Tag Archives: panopticon

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Top 10 predictions for 2009

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Every year since 1985 the editors of the Futurist magazine have selected their top ten predictions for the future:

1. Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030. By the late 2010s, ubiquitous, unseen nanodevices will provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people everywhere. Humans will have nanoimplants, facilitating interaction in an omnipresent network.

…

6. Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it’s acquired. An individual’s professional knowledge is becoming outdated at a much faster rate than ever before. Most professions will require continuous instruction and retraining.

[via KurzweilAINews][image from Foxtongue on flickr]

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Stephen Fry on the power of words and CCTV

Stephen Fry’s latest blessay on words and their use is splendid, and it also includes a point relevant to the emerging Panopticon:

CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch.

If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials.

For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” …

I for one will immediately adopt this usage (and the equally compelling “SS” or “Surveillance System” Fry goes on to suggest).

It’s a profound point: meaning matters, but so do the shape and nature of the words themselves.

[image from squacco on flickr]

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Ministers agree “in principle” to spy on all communications in Britain

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Nasty, evil, Orwellian news in The Sunday Times:

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers – thought to be BT and Vodafone.

…

The Home Office stressed no formal decision had been taken but sources said officials had made clear that ministers had agreed “in principle” to the programme.

This is such a horrifyingly bad idea I don’t know where to begin.

The question, to quote Elliot Carver, is why? Why does the government think this will make the world a better and safer place? Don’t they understand that terrorism isn’t about killing people with bombs, it’s about spreading the fear of people being killed with bombs.

Fegh.

[image from qwghlm on flickr]

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Cheaper to meter

meteringKevin Kelly has written a typically intriguing post on ubiquitous metering: what if everything were measured, monitored, recorded, and indexed?

Imagine a world were any set of historical data was available to you. Everyone has their own favorite data stream from history they would love to have. Such a trove would transform our lives. For that reason, monitoring everything will become commonplace. Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself.

This is an interesting idea, very much in the vein of Charles Stross’ brilliant The Beginning of History.

I suppose a Panopticon of sorts is fairly inevitable. Hopefully the transition to a world where everything is recorded all the time will be well-handled, and won’t be used for authoritarian or nefarious purposes.

It’ll be a massive change, perhaps one of the biggest social changes ever.

[from Kevin Kelly’s blog][image from Unhindered by Talent on flickr]

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Surveillance as (dark) art – the Static Obesity Logging devive

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Benjamin Males\' Racial Targeting System in actionAs a contrast to my earlier post about the cyclist panopticon being a positive manifestation of the potential of ubiquitous surveillance, here’s a project from the Royal College of Arts in London that rather neatly illustrates the flipside.

According to we-make-money-not-art, the Static Obesity Logging device:

… can be installed almost anywhere. The casing of the innocent-looking device conceals a computer, digital and analogue inputs and outputs and a camera. The system is able to remotely calculate Body Mass Index and communicate the data via wired and wireless networks.

Given recent hints from the UK government (among others) that they may start legislating against obesity, this is pretty Orwellian stuff. But the other of Benjamin Males’ projects is even darker – it’s a Racial Targeting System.

The [RTS-2] is a fully portable real-time image-processing platform that has the ability to automatically find and follow faces and then analyse and store their race data.

I guess we should be thankful that we’re seeing these devices being made by artists as a commentary on current affairs rather than reading about their deployment on the streets where we live.

That said, one can’t help but worry that what has been implemented by an art student is very likely to have been at least conceived of by our terror-fied governments. [story originally spotted at Hack-a-Day; image borrowed from Benjamin Males’ website]