Ruling segments of communities have always developed mental and on-paper maps to understand and manage the key relationships flowing through and cutting cross ‘their peoples’, connecting their hearts and minds to each other and, from rulers’ point of view, to the rules that put for them; it one way or another must have been made sure that the peoples are staying in order and obeying. It just took several millennia to advance the level of systematic, as well as the necessary tool-kit for command and control, before we arrive the idea of Panopticon. Building on the idea, it did not take too long until the most sophisticated control machinery has emerged. The composition of a big-data gathering and storing, meta-data processing and classifying methodologies and tools, took a form that is very close to Bentham’s original idea.
‘Meta-data’ is the classified form of big-digital data gathered and stored through the webs of digital-sensory networks forming the global surveillance architecture of which is the backbone. All the data extracted from the individuals, and abstracted from their living community context is brought together and put at work using high speed (near quantum) computing hardware which process massive amount of data flows through complex algorithmic modelling software. Many complex processes involve from gathering, storing, classification and sorting out of the global mass-flow of the raw data, and the follow-up process- es. Think of here the work of ranking algorithms running meta-search ‘engines’ like Google. This all package turns the Internet into an ‘intelligence’ production network working in real-time. Most of the information about the individuals, their inner, inter, intra, and infra relationships contain billions of raw-data, that becomes meaningful when put in various context. The massive amount of such data flows through the networks are captures at big-data storage, of which size is multiplied as you I write and you read these lines. Such storages absorb literally ‘everything’, including data makes these lines readable to you, of my writing style, character, readers’ profile, so on.
The modern and almost realized Panopticon, the complex anti-social and destructive relationships it is built on go well beyond the production lines of all kinds. One has to think of and locate the concept of ‘social-graph’ against this background in order to grasp this concrete-complexity from its fundamentals... Anti-social-graphing of the complex-totality of this surveillance architecture, from the people’s and worker’s point of view is essential to figure out which social relationships between who are forming it. This way it would help out us to understand the elements and working processes of global power structures; state, corporate and civil actors acting simultaneously at local, national, international levels. This means better identification of the weak spots to be targeted, as well as better ideas on how and when to strike.
Counter-mapping of the production process from workers point of view, has been a useful organising methodology developed by industrial workers of the Fordist factory. Enriched with variety of adopted techniques it has been used to understand how the production process is designed from the bosses’ point of view; what role given to each departments and workers, and why; and where would be the best time and place to strike. The idea of ‘social graph’ can be hacked in a similar way to think of and challenge the bio-, geo-, geno-, and pysco- conditions imposed on digital, analogue, manual and mental labour today. It can become a key tool to building new and concrete forms of immaterial and digital labour organising.