Surviellance Series #1

You Are Under Surveillance

Public space is increasingly policed by hidden surveillance systems. The private life of the individual is secretly captured, mapped, collected, and owned in effigy by a cabal of private business operations—the security industry.

Ironically, as communities disintegrate and more and more of us find ourselves lost in a faceless mass of consumers, the only ones we can count on to interest themselves in our lives are the enforcers of the laws that govern spaces designated for consumption. Reclaiming space from surveillance would reinforce our freedom to act privately, for each other and ourselves, rather than the cameras, and thus enable us to come together out of our anonymity. We’ve had our fifteen minutes of fame—now point that thing somewhere else!

Such oppressive security measures are only necessary when wealth and power are distributed so unfairly that human beings cannot coexist in peace. The ones who oversee these security systems are mistaken when they claim that order must be established to clear the way for liberty and equality. The opposite is true: order is only possible as a consequence of people living together with freedom, equality, and justice for all. Anything else is simply repression. If cameras are necessary on every corner, then something is fundamentally wrong in our society, and getting rid of the cameras is as good a starting place as any.

As a culture, we are preoccupied with observation, images, and spectatorship. Now Internet advertisements offer consumers spy cameras and hidden microphones of our own, completing the three steps to panopticon: we watch monitors, we are monitored, and we become our own monitors. But when the distinction between observer and observed is dissolved, we do not regain wholeness—on the contrary, we find we have been trapped outside ourselves, alienated in the most fundamental sense.

Here’s a quixotic project—get together with your friends and disable all the security cameras in your city, declaring it a free action zone. You know what they say about dancing like no-body's watching.