[Reader-list] Surveillance after "Big Brother"

[Rana Dasgupta]

The arguments of the media often proceed via the production of victims.  That 
something is wrong is signalled by the fact that there is a victim.  Solutions need to 
be found! - for how could we be so heartless as to ignore the plight of people such as 
these...

Proponents of the various kinds of surveillance have found many victims to justify their 
cases.  Victims who no longer are so, thanks to technology.  Once you had to fear 
walking down the street, but now there are cameras to keep you safe.  You had to fear 
the people sitting with you on a plane, but now surveillance techniques are too good to 
let the wrong people through.  You still might be afraid of "identity theft" but biometric 
ATM withdrawals and computer log-ins will soon make that fear disappear into the past 
too.

The other side of this argument is more difficult to formulate through victims, however.  
How can you be a "victim" of too much observation?  Do cameras present a public 
danger?  Have there been deaths, or at least psychological traumas?  Anyone who tries 
to say that they don't like being watched raises the suspicion that they do things that 
shouldn't be seen.  As the breezy adage goes, "If you have nothing to hide, there is 
nothing to worry about."

When arguments against surveillance are discussed in the media, therefore, they usually 
proceed along another route: that of dystopian nightmares.  There is hardly an article in 
the mainstream media that does not invoke "Big Brother" in an attempt to encapsulate 
the ideas and feelings of those that would question the role of greater surveillance in 
our lives.  Bureaucrats explain the advantages of national ID cards or new biometric 
identification techniques, but the responsible journalist feels it appropriate to point out 
that there are some who feel such innovations are leading us one step closer to the "Big 
Brother" society.

This ubiquitous image is completely inappropriate to the debate.  It makes anxieties 
about surveillance sound stupid.  As if the danger of surveillance techniques were not to 
be found in the present, only in some far-off nightmare of total, centralised control that 
is purportedly brought closer by every new use of personal data.  Next to the 
bureaucrat's wise analysis, such a nightmare seems so exaggerated, so distant, so 
paranoid, that it can be instantly dismissed.

The fact is that the model of surveillance we have to engage with bears few 
resemblances to Orwell's vision.  Even in this era of paranoid states, the infrastructure 
devoted to collecting, analysing and acting on data about an individual is highly 
distributed, spread across a myriad of institutions who all have very different motives 
for what they do.  Employers capture employees' personal communications in order to 
optimise productivity and minimise security leaks.  Telemarketers try to build up a 
detailed picture of an individual's buying habits so that they can target their selling 
more effectively.  Mobile phone companies may aim to pinpoint people's locations more 
precisely so they can match advertisements to places.  Et cetera.

It is certainly the case that all this information is occasionally brought together by 
intelligence agencies or lawyers in order to attest to an individual's interiority, his 
private idiosyncrasies, his scandalous fascinations.  But these moments of absolute 
transparency are not the norm.  The more usual experience is one simply of latent 
paranoia, born of complete uncertainty as to what information has been collected and 
how far it has travelled.  We are not in the 1984 situation, where the private domain has 
disappeared and there is total, certain observation by a centralised power whose 
objective is our absolute control.  We are instead in a position where there is constant 
doubt as to exactly when, and where, our thoughts and actions may be completely 
unobserved.  We are careful, therefore; anxious, perhaps, that our actions, should they 
ever be scrutinised, would not appear quite pure or productive enough.   

This anxiety is something more intangible than sweeping "Big Brother" allusions can 
ever capture.  And yet it is only by finding a language to express the nature of such 
subtle changes to our interiority that it will be possible to offer anything that can place 
in perspective bureaucratic calls for more control.  We need, in short, to find new 
images for life under 21st-century surveillance that can bury blithe references to "Big 
Brother" for ever and help us to understand where, imaginatively speaking, we are 
going.