Excremental Identity and Retinal Securities : Turning Your Poop and Eyes into Data
Contrary to belief, your fecal matter is not waste. It is actually quite valuable. This is the insight of an article titled, "Viruses in the faecal microbiota of monozygotic twins and their mothers" published in the scientific journal Nature, one of two of the most prestigious journals in the sciences - the other being Science. While understanding the details of their work require some fluidity in scientific language, their conclusions can be translated in easier terms: the virus-like particles, or VLPs, found in your excrement within a period of time is unique to you. In other words, I can probe your fecal matter and identify you (if I have a database that I can use as a reference table). This terribly exhilarating insight was not lost to the popular media that reported on this as well.*
At first, this is just fascinating and nothing more. But we ought to be more cautious about what the results mean. In my previous post, I wrote about how strategies and technologies that sought to think of life in terms of information were adopted through time. But what this article from Nature points to is something that goes beyond that: it transforms your body into information. Of course, when I say that it transforms you into information, I do not mean that your bodies are suddenly turned into bits like in Star Trek's de-molecularization of your body or Matrix's Neo showing your body as just lines of computer codes - at least, not yet. What I mean is that your body can be tabulated as information in databases for curious people to look you up and that that information can stand in for your actual body. Therefore, I don't need you and your body to be here to say that I know you. In a few clicks on a computer screen, I can read some information and claim that I know you - your physical body is a bit obsolete.**
The need to probe your feces has its own history. 19th century westerners, mainly Europeans and North Americans, were worried about fecal matter as a source of bad odor that was thought to be the source of disease. But around the 20th century, with the rise of germ theory, the fears of the bad smell turned into fears of germs that could inhabit fecal matter and pass the disease. Carrying a blend of both explanations of disease causation, American administrators occupying Philippines in the first half of the 1900s wanted to teach the locals the "correct" way to dispose of their excrements, use "proper" toilets, and celebrate "Fiestas" that aimed to convert the work of cleaning up their streets into a familiar and fun activity.***
While the American forces in the Philippines were more interested in getting rid of excrement during their occupation until about World War II, the Korean government after the Korean War in the 1950s and during the Vietnam war in the 1960s, used methods inspired by something called tropical medicine to look at feces under a microscope. This form of medical understanding was developed by Japan during their imperialist expansion into Asia that aimed to study diseases they thought were unique to tropical countries. That's why they called it tropical medicine. Using the traces of that medical theory, Koreans looked at poop under a microscope as part of the larger anti-parasite campaigns instituted by its military-authoritarian government as a way to clean up the country. Laboratory scientists would smear the excrement and provide a meticulous observation of the fecal matter that had been collected from school teachers to whom children submitted their brown bags with their poop. The same methods from the anti-parasite campaigns was deployed to collect excrement from soldiers fighting in Vietnam as a way to measure how much their country had developed. In short, good poop was a measure of modernity.****
This history of the authorities' desire to collect excrement may be retold as ultimately a beneficial and distant activity happening in the laboratories. But the logic of collecting excrements has been deployed in everyday life and closer to you - your iPhones and Android phones. While you may think it is quite convenient to unlock your phones using your thumbprints or retinal scans - Samsung's Galaxy Note S7 now offers retinal scans - they are part of the historical effort to collect biological data, or biodata for short. The devices are collecting the biological features of your body which are more or less permanent and irreplaceable and transform them into information to be stored in a machine. Indeed, it is very convenient, but it is certainly fraught with risks and, certainly, not benign. Looking more closely into the movie Minority Report shows what this collection of biodata may mean.
Minority Report (2002) poster from IMBD
Minority Report takes place in some distant future where a particular city has been able to reduce crime dramatically using a technology that predicts them. The police use that information to arrest what you could call pre-criminals before any crime actually happens. The technology is based on the prediction of 3 very strange beings who will "see" the future and pass the information to the police. However, every now and then, one of beings predicting the future - the most gifted one - sees an alternate future and therefore, contests the actual prediction. This dissenting vision is called the minority report and it presents a threat to the legitimacy and reliability of the entire system of policing that the city has used thus far. The movie's plot follows Tom Cruise and his need to make a minority report public and save himself from ending up in prison after a prediction shows him committing a murder. However, what is quite remarkable (and also not so remarkable today) is that in the movie, Cruise walks into buildings where ocular devices automatically detect and scan a subject's eyes to provide tailored advertisements. This means that some institution holds an entire database of his personal information that can be accessed with a single scan. This is why later in the movie, Cruise finds a new set of eyeballs to avoid being tracked by the police.
While the movie appears to depict a futuristic society that is tightly monitored by biodata (retinal scans), this is not in the future. Every time that you walk through the airport security line as you come in to New York City or Seattle, they scan your fingerprints that connects you to a database that will let the authorities decide whether or not to let you in to the country. And as I mentioned above, when your phone asks for your thumbprints, it is collecting biodata as well. While deployment of such biometric technologies on the general public in Europe and in the United States has been limited - but more invasive for those who have been through the criminal justice system - the use of biodata for state security is not new nor in the future.
The beginnings of usage of biodata today began with the British scientist Francis Galton and the development of a field called Biometry along with his peer Karl Pearson (a mathematician) between the late 19th century and early 20th century. Galton, is of course, famous (or infamous) for being the father of the disgraced field of eugenics that would be further developed in the United States and taken up by Nazi Germany during their genocides in World War II. At a time when statistics was becoming popular due to its ability to make tracking the growing population easier, Galton developed the mathematical and statistical concept of biometry, mainly motivated by eugenic concerns. But in principle, it was a mathematical formula to talk about relationships of one body part to another. Some of the tools used today in statistics, such as correlation and regression, can be traced back to Galton's formulation of biometry.
The concept of biometry was applied, or rather developed, through Galton's fingerprinting system that came out as an alternative to the French system of identifying criminals. He proposed fingerprinting to be used instead of Alphonse Bertillon's method of taking and classifying photographs. While the development of the fingerprinting method preceded the official establishment of biometry and was spurred in part by his competition with Bertillon's system of classification, the adoption, expansion, and utility of the fingerprinting system had more to do with British imperialism than technological competition with his French counterpart. His interest in using fingerprinting for practical purposes of policing linked up with his views about the importance of protecting the British empire. And with the aid of many personalities and interests, fingerprinting based on the concept of biometry would become a critical institution for the British empire.^
More specifically, the biometric and fingerprinting system was developed in South Africa (and India first) and has now been introduced in previously colonized countries like Argentina, Brazil, and India. Their welfare system for the poor, for instance, allows those who cannot read or write to go to the ATM and use their fingerprints to have their allowance delivered to them. But most importantly, I should briefly note that the biometric system was not historically so beneficial for South Africa - it was actually quite detrimental in their progress toward a modern state and the treatment of its people. Under the various governments in South Africa, it was used to segregate, mistreat and keep black populations under white control. It was a violent tool, stretching all the way into the Apartheid government; at times, it was used as a way to keep the black people from running away from the horrible mines run by white capitalist interests. In short, it was brutal and repressive.
The next time you flush your poop or give your thumbprint to your phone, it would be good to pause for a second. For now, you cannot exchange the viral population of your intestines or get a new set of fingerprints if something happens to you - although, it is true that fecal transplants have been done. But if a hacker gets your fingerprints, then you will have no alternative and your body - you - will have been stolen. While it is at the moment not common, giving away your excrements to create a database might happen in the future. After all, the Human Microbiome Project that is going on works on the similar idea of the Human Genome Project - and the risks are also similar. The turning of your biological parts into biodata is a double-edged sword and in the hands of the state can even result in an intrusive surveillance of your lives. This is not to create panic or propose we all become Luddites. On a more practical level, it should lead us to discuss about the availability and the unavailability of protective mechanisms that will shield us against the violence that the creation of biodata can unleash - this is what historian Breckenridge proposes. Of course, this issue of body and biodata gives rise to other questions like, Can the state own my body part? Can anybody claim ownership of my poop? An interesting case of a spleen operation in Seattle points us toward an answer to this complex question. But that would perhaps be best told in another post. Until then, flush away, but with a bit of caution.
Notes:
* Alejandro Reyes et al. Viruses in the faecal microbiota of monozygotic twins and their mothers. Nature. 334-340. July 15, 2010. A more exact interpretation is that interpersonal VLPs are highly variable but that interpersonal VLPs are more or less homogeneous, and that they study's conclusion involves about the type of viruses that are that stable, mainly temperate phages. This type of study is not unique or the first. They have been conducted for bacterial communities and a Human Microbiome Project (like the Human Genome Project) has been going on. For more details, refer to the article; An example of the reporting in popular media is by LiveScience. "Your Poop is Unique: Gut Viruses Different in Every Person." http://www.livescience.com/10724-poop-unique-gut-viruses-person.html.
** For more about the conversion into databases and what this means, The Global Genome by Eugene Thacker provides a great analysis. Similar insights have been shown by sociologist Rene Almeling in her book about reproductive technologies (IVF), Sex Cells
*** See Colonial Pathologies by Warwick Anderson. Such activities were meant in part to inculcate a form of a modern subjectivity by the American forces. By performing such cleaning rituals, the administrators hoped to produce modern subjects - or at least get as close to modernity as possible.
**** See Reconstructing Bodies by John DiMoia
^ The word "regression" in statistics shows its racists and colonial origins: Galton came up with the concept as a way to describe the idea that the organisms in higher ladders of evolution would "regress" back to its more "savage types" based on his observation about the "savage" South African tribes. For more on the history of the biometric state, see The Biometric State by Keith Breckenridge