Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

The Social Optics of Race 119
race in Minority Report. Optical scanners matched to networked databases
can “see” who you are and can figure out what to sell you, as in the case of
the Gap episode. However, other digital imaging applications, such as the
technology that enables the Precognitives to project their visions of who
will commit which murders onto giant cinema screens in the Precrime company’s
“temple” brings to a mind another kind of computerized profiling that
echoes the new social optics of race in America post 9/11: racial profiling.
As the Newsweek critic David Ansen writes of Spielberg: “The director
couldn’t have known...how uncannily [this] tale of 2054 Washington D.C.
would resonate in the current political climate, where our jails fill up with
suspects who’ve been arrested for crimes they haven’t yet committed.” 38
The unprecedented access to the suspect’s personal information, remote
geographic imaging, and militarized rapid response combined with the Precognitives’
visions allow the police to concatenate multiple sources of visual
and textual information together to profile people who are about to commit
murders and arrest them before they can do so, without needing to go
through anything but a pro forma trial via videoconference in advance of
the crime, but after watching the footage. In other words, it works exactly
as does the juridico-legal system in an informational post-terror state.
“[Computers] simulate surveillance in the sense that they precede and
redouble the means of observation. Computer profiling...is understood best
not just as a technology of surveillance, but as a kind of surveillance in advance
of surveillance, a technology of ‘observation before the fact.’” 39 The narrative
of inadvertent cross-racial passing that is so much a part of Minority
Report is enabled by the replacement of the physical body by the databody
as a subject (and product) of surveillance. The retinal scanners read Anderton
as Yakamoto because they are keyed to databases that look only at his
eyes and the information that they are linked to. The science fiction film
Gattaca (1997) extends the notion of dataveillance to the level of the gene,
positing a future in which humans are heavily genetically engineered. 40 In
“Closely Belated? Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report,”
Mark Williams draws connections between the film’s handling of
time and prediction through data profiling and what he terms “real time
desire.” Minority Report’s “belated thematics” or hypervaluation of mediated
time shifting, as in the use of the personal video recorder or TiVo, is evident
in the police’s possession of “the capacity to allow one to ‘freeze’ the ‘live’
image, and then fast-forward through ‘real time’ to the now, and resynchronize
with the ‘live,’ represents[ing] the newest wrinkle of temporal frenzy
within mediated culture.” 41 These scenes of mediated video manipulation