Ethnography Blog Entry Four

This week's readings are about the biopolis, and how it relates to the toys (augmented reality glasses) featured in the Japanese animated film “Dennou Coil- a circle of children”.

In Daikoku City, augmented reality glasses are distributed to children who, including the protagonist, Yuko, use these glasses to play games. They overlay information onto physical spaces by creating artificial creatures and data trails, for instance. They also program and trade illegal hacker software.

Hence the children are empowered to play with the city, to create uses beyond those imagined and legally permitted by Megamass, the corporation that manufactures the glasses. As the glasses are toys, they do not have preset objectives and can be repurposed to facilitate different types of gameplay. This is like paidia as proposed by Callois, which resists social control (e.g. surveillance by biocontrollers, including Megamass, adult family members of the children and the government).

Paidia, especially in the case of the child hackers in Daikoku city, can hence be expressed as resistance to manipulative corporation. It is also easier to exit the game than a commercial one that aims to seduce players into an immersive gaming experience.

However, the presence of biocontrollers can be justified, as control and disciplinary action may be necessary for the well-being of the biopolis, including health and security of the people. There is hence tension between bios and politics (i.e. life and power).

Bios and polis have different definitions, however. Foucault proposes the tension between bios and polis as the populace being shaped by institutions through apparatuses (i.e. bios shaped by polis), but Agamben describes a distinction between bios and zoe (the “undesirables”, people whose lives are stripped of citizenry by the polis). In this case, governments, or even corporations such as Megamass, act as an extended family to protect and care for its populace by ridding it of undesirables. This is opposed to state oppression (e.g. in sovereign societies as mentioned by Foucault).

Agamben also talked about subjects: an organic being tied to multiple subjectivities depending on the different ways apparatuses (e.g. mobile phones and not Foucault's instruments of control) can be repurposed. Hence apparatuses are generative.

However, apparatuses promote artificial/digital life forms (e.g. virtual pets in Daikoku) that are intangible. Yet these intangible life forms are capable of evoking feelings in organic beings while perhaps distancing relations between people (e.g. Yuko's emotional attachment to her dog versus her emotional distance from adults outside the game). These digital life forms are also prone to exterior control and provide opportunities for profit (e.g. corporations selling traceable data).

The reading also mentioned that networked control is elastic and seldom felt, yet even biocontrollers are not free as they are bound to those they control.

Question: What could be the impact of mixed reality toys/games (e.g. the augmented reality glasses in Daikoku City) in real life?

These gadgets support the biopolis, but “the mobile device is prone to exterior control, regardless of the user's conviction.” Does this mean there is less impact on non-players?

On the other hand, the biopolis seems to be a concept that applies to the society as a whole, not just to players in a mixed reality game. If so, what will happen to non-”players”?

For example, the elderly may be less receptive to mixed reality toys/games/gadgets. As a result, would the biopolis have less impact as these people will be free from the gadget's control? (For example, less results can be seen from tracking the elderly since they are less mobile, although their everyday lives can still be disrupted by play or controllers/subjects.) Or will these people be forced to be subjects or targeted as undesirables?