Overview
Agre's argument against automatic face recognition in public places, developed most fully in his 2001 essay 'Your Face Is Not a Bar Code.' The essay applies the capture model to a specific emerging technology, arguing that face recognition transforms the experience of public space by imposing an identity grammar on the previously anonymous activity of being in public.
The title captures the core argument: a face is not a bar code, because bar codes are designed to be scanned while faces are expressions of human identity. Treating faces as bar codes is a category error with profound political consequences.
Significance
Written in 2001, this essay anticipated the explosion of facial recognition technology by nearly two decades. The arguments Agre made remain central to ongoing policy debates about facial recognition in policing, public surveillance, and commercial applications.