ivory tower out into public space. For a young scholar like myself, that was a crucial moment when one is called upon to re-examine one’s role as an intellectual in this day and age, to reflect on how knowledge is produced and disseminated, and what the ethics and responsibilities of a researcher should be. I watched the events unfold while being physically here in Europe. It was Facebook and streaming platforms and online independent media outlets which provided the most up-to- date information. For weeks, I volunteered my skills as a professional translator online for statements and press releases, forging alliances with people I have never met and will never meet, and took full advantage of the time difference to translate and proofread items while my counterparts slept in Hong Kong. In hindsight, this experience of digitally-participating in a protest movement changed my work profoundly. Part of it was due to my deep attachment to and reliance on digital infrastructures to stay abreast of politics back home. Part of it was the urge to come to terms with my own subjectivity as a born-and-raised Hong Kong local. As a postcolonial subject, I am caught up with interrogating and resisting the structures of power that condition my experience and ways of inhabiting the world, and I came to theory because it offered some semblance of vii Acknowledgements ‘answers’ to such existential queries. I am Other in the European academy, and there have been many moments where I needed to negotiate my positionality in the midst of blatant Eurocentrism. But in these moments of (productive) tension, I learnt to stand my ground and find my own voice. Perhaps some of these reflections have found their way unconsciously into this dissertation. In the 4 years of intense academic research and PhD work, I am indebted to the unfailing support and encouragement from my dearest supervisor, Prof. dr. Maaike Bleeker. I honestly cannot believe that it has already been 8 years since I stepped into your office for the very first time as a Gender Studies student, whose lack of knowledge and training was merely made up for by a dose of naive enthusiasm and the guts to try something new. In the years that followed, you have guided my meander across the fields of Gender Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Media Studies, and you did not for a moment flinch at my persistent conceptual travelling and raw ambition to traverse disciplinary boundaries. Even I have to laugh explaining to people that my research MA thesis was on dance, and now, somehow, I write about algorithms and digital infrastructures. All the supervisory meetings and thinking we have done together make up the fondest memories of studying in Utrecht. It takes an incredible amount of labour to supervise students and see projects through. It takes practices of care to nurture the next generation of scholars, foresight to push forward new initiatives, and determination to invest time and energy into creating a better community for Performance Studies scholars, and all of this to be achieved on top of the expected teaching, research, and administrative load. You have been a fantastic role model to work with and look up to. In all this time you instilled a sense of trust and confidence in my own abilities and empowered me to set up projects and come into my own as a scholar. “Thank you” doesn’t quite capture the extent of my gratitude and my appreciation for the intellectual generosity you have shown. It has been an absolute delight working with you and I look forward to many more conceptual travels (and conference travels, of course) together in the years to come. To my international colleagues at the Performance Studies international (PSi) Future Advisory Board with whom I have had bi-weekly meetings on Skype for 3 years across a series of timezones, my deep investment in studying time and temporality is indebted to our adventures and continuous reflections on the future. To Felipe Cervera, Shawn Chua, Eero Laine, and João Florêncio, Yiota Demetriou, Areum Jeong, Azadeh Sharifi, and Asher Warren, thank you for being a dream team and a consistent source of inspiration throughout my years of study. When I proposed the project, I did not expect that in 3 years we would have achieved setting up an annual summer school and that we would co-write, co-curate, and co-edit in an academic climate that encourages single-authored monographs and a competitive race to secure tenured positions. The future looks much brighter with viii Acknowledgements your camaraderie, collegiality, and friendship. Our ambitious project would not have been possible without the support of the PSi Board, notably President and Vice-President Sean Metzger and Peter Eckersall, and Kevin Brown, Chief Editor of Global Performance Studies, and former Board members Maaike Bleeker and Sarah Bay-Cheng, all of whom I have learnt an incredible amount from during my PhD journey. Many of my ideas in this dissertation have taken shape through participating in various summer/ winter schools and conferences, including the Critical Theory Summer School “The Posthuman” at Utrecht University, New Materialism Training School: Research Genealogies and Material Practices at Tate Modern, IIAS Winter School “Media Activism and Postcolonial Futures” at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, RMes Digital Methods initiative at the University of Amsterdam, and PSi Summer School #0.5 in Hamburg. Parts of this dissertation have appeared in presentations at PSi conferences in Melbourne (PSi#21 Performance Climates, 2016), Hamburg (PSi#22 OverFlow, 2017), and Daegu (PSi#23 Performance as Network, 2018), as well as the Digital Media and Borders Workshop at Lingnan University in Hong Kong (2017). I am extremely grateful for the constructive feedback, literature recommendations, and encouragement from fellow attendees. A big thank you is owed to the Board Members of the R. C. Lee Centenary Scholarship who have generously extended my grant to cover 4 more years of PhD study. Not only have I studied hard, I have also had many opportunities to travel and see more of the world during the 6 years of scholarship support. I feel absolutely privileged to have actually met in person a significant amount of scholars
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