Core Post 5: Obfuscation as a De Certeauan Tactic

I want to focus my core post on the idea of obfuscation and what else that might imply in terms of our relationship to data. Brunton and Nissenbaum, to me, are drawing from a kind of De Certeauan tactics-strategy schema in which they frame obfuscation as a way to “make do” in response to a totalizing structure of surveillance. As Adam appropriately points us to Foucault, such is dependent on the existence of a larger framework to which the 'obfuscator' is subjected, and it is only through the tension between structure and individual that obfuscation, resistance, or “trouble-making” (Brunton and Nissenbaum, p. 62) becomes necessary, desirable, and possible. If surveillance is the layout of the city, obfuscation is De Certeau’s back alley – “it can only take place within them… [but] it does not receive its identity from them” (De Certeau, p. 101). I’m wondering here, once again, about self-curation processes and how measurable types can also be repurposed by individuals as ways of not only obfuscation and hiding from data mining regimes, but also strategic self-presentation. Strategically curated data doubles can be generated by manipulating data in ways that can somewhat subvert or mislead data mining processes, and in an increasingly mediated world where reductive algorithmically generated data doubles are, often times, the most public-facing aspects of individual personas, their reductive nature might contrastingly prove to be an effective tool in particular contexts, such as the case with Last.fm I mentioned in my previous core post. Here, the strategically curated measurable type is flipped into a kind of digital and cultural currency through which the individual specifically siphons the symbolic power of the dominant into his/her/their own self-presentation via data as a mode of asserting agency.