I’ve recently been reading some of David Lyon’s work, and his idea of developing an ethic of voyeurism has managed to intrigue me. I don’t think that I necessarily agree with his position in its entirety, but I think that it’s an interesting position. This paper, entitled “Code-Bodies and Algorithmic Surveillance: Examining the impacts of encryption, rights of publicity, and code-specters,” is an effort to think through how voyeurism might be understood in the context of Deep Packet Inspection using the theoretical lenses of Kant and Derrida. This paper is certainly more ‘theoretical’ than the working paper that I’ve previously put together on DPI, but builds on that paper’s technical discussion of DPI to think about surveillance, voyeurism, and privacy.

As always, I welcome positive, negative, and ambivalent comments on the draft. Elements of it will be adopted for a paper that I’ll be presenting at a Critical Digital Studies workshop in a month or two – this is your chance to get me to reform positions to align with your own! *grin*