E31: Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 2: the factory

Oddly Influenced

An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do* with that theory in the sense of "applying it to software". So it doesn't really fit with the podcast theme. But his is a disturbing theory for the problem-solvers among us, so I make it more palatable by comparing it to a cult horror movie from 1997.

Sources

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975
• C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000
• Vincenzo Natali, script for the movie "Cube", 6th draft
• Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. The chapter I cite is “Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage”

Other mentions

• On large language models and "a judicious amount of randomness", Stephen Wolfram's "What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?" is good.
• Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016
• George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, 1987
• Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002
• The Eastern State Penitentiary was a model prison that featured solitary confinement, a Bible as the only possession, and piecework in the cell. It was the founding institution of what came to be called "The Pennsylvania System." See also "Eastern State Penitentiary: A Prison With a Past".
• I mention an idea I got from Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. I don't exactly remember the sources. For Rorty, it was probably Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For Fish, it might have been Is There a Text in This Class?

  Image credit

  The image is the Albion flour mill, completed in 1786, which was possibly the referent of Blake's "dark satanic mills" in his poem Jerusalem:

  And did the Countenance Divine,
  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
  And was Jerusalem builded here,
  Among these dark Satanic Mills?