Complacency in the 'Surveillance Society'

Complacency in the 'Surveillance Society'

By docrivs

12/29/2005

The importance of an 'open network', in the sense of a global internetwork uncontrolled and untamed by privately-owned or publicly-centered powers, is definitely very important. I find it shocking to realize that the right to bear arms and the right to vote have proven to be far less important in promoting and maintaining democratic ideals than has the internet. Yes, peoples' voices weigh heavier in the democratic movement than do votes. Many people still do not vote with a ballot; they vote with consumer purchases (and thus, choices), and internetwork attention (web site exchange, blog exchange, email exchange, and other information exchange). Voice is very important, but in the medium of internetwork communication, voice is not just words but words combined with images. This combination is what makes cinema, television, and the 'land-line' telephone far less essential to the spread of communicated messages than the ever-expanding realm of the internet.

In Europe, the scope and rate of spread of applications for communication and personal organization technologies have far surpassed that in the United States. Perhaps, the reason lies in the differing attitudes towards a global interconnection of people and markets. In Europe, nationalities and languages blur, as the spread of technology and ideas moves in muiltinational-border-transcend ing whirls. In the United States, there is the tendency to forget that the rest of the world is moving too, and technology and ideas are spread locally.

The Europeans, as well as people all over the world who share the same information-and-technology-passing lifestyles, are people I admire. They are aware -- and make the world aware -- of what is going on around them.

During some moments of my life I feared living in a 'surveillance society'. I read 1984 in 1984, and although most of the ideas in that book went well over my head during my first reading of that book, it influenced my life in many ways. I have since read that book approximately 7 times since my first reading, along with a library of other writings by the author, George Orwell.

The published work of men like Orwell were the web pages and web sites of yesterday. He also spoke warnings and used images (through his use of the english language) about a 'surveillance society' and the tyrannies of totalitarian government regimes. In his created world the people did not have the technological knowledge and skill to battle the tyranny through 'hacking' and 'chaos communication'. Perhaps, also, they feared that the consequences for getting caught in rebelling against the system would be too sure, swift, and severe to warrant. Perhaps, the people in Orwell's 1984 waited too long to fight, allowing the powers over them to get more and more overbearing to the point where the people were helpless against their oppressors.

Living under surveillance is a reality that I can live with, so long as I buy into the paradigm that complacency is okay. I hate to use another modern cinematic cliche, as I tend to do, but the image of the 'red pill' and the 'blue pill' in The Matrix is so memorable in making the point about choosing to remain in the 'dream world' or choosing to 'free' yourself from the illusions of that rabbit hole.

In my life, there hangs that 'red pill'/'blue pill' dichotomy in every choice that I make. Do I give my $3 to some corporate grocery chain conglomerate for that frozen food product that tastes so good, is easy to make, and claims to be made of ingredients I can live with, although it is ultimately a product of a globally-dominating corporate power I disdain? Do I choose to say, 'Yes, I have my Big Grocery Store Chain discount club card, with my own personal bar code printed on it', so that the checkout clerk can scan more data for my personal purchase history into the databases of the corporate powers who own Big Grocery Store Chain and the trading partners who have a stake in that information? Do I choose paper or plastic? Do I choose credit, debit, check, or cash? These are all weekly or bi-weekly consumer choices for me, but I realize these are powerful choices when I consider the amount of consumer choices I make in a year or two.

There are many questions to ask about consequences when you think of every action in a day being a decision and a choice. It is so easy to stick with the 'dream world', eat the 'blue pill', shut out all of the bad news in the world.

Living in a surveillance society may be a reality now, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. We can choose to disregard the fears of where that kind of a culture may take us. We can choose to hope and believe that it may take us somewhere nice, like a beach in Tahiti, or we can hope and believe that someone else will fight the battle for us. However, there are a select few in the world who realize that we don't have the luxury of eating the 'blue pill' anymore.

What are the questions we should ask when we consider the implications of certain applications of ideas and technology? That is a good question in itself.

On the topic of surveillance, though, I realize that there are some important questions to ask. I'll lay them on you. For one, it is important to ask who is watching whom. It is important to ask what the watchers are watching for. It is important to ask what information is being collected about the watched. It is important to ask for which applications that data is being put to use.

Now, I must choose whether or not to keep spouting off about surveillance, blue pills, dream worlds, and consumer choices, or to finish developing the application I was hired to develop. Oh, the webs we weave…

May the road rise before you and the wind be forever at your back.

-docrivs