Tag Archives: Surveillance

Regular activity

Roundup, mid 2025

Teaching: Considering a different De Pizan text to adopt next semester (The Book of the Body Politic? The Book of Peace?). Other potential changes to the reading list: new tragedy (Ajax?), new Platonic dialogues, new passage selection for Augustine, a substitute for Rabelais (Erasmus? Bruni’s Laudatio?). Also thinking about changes to the organization of class time (e.g., beginning the week with a quick text survey) and of assignments (e.g., structuring take-home writing prompts with several micro-questions).

Research:

  • History of political thought: Reading for the second chapter in the project (Filippo Buonarroti): praxis over doctrine; coordination of underground activities; role of Brussels under the Dutch kings as a center of radical politics in the Biedermeier era; political experiences peaking early; Oneglia; transnational revolutionary myths; risky bookselling; Freemasonry; the importance of Corsica (the long shadow of Jean-Jacques); land reform and the Gracchi; a talented musician; the democratic Left against federalism in 1830s Italy; communism and natural law; the importance of revolutionary dictatorship. In other news, found a potential venue for presenting the Alfieri research (chap. 1): the BIAPT conference in Edinburgh, January 2026 (https://www.associationforpoliticalthought.ac.uk/conference/apt-2025-2-2/).
  • Tech and politics: New paper project on governmental legitimacy and surveillance, to be presented at the MANCEPT conference in Manchester (early September) in a panel on democratic deconsolidation and non-ideal theory.

Interesting books:

  • Adami, Christoph. The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Anderson, Perry. Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War. London: Verso, 2024.
  • Applbaum, Arthur Isak. Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard university press, 2019.
  • Beneš, Jakub S. The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Beonio-Brocchieri, Maria Teresa. Introduzione a Abelardo. I Filosofi. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1974.
  • Bobrycki, Shane. The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages. Collective Behavior in Europe and the Mediterranean, c. 500 – c. 1000. USA: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Bradlow, Benjamin H. Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg. Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Braunthal, Julius. History of the International, Volume II: 1914-1943. Translated by John Clark. New York: Praeger, 1967.
  • Cacioppo, Stephanie, and John T. Cacioppo. Introduction to Social Neuroscience. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University press, 2020.
  • Callanan, John. Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Cantimori, Delio. Utopisti e riformatori italiani. Edited by Lucio Biasiori and Francesco Torchiani. Saggi. Storia e scienze sociali. Roma: Donzelli editore, 2021.
  • Cennevitz, Martin. Verrà il giorno: le origini del primo maggio. Translated by Vincenzo Papa. Milano: Elèuthera, 2025.
  • Champlin, Edward. Tiberius and His Age: Myth, Sex, Luxury, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Christiano, Thomas. The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford university press, 2008.
  • Cunningham, Fiona S. Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Daum, Andreas W. Alexander von Humboldt: A Concise Biography. Translated by Robert Savage. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Davis, Richard H. Religions of Early India: A Cultural History. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Davis, Robert C. The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Deibert, Ronald J. Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy. Toronto, Ontario: Simon & Schuster, 2025.
  • Diggins, John Patrick. The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority. Chicago London: University of Chicago press, 1994.
  • DISCO Network, Disco. Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal. 1st ed. Sensing Media: Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Cultures of Media Series. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • Douady, Stéphane, Jacques Dumais, Christophe Golé, and Nancy Pick. Do Plants Know Math? Unwinding the Story of Plant Spirals, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Now. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Dourish, Paul. The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information. Cambridge, [Massachusetts]: The MIT Press, 2017.
  • Fitzpatrick, Sheila. On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
  • Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionnary Age. Princeton (N.J.): Princeton university press, 1991.
  • Goldin, Claudia Dale. Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Princeton: Princeton university press, 2023.
  • Graeber, David. Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
  • Graham, A. C. Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science. Hong Kong : London: Chinese University Press, Chinese University of Hong Kong ; School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1978.
  • Halvorson, Hans. How Logic Works: A User’s Guide. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
  • Hancox, Dan. Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. London ; New York: Verso, 2024.
  • Haskel, Jonathan, and Stian Westlake. Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy. Princeton : Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Hesk, Jon. Sophocles: Ajax. Bristol Classical Press Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.
  • Howes, Hetta. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2025.
  • Jubb, Robert. Unjust Authority: Justice, Liberal Democracy and Political Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
  • Kaufman, Arnold S. The Radical Liberal: New Man in American Politics. [1st ed.]. New York: Atherton Press, 1968.
  • Kauṭilya. King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra: A New Annotated Translation. Translated by Patrick Olivelle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Keane, Webb. Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Kim, David D. Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024.
  • Koerner, Joseph Leo. Art in a State of Siege. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Kohl, James, and John Litt. Urban guerilla warfare in Latin America. Cambridge, Mass London: MIT press, 1974.
  • Kotsonis, Yanni. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Lamb, Michael. A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le siècle du populisme: histoire, théorie, critique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2020.
  • Levy, Jonathan. The Real Economy: History and Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Lynch, Michael P. True to Life: Why Truth Matters. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
  • McQuillan, Dan. Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
  • Merriman, John M., ed. Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979.
  • Mindell, David P. The Network of Life: A New View of Evolution. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Morrison, Robert G. Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe. Stanford Ottoman World Series. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • O’Brien, M. E., and Eman Abdelhadi. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022.
  • Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
  • Reid, Richard. The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Schroeder, Paul W. Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered. London New York: Verso, 2025.
  • Seymour, Richard. Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. London ; New York: Verso, 2024.
  • Stanley-Becker, Isaac. Europe without Borders: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Stewart, Ian B. The Celts: A Modern History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
  • Storm, Eric. Nationalism: A World History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 10. Berkeley: University of California press, 1996.
  • Ullmann, Walter. Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism. London: P. Elek, 1977.
  • Walter, Alissa. Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2025.
  • Wawro, Gregory J., and Ira Katznelson. Time Counts: Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Wen, Xin. The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
  • Wright, Andrea. Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2024.
  • Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. In-Formation Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Interesting events/visits: Juvarra buildings in Turin; Alfieri’s native home in Asti.

Rabbit holes: German rearmament, deficit spending, and the leadership cadres of the SPD; outsourcing of public coercion and patrimonialization of the State; organized crime and grassroots social control; the West as a historical political category; the cultural history of violence as organizing principle; queuing as a structuring of the urban space; Garibaldi; symbolic communication in the High Middle Ages; Roger Bacon on heresiarchs and fascinatio.

Sundry: Experimenting with decentralized alternatives to collaborative word processors/file-sharing.

Trustworthiness

A global take on the mistrust moment

My forthcoming piece on Ethan Zuckerman’s Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them for the Italian Political Science Review.

Trustworthiness

Limits of trustbuilding as policy objective

Yesterday, I attended a virtual event hosted by CIGI and ISPI entitled “Digital Technologies: Building Global Trust”. Some interesting points raised by the panel: the focus on datafication as the central aspect of the digital transformation, and the consequent need to concentrate on the norms, institutions, and emerging professions surrounding the practice of data (re-)use [Stefaan Verhulst, GovLab]; the importance of underlying human connections and behaviors as necessary trust markers [Andrew Wyckoff, OECD]; the distinction between content, data, competition, and physical infrastructure as flashpoints for trust in the technology sphere [Heidi Tworek, UBC]. Also, I learned about the OECD AI Principles (2019), which I had not run across before.

While the breadth of different sectoral interests and use-cases considered by the panel was significant, the framework for analysis (actionable policy solutions to boost trust) ended up being rather limiting. For instance, communal distrust of dominant narratives was considered only from the perspective of deficits of inclusivity (on the part of the authorities) or of digital literacy (on the part of the distrusters). Technical, policy fixes can be a reductive lens through which to see the problem of lack of trust: such an approach misses both the fundamental compulsion to trust that typically underlies the debate, and also the performative effects sought by public manifestations of distrust.

Trustworthiness

Bridle’s vision

Belatedly finished reading James Bridle’s book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (Verso, 2018). As the title suggests, the text is systemically pessimist about the effect of new technologies on the sustainability of human wellbeing. Although the overall structure of the argument is at times clouded over by sudden twists in narrative and the sheer variety of anecdotes, there are many hidden gems. I very much enjoyed the idea, borrowed from Timothy Morton, of a hyperobject:

a thing that surrounds us, envelops and entangles us, but that is literally too big to see in its entirety. Mostly, we perceive hyperobjects through their influence on other things […] Because they are so close and yet so hard to see, they defy our ability to describe them rationally, and to master or overcome them in any traditional sense. Climate change is a hyperobject, but so is nuclear radiation, evolution, and the internet.

One of the main characteristics of hyperobjects is that we only ever perceive their imprints on other things, and thus to model the hyperobject requires vast amounts of computation. It can only be appreciated at the network level, made sensible through vast distributed systems of sensors, exabytes of data and computation, performed in time as well as space. Scientific record keeping thus becomes a form of extrasensory perception: a networked, communal, time-travelling knowledge making. (73)

Bridle has some thought-provoking ideas about possible responses to the dehumanizing forces of automation and algorithmic sorting, as well. Particularly captivating was his description of Gary Kasparov’s reaction to defeat at the hands of AI Deep Blue in 1997: the grandmaster proposed ‘Advanced Chess’ tournaments, pitting pairs of human and computer players, since such a pairing is superior to both human and machine players on their own. This type of ‘centaur strategy’ is not simply a winning one: it may, Bridle suggests, hold ethical insights on patways of human adaptation to an era of ubiquitous computation.

Online sociability and community

Edgelands Institute launches

Yesterday I attended the online launch event for Edgelands, a pop-up institute that is being incubated at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. The Institute’s goal is to study how our social contract is being redrawn, especially in urban areas, as a consequence of technological changes such as pervasive surveillance and unforeseen crises such as the global pandemic. The design of the EI is very distinctive: it is time-limited (5 years), radically decentralized, and aiming to bridge gaps between perspectives and methodologies as diverse as academic research, public policy, and art. It is also notable for its focus on rest-of-world urban dynamics outside the North-Atlantic space (Beirut, Nairobi, and Medellín are among the pilot cities). Some of its initiatives, from what can be gleaned at the outset, appear a bit whimsical, but it will be interesting to follow the Institute’s development, as a fresh approach to these topics could prove extremely inspiring.