On Paranoia

I don't feel that I am being watched but isn't that the point? Or is it that we know we are being watched and therefore don't get up to anything we might be embarrassed about or might be punished for? That is what the telescreens in nineteen-eighty-four were for - they were on all the time and while you knew it was possible that you might not be being watched at any particular moment you could not take the chance. Anyway, our technology is far more advanced than that - the face-recognition systems will just be let loose on the exabytes of recorded data, picking out any undesirables and flagging them up on the teleprinter for follow-up during office hours. That would have stopped the 7/11 bombings wouldn't it? While those monitoring the input are not yet at the level of Malice that Big Brother exuded, we have walked dozily this far and it would be nothing for us to somnambulate into a full-on, 24/7, moral-judgement-by-rule society. Orwell's shock troops were never depicted as incompetent and of course in our real world they would be - the "you don't do anything wrong - you've got nothing to fear" argument is not just flawed - it is fractured - only useful for those with an idea of right and wrong which matches those who decide on the criteria. Without zero defects, in a population as large as ours, thousands of people are going to be picked out wrongly. It is identity theft condoned - indeed perpetrated - by government. The fact that I am talking about it as if it has already happened makes it worse. It's as if I have accepted that it has happened or is about to happen and that it is the norm - a sort of conceptual Newspeak where they make us forget what it was like not to be watched, educated us to be familiar and comfortable with being watched so we cannot even think about what it would be like not to be watched.

The trouble is how do we go back? The minute the first camera went up we were lost to it. We could not destroy the cameras because that would have been against the law even then. Had some shadowy anarchist group started a campaign of vandalism against the networks early on, their growth might have been stopped before the wider plan was realised. Now we would need more anarchists than are available to even make a dent on this. How far does the surveillance society have to go before we all take a stand against it? All we have at the moment is the rumbling of unease that retreats when the news story finishes and the next prole-numbing reality show starts. You may think I am over dramatising the whole thing and maybe I am - maybe those in control do have our best interests at heart but that goes against the fuzziness that is democracy. Our own ideas can never match exactly with those we vote into power. Politics these days seems to be a case of get as many votes as you need and then just wave, say "thanks for voting us in" and then get on with whatever you want. I am back to my standard idea that most people live in a fog of misunderstanding about the world, a sea of inaccurate science and lack of concrete views. Under the wire of this random gathering of dumb animals, the herdsmen send in their cameras and control until we can be shooed in whatever direction they want - 40 days detention - baaa - lock 'em up - that'll stop 'em. Teach everyone the same thing and they will mostly jump the same way - much easier for us.

I am afraid, as usual, that my mind on this has fractured into some undecipherable fugue state - wandering all over the place. Which means it is time to stop. In fact the time seems to have actually jumped which suggests I am using "fugue" in a sense closer to the real meaning than the incorrect and overdramatic one which I intended.