Postscript on the Ctrl+Alt Society

Abstract

This chapter explores new-model DH projects that use locative media to augment the real world with layers of virtual data relevant to a user’s geolocation. Building on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of control societies as an anticipation of surveillance capitalism and a social diagram that gives pause to the digital humanities imperative of open access, I propose a preliminary typology of spatial access protocols for locative media, and argue for their potential to raise critical questions about the control society. In theory, locative media apps exhibit the paradoxical tendency that Deleuze describes as simultaneously enabling access while intensifying enclosure and control. In actual practice, many locative media installations foreground the persistence of locality and enclosure within mobile networks. In their most critical mode, locative media engage multiple analogue and digital protocols that allow us to play at eluding control through what Alexander Galloway calls “life resistance”, while revealing that any technology that confines access to specific social sites might actually represent a form of resistance within control societies. Locative media are thus characteristic of what I call the Ctrl+Alt society, a modulation of Deleuze’s own terminology that insists upon the residual critical potential of the logic of control within our current post-digital condition, which blurs the distinction between analogue and digital states, between moulds and modulations.