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Gabrielle Rulon, Author

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Ron Deibert, Black Code

Big Data and Surveillance:

"German citizen Malte Spitz had virtually every moment of his life tracked- every step he took, where he slept and shopped, flights and train trips he booked, every person he communicated with, every Internet connection he made. All of his movements and communications were cross-checked against open-source information that could be found out about him, including his twitter, blog, and website entries. The surveillance net around him was total, and all this information was dutifully archived. In short, someone, somewhere, knew Malte Spitz better than he knew himself."

"It is an embodiment of us, a kind of cyberspace biography and activity chart, and we have little control over it."

In Ron Deibert's reading, surveillance is conducted at the corporate level. My narrative, while similar, disguises this type of surveillance through the tracking of the body as it moves in the "physical" space. However, this "physical space," which in actuality is virtual, relies heavily on the digital. The avatars themselves are digital, created through the neural reception of visual representations and digital transmissions of three-dimensional virtual space. In this way, the body becomes digitized, and the actions of the avatars exist as a collective set of data. Tracking the subject, in this case, becomes tracking the data. People are embodied as numbers. The barcoded body reflects this digitization of life. Organized and plotted as numbers, these people are controlled by a higher power, the corporation.
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