The surveillance state in the era of Dirty Computer

July 25, 2022

"Eyes on", someone says, and the group passing the doobie shuffles out of sight of the surveillance camera. This is from a TV show, a "black mirror" to our present moment. But it's not like a fantasy, or a premonition. Groups planning civil disobedience? - cell phones in the box, put the box away, then talk... Is this paranoia or reality? In a certain philosophical sense, - who cares?

Ms. Janelle Monae's "Dirty Computer" book talks about this, too. How did this surveillance paradigm come about? She says:

We ushered ourselves into the darkness - so many of us having grown too cool with the civic officials and techpreneurs who believed we should, we could, be an all-seeing people. And with so many so long fatigued from warring in our homes and abroad, so scared of unforeseen bullet showers and continental storms of smoke, we accepted their offer that an eye in the sky might protect us from...ourselves, our world. We already believed in an infinite web, so why not hardwire an eye to each of its strands? A camera on your home. A camera on a badge. A camera on a drone. And so on. (IX)

The unspoken scourge of the present moment, our present public culture, is this mounting dominance of surveillance. Cameras on every street corner in some public places. Behavior and public conduct is strictly maintained within norms - some completely arbitrary - not by the traditional threat of flesh-and-blood social approbation, but by a new threat, of the "eye in the sky" managed by Big Tech. 

This has unforeseen and undesirable consequences. Not only for the folks carrying on civil disobedience for the improvement of society and betterment of those social norms. 

But also, because the equilibrium has shifted, toward a tendency for people that want to change society for the better being less comfortable experimenting with presenting those ideas to the public, and, rather, are more likely to indulge the proclivity for covert, and clandestine activity, out of the sight of the public and out of the reach of the law - and even moral deliberations as a whole. 

Why is that? Because, of the simple fact that when a camera is trained upon you, the fundamental instinct is to act more like you are acting, in a play - less improvisation, a lack of naturalism. And a lack of new ideas results, for several reasons: lack of people with those ideas on the scene, and lack of people being willing to voice those ideas. 

It's hard not to see these cameras except as a threat. For decades, video evidence, after all, has been the nail in the coffin for the opposing side - and/or "the smoking gun" for the police. That completely dispositive piece of evidence that could put someone away or not... For the rest of the citizenry, what a pressure on us on how to do perfectly normal things in living your life. 

What should you or anyone else do, to avoid putting themselves in a situation where their actions might be taken "out of context" by the "eye in the sky" and its human operator... especially when the omnipresent camera conditions us to live life in the public as an act - except to avoid the context where your conduct might be videotaped? 

Everything we do in front of surveillance camera has become, because of how our society and legal system has now conditioned us to see surveillance footage, could become part of some 11th round knockout that proves some wrongdoing we might later be accused of... you can imagine how someone could see this new surveillance society as actually being structured that way. 

Video footage is often that slam-dunk in a court case where it is used...and it thinkably could be precluding people from taking advantage of their rights and taking their case to court, even just to a lawyer, if video is used in the police action against them. 

Ms. Monae hits on this hard kernel of truth when she writes: 

"You're not a police state, but you're sure as fuck letting the executioner lead your investigation." (147)

Is enough of our actual lives, including our occasional counter-conducts that may be productive for our society, getting to a place of reasoned deliberation?  Dirty Computer; it's all around us. With our current regime of a "surveillance state", I think too much of our ability to deliberately consider these new issues in human behavior is being siphoned away because the surveillance-based police state is siphoning these issues away from public and institutional view: it gets you coming and going.