In fifteen years the dominant cultural metaphor shifted from resisting face-as-barcode to accepting it.

Evidence

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be human—to remain distinctively human—in the twenty-first century? A decade and a half ago, it still made sense for one of the United States’s leading privacy advocates, Philip Agre, to assert that “your face is not a barcode.” But in May 2018, the black rap artist Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, released a video that went viral called “This is America.” As the song fades, he sings, “You just a barcode.” The chasm between these two sentences says much about the recent trajectory of poverty and race relations in the United States, already touched on in the last chapter. But it also opens an even larger story about the violence that data colonialism does everywhere to the core human values of freedom and autonomy. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 466

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to surveillance/attention school readings on biometric identity and the commodification of the self; also resonates with the reader’s existing work on data as extractive territory. — connects to: Stylistic features change meaning when they shift from symptom to cultural norm. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 118; Cultural paradigms replace previous aesthetics entirely when they shift — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 382; Fragmented cultural symbols now hold diametrically opposed meanings simultaneously — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 727 (+1 more)
• CANDY: The Agre-to-Gambino barcode sentence inversion is a tight, quotable fact for conversation.

Broader Connections

• Stylistic features change meaning when they shift from symptom to cultural norm. #exemplifies (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 118
• Cultural change can follow institutional change rather than precede it #corroborates (0.82) — , The Rod and the Child, 2237
• Fragmented cultural symbols now hold diametrically opposed meanings simultaneously #exemplifies (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 727
• Cultural paradigms replace previous aesthetics entirely when they shift #complicates (0.72) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 382