Panopticism is waning; panspectrocism is the nascent social diagram that organizes our lives. Heineken and Wal-Mart use pattern recognition and computer-assisted predictions of future behaviours to secure their markets. Google, the panspectric corporation par excellence, tells us that the company wants to know what you’ll want to do tomorrow. This brings renewed poignancy to Gabriel Tarde’s contagion-centric thought, write Kullenberg and Palmås.
Christopher Kullenberg
is a researcher at the University of Gothenburg where he works in the fields of phylogenetics and contagiontology.
