“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, August 4, 2011

Come Over Agamben, Your Retina Has Already Been Scanned

I heard a CIA spokesperson on the radio a couple of weeks ago. For some reason the subject of retinal scans came up.

Agamben refuses to come to the States because he's protesting the “biometric” information gathering that many states are now doing. (As if fingerprints weren't already a case of that, but I'll leave that aside for a moment.)

In particular, Agamben has a beef with having his retinae scanned. Now this CIA spokesperson might have been doing psy-ops, but this is what she said:

“Oh, we can do that with a picture of you on Google Images. As long as it's over 150dpi.

So let me get this straight. The CIA can take a 150dpi (low resolution and then some) image of your face from Google and scan your retinae?

In that case, Agamben, there is no need to worry: you have already been scanned. So you might as well come over here!

2 comments:

khadimir said...

I presume they meant facial scanning. Ssssshhhhh.

Timothy Morton said...

no, retinal...