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--- when_biometrics_fail_shoshana_amielle_magnet [2022/11/11 17:47]
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-When Biometrics Fail, Shoshana Amielle Magnet
+Notes on When Biometrics Fail, Shoshana Amielle Magnet
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+(p.128)\\
+Biometric discourse produces new forms of //scopophilia//, pleasure in looking. I coin the term surveillant scopophilia to show that the new forms of pleasure in looking produced by biometric technologies are tied both to the violent dismembering of bodies marked by radicalized, gendered,  classed, and sexualized identities and to pleasure in having anxieties about security resolved by biometric surveillance.
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+Using biometric technologies as a form of surveillance of suspect bodies and then reducing those suspect bodies into their component parts helps to allay the anxieties created around security through surveillance and dismemberment.
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+(p. 131)\\
+//Witwer: Flaws//
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+[…]understanding scientific practice as interpretative act.
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+(p. 133)\\
+the //technofantastic//
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+Like the biometric image itself, a satisfyingly contained series of zeroes and ones, the biometric match seems to guarantee our security—closing up security holes with a satisfying clink—serving simultaneously to smooth and to identify. Here surveillant scopophilia is a visual process that serves to smooth our anxieties about security, as these visual representations suggest that those bodies that threaten our security will be reliably identified.
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+(p. 150)\\
+With this new search technology, bodies are imagined as stable entities that can reliably give us definitive proof of identity, creating processes of social stratification in which “material and technological infrastructures divide populations” by gender, race, class, and other axes of identity (Monaghan 2010:83). Yet biometric mismatches due to mechanical failures and the technology’s inability to work objectively dispute such stability.
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+(p. 151)\\
+We must also think of the intensification of existing inequalities as failures.
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+Given the devastating consequences of biometric errors for human lives, we need a language that is not restricted to technical terms. Biometric failures as //complex sorrows// is a beginning.
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+[…]what Haraway and Goodeve (2000:115) calls “denaturalization… when what is taken for granted can no longer be taken for granted precisely because there is a glitch in the system.”
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+[…]while cultural theorists generally understand the basics of the scientific objects they study, the same cannot be said for scientist’s knowledge of cultural theory.
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+[…] within biometric science we are witnessing a return to the long discredited field of anthropometry and physiognomy, serving as a reminder that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is always already bound up with culture.
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+before formulating further policies regulating biometric technologies, it is imperative that we critically interrogate the assumptions upon which these technologies are based, the limits of any technology to address the larger context of inequality, and the complex relationships of these technologies to their existing cultural context. Moreover the conditions under which they are produced needs to be examined further, as does who gets to participate in conversations about their expansion and development and who is notably absent from these discussions. […] We need to continue to investigate the investments of billions of dollars on technological solutions to social problems.
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+We may also understand biometric representations of the body as a map of the contemporary social moment, both producing and reflecting its enduring inequalities, prejudices, and competing values, as well as engraved with continued resistance and hope.
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+We do not need a perfect technology for representing the body—there is no such technology. Rather we need to think critically about how security imperatives and the development of new technologies are trumping a commitment of the state to address poverty and the perpetuation of intersecting forms of discrimination. In speaking about the consequences of corporeal fetishism, Donna Haraway (1997:160) argues, “We need a critical hermeneutics of genetics as a constitutive part of scientific practice more urgently than we need better map resolution for genetic markers.” The same is true for biometric technologies. Technological solutions to social problems have tended to take an approach characterized by the prioritization of security over substantiative equality, global lockdown over emancipation, and an uncritical “more is better” approach to new technologies. We need the formulation of technological policy based on principle of inclusiveness ands which facilitate substantive claims to equality. Otherwise, as we have seen, in offering to redefine social problems as scientific ones, biometric discourse will simply portray old inequalities in new ways.

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