In what seems like a distant, more innocent time in surveillance (viz. 2003), Andy Clark was able to use as an example in his Natural Born Cyborgs an implanted tracking chip for pets. Does your cat tend to wander off? Now you can know where Whiskers is at all times! (no doubt taking a nap in the sun, and not earning his keep catching mice) Clark’s point was to argue that we are all tool-using creatures by nature, to the point that when we speak of our “minds,” that term really needs to include at least some of the tools we use. So the extended mind hypothesis was the point of the book, and pet-tracking an example, but Clark’s optimism was evidenced in the way that he dumped concerns like privacy together into a final chapter. It's that ability to put the worries in the last chapter that seems dated now.
In Sleights of Reason, Mary Beth Mader makes the point that there is an ontological distinction between the members of a normalized “population” and the individuals they represent. Mader is talking about statistics and bell curves; as she summarizes the part of her argument that’s relevant here, “statistical social measurement is ontologically problematic on the very level of the conceptual composites expressed in statistical measures and distributions and not only on an allegedly duplicitous subsequent prescriptive application of an allegedly descriptive conceptual instrument” (45). In other words, it’s not just that we get told that we’re “abnormal” or not living up to the norm; it’s that the way the norm is constructed also needs scrutiny.
The connection between neoliberalism and biopower – the one that Foucault seems to make in Birth of Biopolitics, but then doesn’t exactly spell out – is made crystal clear in a piece by Gary Becker that makes precisely this move in declaring that accounts of human behavior based on human rationality can nonetheless apply to irrational behavior as well. The piece is cited often enough for the temerity of the claim that economic rationality can be applied to irrational behavior, and it clearly evidences Foucault’s claim that “American neo-liberalism still involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market. It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges “ (BB 243; Becker elsewhere claims that “the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior, although I recognize, of course, that much behavior is not yet understood” (Essence of Becker, 13, emphasis original)). That said, what is actually going on in the discussion of irrationality becomes substantially more interesting when read in light of Mader’s point about norms and populations.