Joshua Reeves
Biographic Data
| ID | 3996479 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joshua Reeves |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joshua |
| FAMILY NAME | Reeves |
| SIGNATURE | REEVES J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Oregon State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7217-8308 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Pulp to Plutonium
This essay argues that media systems are not passive instruments of military power but active infrastructures that shape how war is conceived, executed, and sustained. Building on Harold Innis’s staples theory and the materialist traditions in media scholarship, we analyze three case studies—the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and the ongoing conflict over rare-earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—to demonstrate how media-specific dema…
Brain Warfare and the Malleable Mind
This article examines mid-century mind control experiments—carried out by intelligence services like MK-Ultra and the CIA—as biopolitical strategy. This analysis has two main goals: first, to build theory at the boundaries of biopolitical research, examining the conditions under which something like a “programmable subject” can emerge; and second, to reframe a key episode in the scientific management of the US population. In service of these aims…
Surveillance Work in (and) Teaching Technical Writing with AI
The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and ed…
The weapons of civilization
From the Confessional Booth to Digital Enclosures
This article examines the confessional booth as an architected space that, by serving as a geo-epistemological enclosure, prefigures digital forms of data capture and production. In conversation with critical scholarship about 'confessional culture,' it analyzes how confessionals and digital enclosures embody different historical iterations of a cultural technique that promises absolution - understood as a cleansing process of transparent exposur…
Accelerated ageing is associated with increased Covid-19 severity and differences across ethnic groups may exist
Background: While increased age is an established risk factor for COVID-19, there is great heterogeneity in outcomes within age groups. This is because chronological age does not reflect health, unlike biological age. We intend to investigate the association between accelerated ageing and COVID-19 outcomes through the lens of three measures, namely phenotypic age acceleration (PhenoAgeAccel), telomere length (Adjusted T/S Ratio) and facial ageing…
AI and the Automation of Warfare
On June 16, 2021, Fenwick McKelvey met with Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves (2020) to discuss their work, including their recently co-authored book Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine. McKelvey’s (2018) work focuses on algorithmic media and its implications for communication, including his book Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. Packer’s (2008) work is generally concerned with the use of automated, military, and mobile media for pur…
Rhetoric, violence, and the subject of civility
While critical scholars often focus on the ontological boundaries of rhetoric and violence, this article analyzes the rhetoric/violence relationship from the perspective of cultural governance. It builds upon earlier work in rhetoric and civility to analyze how authorities and institutions cultivate deliberative rhetorical norms as a means of regulating citizens’ political conduct. The rhetoric/violence opposition is used as a police logic to sup…
Citizen Spies
The history of recruiting citizens to spy on each other in the United States. Ever since the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, we think about surveillance as the data-tracking digital technologies used by the likes of Google, the National Security Administration, and the military. But in reality, the state and allied institutions have a much longer history of using everyday citizens to spy and inform on their peers. Citizen Spies shows…
Making enemies with media
This article examines the role of media technology in determining preconstitutive enemies of the political order. To do so, it analyzes how discipline-specific methods of enemy detection, analysis, and neutralization correspond to different media environments. Media have a diagnostic and prescriptive significance: not only do they locate enemies that conform to their own unique standards of measurement, they also offer reprogramming resources tha…
Sousveillance Capitalism
The striking commercial success of Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, provides us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on how the present convergence of surveillance/capitalism coincides with popular critical and theoretical themes in surveillance studies, particularly that of sousveillance. Accordingly, this piece will first analyze how surveillance capitalism has molded the political behaviors and imaginations …
Killer Apps
Of Social Networks and Suicide Nets
This article analyzes how the Silicon Valley ethos has influenced the development of screening technologies designed to enforce survival. Although various technologies have been used to ensure the survival of clumsy, sick, depressed, or unpredictable subjects, this article focuses on recent developments in suicide screens—that is, those screening technologies that detect suicidal subjects and aim to prevent acts of suicide. Digital versions of th…
Automatic for the people
Artificial intelligence is rapidly giving rise to new automated technologies. Among the most important of these innovations is the development of artificially intelligent machines that produce increasingly sophisticated forms of oral and written discourse. As more of our communicative encounters are with artificial agents, our notions of communicative labor, surveillance, and digital rhetoric will have to contend with these extensive shifts. As a…
License to Kill
This essay presents two complementary culprits in the death of Trayvon Martin. First, Zimmerman's acquittal under Florida's self-defense codes demonstrates how simple communicative rites allow citizens to undergo a subjective transformation by which they are empowered to act 'above the law.' Second, this transformation illustrates a darker side of our cultural dichotomization of speech and violence. Although this dichotomy generally functions to …
The Gift that Keeps on Giving
This essay analyzes Ingress, Google’s new massively multiplayer online game, as indicative of an emergent gift economy that calls for the datafication of one’s mobile life in exchange for the gift of play. From this perspective, Ingress is only suggestive of broader sociocultural transformations in which citizens must submit to pervasive surveillance in order to participate in contemporary economic and political life. Turning to Roberto Esposito’…
Romancing the Drone
This article provides an historical account of the U.S. military’s creation of and reliance upon Earth observation media to orient their ability to conduct first the Cold War and then the War on Terror. Two technological case studies are provided: 1) an account of the development of the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) system developed to automate the surveillance necessary for anti-nuclear bomber defence; and 2) a brief history of drone …
Police Media
The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communicatio…
If You See Something, Say Something
The US Department of Homeland Security’s new “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign displays a renewed drive to redistribute surveillance responsibilities to the public. Using this campaign as its point of departure, this article examines the relationship between conditions of sovereign governance and public lateral surveillance campaigns. As the police and other sovereign institutions have receded from their traditional public responsibi…
If You See Something, Say Something
The US Department of Homeland Security’s new “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign displays a renewed drive to redistribute surveillance responsibilities to the public. Using this campaign as its point of departure, this article examines the relationship between conditions of sovereign governance and public lateral surveillance campaigns. As the police and other sovereign institutions have receded from their traditional public responsibi…
Police Media
The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communicatio…
Automatic for the people
Artificial intelligence is rapidly giving rise to new automated technologies. Among the most important of these innovations is the development of artificially intelligent machines that produce increasingly sophisticated forms of oral and written discourse. As more of our communicative encounters are with artificial agents, our notions of communicative labor, surveillance, and digital rhetoric will have to contend with these extensive shifts. As a…
Sousveillance Capitalism
The striking commercial success of Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, provides us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on how the present convergence of surveillance/capitalism coincides with popular critical and theoretical themes in surveillance studies, particularly that of sousveillance. Accordingly, this piece will first analyze how surveillance capitalism has molded the political behaviors and imaginations …
The Gift that Keeps on Giving
This essay analyzes Ingress, Google’s new massively multiplayer online game, as indicative of an emergent gift economy that calls for the datafication of one’s mobile life in exchange for the gift of play. From this perspective, Ingress is only suggestive of broader sociocultural transformations in which citizens must submit to pervasive surveillance in order to participate in contemporary economic and political life. Turning to Roberto Esposito’…
Rhetoric, violence, and the subject of civility
While critical scholars often focus on the ontological boundaries of rhetoric and violence, this article analyzes the rhetoric/violence relationship from the perspective of cultural governance. It builds upon earlier work in rhetoric and civility to analyze how authorities and institutions cultivate deliberative rhetorical norms as a means of regulating citizens’ political conduct. The rhetoric/violence opposition is used as a police logic to sup…
Of Social Networks and Suicide Nets
This article analyzes how the Silicon Valley ethos has influenced the development of screening technologies designed to enforce survival. Although various technologies have been used to ensure the survival of clumsy, sick, depressed, or unpredictable subjects, this article focuses on recent developments in suicide screens—that is, those screening technologies that detect suicidal subjects and aim to prevent acts of suicide. Digital versions of th…
License to Kill
This essay presents two complementary culprits in the death of Trayvon Martin. First, Zimmerman's acquittal under Florida's self-defense codes demonstrates how simple communicative rites allow citizens to undergo a subjective transformation by which they are empowered to act 'above the law.' Second, this transformation illustrates a darker side of our cultural dichotomization of speech and violence. Although this dichotomy generally functions to …
If You See Something, Say Something
The US Department of Homeland Security’s new “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign displays a renewed drive to redistribute surveillance responsibilities to the public. Using this campaign as its point of departure, this article examines the relationship between conditions of sovereign governance and public lateral surveillance campaigns. As the police and other sovereign institutions have receded from their traditional public responsibi…
Romancing the Drone
This article provides an historical account of the U.S. military’s creation of and reliance upon Earth observation media to orient their ability to conduct first the Cold War and then the War on Terror. Two technological case studies are provided: 1) an account of the development of the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) system developed to automate the surveillance necessary for anti-nuclear bomber defence; and 2) a brief history of drone …
Police Media
The work of the modern police apparatus is highly dependent upon media technologies. This article traces crucial developments in this history, analyzing the central role that media have played in policing practices since the advent of the modern patrol in the late eighteenth century. We trace how the governmentalized police force has used media to govern efficiently what Foucault calls the three great variables: territory, speed, and communicatio…
The Gift that Keeps on Giving
This essay analyzes Ingress, Google’s new massively multiplayer online game, as indicative of an emergent gift economy that calls for the datafication of one’s mobile life in exchange for the gift of play. From this perspective, Ingress is only suggestive of broader sociocultural transformations in which citizens must submit to pervasive surveillance in order to participate in contemporary economic and political life. Turning to Roberto Esposito’…
License to Kill
This essay presents two complementary culprits in the death of Trayvon Martin. First, Zimmerman's acquittal under Florida's self-defense codes demonstrates how simple communicative rites allow citizens to undergo a subjective transformation by which they are empowered to act 'above the law.' Second, this transformation illustrates a darker side of our cultural dichotomization of speech and violence. Although this dichotomy generally functions to …
Of Social Networks and Suicide Nets
This article analyzes how the Silicon Valley ethos has influenced the development of screening technologies designed to enforce survival. Although various technologies have been used to ensure the survival of clumsy, sick, depressed, or unpredictable subjects, this article focuses on recent developments in suicide screens—that is, those screening technologies that detect suicidal subjects and aim to prevent acts of suicide. Digital versions of th…
Automatic for the people
Artificial intelligence is rapidly giving rise to new automated technologies. Among the most important of these innovations is the development of artificially intelligent machines that produce increasingly sophisticated forms of oral and written discourse. As more of our communicative encounters are with artificial agents, our notions of communicative labor, surveillance, and digital rhetoric will have to contend with these extensive shifts. As a…
Citizen Spies
The history of recruiting citizens to spy on each other in the United States. Ever since the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, we think about surveillance as the data-tracking digital technologies used by the likes of Google, the National Security Administration, and the military. But in reality, the state and allied institutions have a much longer history of using everyday citizens to spy and inform on their peers. Citizen Spies shows…
Making enemies with media
This article examines the role of media technology in determining preconstitutive enemies of the political order. To do so, it analyzes how discipline-specific methods of enemy detection, analysis, and neutralization correspond to different media environments. Media have a diagnostic and prescriptive significance: not only do they locate enemies that conform to their own unique standards of measurement, they also offer reprogramming resources tha…
Sousveillance Capitalism
The striking commercial success of Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, provides us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on how the present convergence of surveillance/capitalism coincides with popular critical and theoretical themes in surveillance studies, particularly that of sousveillance. Accordingly, this piece will first analyze how surveillance capitalism has molded the political behaviors and imaginations …
Killer Apps
Accelerated ageing is associated with increased Covid-19 severity and differences across ethnic groups may exist
Background: While increased age is an established risk factor for COVID-19, there is great heterogeneity in outcomes within age groups. This is because chronological age does not reflect health, unlike biological age. We intend to investigate the association between accelerated ageing and COVID-19 outcomes through the lens of three measures, namely phenotypic age acceleration (PhenoAgeAccel), telomere length (Adjusted T/S Ratio) and facial ageing…
AI and the Automation of Warfare
On June 16, 2021, Fenwick McKelvey met with Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves (2020) to discuss their work, including their recently co-authored book Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine. McKelvey’s (2018) work focuses on algorithmic media and its implications for communication, including his book Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. Packer’s (2008) work is generally concerned with the use of automated, military, and mobile media for pur…
Rhetoric, violence, and the subject of civility
While critical scholars often focus on the ontological boundaries of rhetoric and violence, this article analyzes the rhetoric/violence relationship from the perspective of cultural governance. It builds upon earlier work in rhetoric and civility to analyze how authorities and institutions cultivate deliberative rhetorical norms as a means of regulating citizens’ political conduct. The rhetoric/violence opposition is used as a police logic to sup…
Surveillance Work in (and) Teaching Technical Writing with AI
The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and ed…
The weapons of civilization
From the Confessional Booth to Digital Enclosures
This article examines the confessional booth as an architected space that, by serving as a geo-epistemological enclosure, prefigures digital forms of data capture and production. In conversation with critical scholarship about 'confessional culture,' it analyzes how confessionals and digital enclosures embody different historical iterations of a cultural technique that promises absolution - understood as a cleansing process of transparent exposur…
Pulp to Plutonium
This essay argues that media systems are not passive instruments of military power but active infrastructures that shape how war is conceived, executed, and sustained. Building on Harold Innis’s staples theory and the materialist traditions in media scholarship, we analyze three case studies—the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and the ongoing conflict over rare-earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—to demonstrate how media-specific dema…
Brain Warfare and the Malleable Mind
This article examines mid-century mind control experiments—carried out by intelligence services like MK-Ultra and the CIA—as biopolitical strategy. This analysis has two main goals: first, to build theory at the boundaries of biopolitical research, examining the conditions under which something like a “programmable subject” can emerge; and second, to reframe a key episode in the scientific management of the US population. In service of these aims…
Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Computer security (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Corporate governance (3 works) · Criminology (3 works)