REVIEWSAriel on the border Alejandro Arturo Vil ega, Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianopolis, 2014. 284 pp., £62.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 0 25301 248 7 hb., 978 0 25301 257 9 pb. Alejandro Villega’s new book is a philosophical interpretation of the philosophy emerging from Latin […]

Commentary DATA & SURVEILL ANCE Oceanic enemy A brief philosophical history of the NSA Grégoire chamayou 6 July 1962, NAVFAC base, Barbados. A grey building stands at the foot of a stone lighthouse overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Inside, a military serviceman is examining the lines being recorded on an enormous roll of paper by the […]

Big data, smal freedom? Informational surveil ance and the political Burkhardt wolf In 2010, ‘big data’ was described as ‘datasets that could not be captured, managed and processed by general computers within an acceptable scope’. [1] Today’s definitions boil down to three Vs: Variety, Volume and Velocity. Big data deals with mostly un structured, heterogeneous […]

The signature of security Big data, anticipation, surveil ance Claudia aradau‘ We are not crystal ball gazers. We are Intelligence Agencies’, noted the former GCHQ director Iain Lobban in a public inquiry on privacy and security by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament (ISC) in the wake of the Snowden revelations about […]

In his study of the semantics of historical time, Reinhart Koselleck proposes that ‘two specific determinants’ characterize modernity’s ‘new experience of transition: the expected otherness of the future and, associated with it, the alteration in the rhythm of temporal experience: acceleration, by means of which one’s own time is distinguished from what went before’. If […]