Introduction

It is or contention that this book, The Pre-Crime Society: Crime, Culture and Control in the Ultramodern Age, furthers a project that was initiated and subsequently developed within two of our previous volumes (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009; Arrigo, Bersot & Sellers, 2011). Among the themes shared by these volumes was a sustained focus on the philosophical currents and cultural intensities that produce de-vitalizing and finalizing laws of shared human captivity (Arrigo & Sellers, 2018). These laws originate in the captivity of forms (Plato, 2008), including the forms of human abstraction and their sequelae (Arrigo & Polizzi, 2018).

In the first of these volumes, Bruce Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic (2009) argued for a ‘revolution in penology’ (pp. 3–8). As the authors explained, this revolution begins with a radical critique of subjectivity (i.e. human capital abstracted) and the constitutive forces into and out of which this subjectivity both shapes and is shaped by a ‘society of captives’ (pp. 170–95). This is the captivity of the kept and their keepers, the watched and their watchers in which risk-as-currency prevails as trade. The authors further asserted that when the excesses of this captivity are maintained in consciousness, through dialogical encounters, and in material expressions of the same, then they (these excesses) nurture the captivity of society. This is the captivity of ontology (i.e. of being human), and of epistemology (i.e. of human relating). The maintenance of these conditions forestalls a ‘people yet to come’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 108), and forecloses what Hardt and Negri (2004) have described as the ‘multitude’ (pp. 97–157).

The ubiquity of the prison form is revealing of captivity, both as meditation on and metaphor about risk, the risk of being human and of evolving in humanness (Nietzsche, 1966), amidst the culture of crime control that the management of human risk inevitably spawns (e.g. Ericson & Haggerty, 1997; O’Malley, 2004). By prison form we mean its symbols and discourses (Sloop, 1996; Brown, 2009), its architecture and environmental designs (Johnston, 2006; Day, 2013; Reiter and Koenig, 2015), its industries and mechanisms (Alexander, 2011; Geunther, 2013). In this regard, we might think of the prison form as what Foucault (1980) described as a dispositif: an apparatus of discipline and of disciplining whose systems of thought reproduce a network of discursively structured power/knowledge relations (pp. 194–228).

What happens to culture when the experience of privacy, as we have lived it, disappears? What happens to (co)existence when the commercialism of surveillance capitalism fetishizes ‘life mining’ (van Dijck, 2014, p. 198) expressed through the recursive logics of new social media? What happens to human subjectivity when all of reality is reduced to the predictive analytics of dataism (i.e. the algorithmic scrutiny of metadata and the cyber-construction of networked profiles) (e.g. Powell, Stratton & Cameron, 2018)? These are the information technology conditions of the current era. These conditions reflect a collective, undulating consciousness. Within the ‘hardwiring’ or circuitry of this consciousness lurk the passions of law and the emotions of crime reassembled as ‘dividual’ justice (Deleuze, 1992, p. 6). This volume both probes and dissects the criminological landscape of this consciousness that we, and others, have termed the ultramodern (Arrigo, 2012; Arrigo, Sellers & Sostakas, 2020; Shantz, 2014).

Introduction

We are seeing changing patterns of governance in a globalizing world. Globalization initially gestured at interconnectedness, with others involved in our lives as we in theirs—it was envisioned as a metaphor for the ‘Global Village’ (McLuhan, 1964). Yet, globalization was reconstructed through the lens of global neoliberal capitalism, which is governed by market logics, technologies and homogenizing modes of human interaction that often produce marginalizing and dehumanizing processes geared toward control (Bauman, 1998). In our ultramodern era, crime is also reassembled so that the criminal and the vulnerable are linked to danger and surveillance, justifying new ventures in securitization policy and practice. The responsibilization of citizens globally through devices of post-panoptic bio-power require researchers in the post-criminology era of pre-crime to reexamine the matters of identity-making and rights-claiming as they relate to the concept of citizenship by critically re-problematizing this static construction of the social person (Sellers & Arrigo, 2016).

Global neoliberal capitalism seeks to weather its own crises and creatively consume its contradictions while imposing uniformity—that is sameness in the sense of the same everywhere (Noys, 2011). A closer examination of the biopolitical processes, technologies of domination and multiplicity of surveillance accompanying neoliberalism is needed to expose techno-globalism's mechanisms of post-panoptic (synoptic) and banoptic control. This new ultramodern sign-optic system of governmentality does not refer only to the management of political structures but also designates the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed (Foucault, 2008). The resulting neoliberal governance recognizes the need to make subjects more governable and interactively visible to prevent and pre-empt deviance or crime so securitization efforts can be normalized. Instruments of bio-digital power, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) implants, impose the liquid process of individualization, which places the focus onto individual personal responsibility for social or economic failure, delinquency, crime or violence (Bauman, 2000). The conditions required for creating newly responsibilized global citizens includes: (1) technologies of surveillance, which act as biopower—instruments of technology deployed to discipline and make individuals behave; (2) heightened individualism fostered through competition and linked to fear of cultural and economic non-survival; and (3) discourse of moral absolutism tied to inevitability of the economization of the Social—suggesting no alternatives to neoliberal forms of marketization, choice and competition exist (Sellers & Arrigo, 2017, 2018a).

Summary

We present an agent-based model of the key activities of a troop of chacma baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) based on data collected at De Hoop Nature Reserve in South Africa. The construction of the model identified some key elements that were missing from the field data that would need to be collected in subsequent fieldwork. We analyse the predictions of the model in terms of how well it is able to duplicate the observed activity patterns of the animals and the relationship between the parameters that control the agent's decision procedure and the model's predictions. At the current stage of model development, we are able to show that, across a wide range of decision parameter values, the baboons are able to achieve their energetic and social time requirements. The simulation results show that decisions concerning movement (group action selection) have the greatest influence on the outcomes. Group decision making is a fertile field for future research, and agent-based modelling offers considerable scope for understanding group action selection.

Introduction

Group living is a common strategy among mammals and is key to understanding the success of the primate order in general and early humans in particular. For animals that forage or move in social groups, decisions about when and where to move often depend upon social interactions between group members (Krause and Ruxton, 2002; Couzin et al., 2005). Little is actually known, however, about how groups of animals arrive at such collective decisions (Conradt and Roper, 2003). We focus on the problem of action selection in groups, i.e., where an individual's action choice is constrained by the choices of other members of the group.