Op-Ed

People have generally been free to act either with or without integrity. It’s a choice. Whether or not we choose to treat ourselves, peers and colleagues, families and the environment with respect has usually been a fundamental freedom, generally speaking. We feel good when we treat others the way we want to be treated and it is, in turn, its own reward.

What happens when that’s no longer a choice? What could we expect if we were forced to start literally “acting” a certain way out of respect for the risk of being caught acting otherwise? You may say to yourself “What a good thing! It’s a good thing because more people will do what’s right.” Trouble is, it’s the motivations and not the acts themselves that shape us. There is a huge difference between doing something out of will and doing something out of fear.

These choices cause subtle changes which, over time, lead to huge cultural shifts and how we behave towards each other and ourselves.

This is why surveillance is antithetical to itself. In any form, it leaves long-standing issues to be addressed that are not able to be resolved because it works against the very purpose for which it is used. To be clear : the purpose of such systems is to create an environment that eliminates fear or danger and instead create one of safety, one that is conducive to commerce and the security of its participants to move freely and safely within it. It would be successful if it did this exclusively, however, it also creates an environment of fear and stress as people are increasingly aware that they are being watched in this age of online, satellite, cellphone and public video surveillance.

Think of it like this : the rituals of celebration, historical events and other cultural interactions have been held in the presence of image and audio capture devices for as long as most of us reading this can remember. There is a time and place where we feel comfortable and safe with this technology around. For example, in banks and airports surveillance systems genuinely are a welcome and effective tool.

For the moment, let’s consider the future of the generations that come up being literally observed more and more and then constantly, whether or not in or around celebratory rituals or potentially dangerous places. It could be proposed that reality television, social networks and similar mechanisms are effectively preparing the populations for life in a surveillance state. We are seemingly giving up our privacy without even thinking about it. This surveillance state meme is beginning to take shape in earnest. Quietly and unobtrusively.

There are some examples of such subtle changes having huge impacts.

One example is during the post-World War II era which brought the advent of the attached garage. For the first time ever, people could go from the kitchen to the garage to the car to the grocery, acquire more sugar and return home without having to deal with anyone save the store clerk. No more walking over to the neighbor’s and knocking on the door to borrow a cup of sugar.

It was right around the same time [October 3rd, 1955 : via NPR] when the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on TV. The show quickly became a huge influence that helped define that era. What is forgotten but perhaps more important is that another event took place that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the “ThunderBurp.”

Have you ever heard of the ThunderBurp? No? You can listen to the original ad by clicking here.

This is significant because it marked the first time a toy company advertised merchandise on TV outside of the Christmas season. Thus, began the targeting of children to influence them to influence their parents to buy them stuff. According to cultural historians it was significant because, seemingly overnight, children’s play became focused not around an action but an object : toys. As a result, as more and more companies followed with more and more ads, play was no longer an act but a thing. A product not of the imagination so much as one off the shelf.

Before TV, in the early days of Hollywood during the creation of the global entertainment structure, many artists of all disciplines in Europe watched in awe as the industry as it’s known today was born and warned that the continuing works of Chaplin and Keaton [in the early part of the twentieth century] were creative only in the way Henry Ford’s new conveyor-driven machines [reaching optimization during the same era] were pumping out not crafted but rather uniform, bland and industrialized entertainment at a blistering pace. Overseas, there were rumblings that, while successful and revenue-generating, this type of content would have some long-term consequences on the collective intellect and sensibility of this new, powerful and rising culture.

They further warned that the prevailing methodology in education and training at that point was not steeped in a critical-thinking perspective, instead entirely focused on the primitive call-and-response mechanism [for example : being tested only by multiple choice or true and false questions] designed primarily to prepare the workforce as quickly as possible for the new industrialization. Content at this point was directed exclusively towards a male, adolescent sensibility.

Now, here, in the present, the institutional successes of the relative Will Ferrells and Ben Stillers [modern day Chaplins and Keatons] in the entertainment arena and the memes being delivered en masse mirror this same sensibility a hundred years later.

It’s a tough choice : to be the wisest or smartest nation or the richest? Each has their own set of consequences. To have chosen to build the smartest nation may or may not have made it the richest but building the richest nation has not made it necessarily the wisest. There is a trade-off when accomplishing goals. The trade-off in the case of the US as it’s become the richest nation in the world is it’s not become the seat of intellect but rather the seat of consumerism. Outside of the States, the first things
that come to mind are Levis and brands and their respective memes. The results of the science of profitability.

Like any other science, surveillance theory has it’s own Holy Grail : panopticism. This word comes from 1785 when Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon [from Wikipedia], a prison that would allow an observer to observe [-opticon] all [pan-] prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what has been called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”

Here is a passage from the work of Michel Foucault as he describes the implications of ‘Panopticism’ in his 1975 work Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison :

“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.”

This is the kind of stuff that gives rise to an ethic that may prove to be counter to the goal of a happier, healthier and more productive population. Will this happen? Will surveillance and its goals continue to work against itself and create not a world free from fear but instead one built on it?

Some believe surveillance has already more or less reached this goal. Consumer information, such as spending habits, email addresses, phone numbers and even conversations on IM, email, cellphones, SMS messaging - most any kind of communication is logged and traceable. Many of us savor gadgets that collect more and more information about us, effectively surrendering more and more of our privacy to devices such as Global Positioning Systems in phones and cars. We even attach them to our kids and willingly subscribe and pay for many security services that are designed to provide us with peace of mind. What they primarily do is remove more and more of our privacy while at best only slightly reducing the risk of anything unexpected from happening.

Meanwhile, life is risk. Somewhere there is a happy medium of safety where it doesn’t become an obstacle that gets in the way of experience and our capacities for experience. There is no discovery or beauty or anything worthwhile without risk. Risk sometimes leads to failure, which is sometimes as valuable as triumph. Risk sometimes involves some level of danger or just a whimsical spirit. It is also often misinterpreted as mischief.

The point is this : the task of creating an environment free of fear and risk is best left to each of us as individuals and not one that any system, service, device or policy can provide. It’s up to each of us to remember, lest we forget this. Only then are we truly and forever doomed.

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” - Roy Batty in Blade Runner.

Chad Calease is Chad Calease is a filmmaker currently living in Minneapolis nearing completion on a documentary film about the game of Tag. It's likely he can stay awake longer than you can.
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