The Coming Insurrection

For other information maybe or maybe not closely related to the idea of surveillance in contemporary culture, check out The Coming Insurrection (PDF of The Coming Insurrection). It was written by the Tarnac 9, a group of French Anarchists that are responsible for terrorist activity in France in the early 2000's. It's fairly interesting, albeit too radical for me in its final chapters. Also:

Does Surveillance Mandate More Than Self-Awareness?

In reading about the panopticon, the nature of surveillance seems to be useful in monitoring the activities of prison inmates. The method of doing so makes the inmates experience a mandated self-awareness. They become their own surveillance by the way that the prison's architectural design and guard system is set up. The purpose of bringing this up is that upon reflection, we can see that new media holds a very similar role in our society today, but not just for prison inmates, for all of us. High tech military surveillance watches over other countries via satellite, google earth is probably a few generations away from giving us live updates on towns (supposedly for directions from place to place), and all new cell phones come equipped with digital cameras and movie making software. The point is, our notion of privacy has evolved in this new digital age. We are always under surveillance; all we have to do is leave our homes, but even then cable companies monitor the television shows and websites that we view, and how do we know all this information isn't sold to the federal government? Since the Patriot Act was passed post 9-11, we all know that the government will go to any means of invading privacy in order to "protect the ordinary American", but how do we know the government hasn't gone further than that. So much of our personal information is out there, what reasons does the government have NOT to collect it and use it for whatever their interests may be. An even scarier idea is the thought that large corporations could be buying this information for their own malevolent use. We know they already do this in some capacity, (thats what spyware and adware is, right?), but there's no way to find out if it's done more malevolently because of course they would keep it a secret. But anyways, government and corporate conspiracies aside, there is no doubting that at least in some capacity the American individual is under surveillance more than they are readily aware of. Most of us think about surveillance as a way of making sure people do the right thing, or are doing what their supposed to be doing(bosses monitoring employees' web access), and we all adhere (or otherwise face the penalties) to breaking the rules that surveillance is in place to preserve. We're conscious of doing so also. We change our behavior when digital cameras are present just like how when we were kids and we would change our behavior when our parents were watching. It took me this long to bring it up, but this analogous to what happens in the film Standard Operating Procedure by Errol Morris. The film is about the role of digital cameras as either surveillance or their pictures as evidence in the Abu Ghraib scandal that hit the American media a couple years ago. In this film we saw compelling evidence that the digital camera opened a door for a performance. In the famous incidents at Abu Ghraib that have been deemed "criminal action", the way that the interviewees described the events makes it seem like the events occurred for the camera. Specifically, in the film Sabrina and Lynndie (both guards at the prison) described other men forcing acting inhumanely towards the prisoners in front of the camera. Of course there is the possibility (and i would even argue more than possibility) that other instances of abuse occurred off camera, but the evidence that we have is only photographs mixed with after-the-fact statements. The photos and the way that the interviewees described the events made the prison guards seem like they were proclaiming "look what we can do!", as a manifesto of power over the Iraqi inmates. Also, the fact that one of the guards, Graner, passed the photos out to the other guards further backs up this idea. While Sabrina has claimed that she "was trying to display the horrors of what happened" in her letters at the prison and after the fact, her smiles and thumbs ups (basically overall display of unaffectedness) show that she was also a victim of this. The digital camera as a surveillance tool in the end is important in this instance because it made the guilty parties guilty. Although this is an important aspect of the film, the biggest impact that the film had on me was further solidifying my utter disgust with military personnel. The discussion in the film about higher up government officials "ghosting" individuals (or making them never have existed within the facility), military intelligence officers condoning (at the least, if not ordering) abuse to prisoners, and the fact that no one besides the people caught on camera served any time in prison for the abuse at the prison, I think, points to the notion of a vast network or military groups that will cover anyones ass who ranks high enough. They can do whatever they want, wherever they want, and make it disappear; it's like the fucking x-files except in real life and without aliens (in this case). At the risk of sounding too much like a conspiracy theorist (I think that my general distrust of the military, the government, and most wealthy figures of authority is clear enough at this point), I'd like to summarize the role that I see surveillance taking on in contemporary American life. It's everywhere, not always used malevolently (even if politically motivated), but most likely has severe psychological effects on the people within our cultures. I don't like to think I'm being watched for being an ordinary civilian, but the digital age has made it possible for unknown forces to monitor just about anything they want and get away with it unscathed as long as it's paid for or in the name of national security. I don't distrust the surveillance tools; I distrust the people behind them.

Response to "Augmenting Human Intellect" by Douglas Engelbart

I read "Augmenting Human Intellect" and for a large portion of the reading it was difficult for me to transform the words that Engelbart uses into visuals in my mind. Reading about frameworks which are just systems for computer processes is entirely what we take for granted when we think what a computer does (or should be able to do). When I try to imagine a world where data is stored either in peoples minds or as text in a book or related medium (analogically?), it is clear that Engelbart's ideas were meant to make a digitalized framework that is analogous to the human mind, but doesn't have the shortcomings that the human mind has (forgetfulness and/or other general absentmindedness). The frameworks for data serve as somewhere closer to physical, though arguably digital isn't physical, structures of data collection. I find it really fascinating that someone could conceive of creating a data storage space (that is also capable of designing programs) that exists as something different than physical storage; of course now we take this type of not-wholly-physical, existent space for granted, but back before computers and the digital age, how could someone conceive of a place that is somewhere between the physical and mental and put data there. So to relate this whole thing to that twilight zone episode, I can see how difficult it would be to understand or comprehend something like a computer, which could easily lead to fear. In contemporary America, and many, many other places in the world, digital space is necessary for all modern conveniences, whether we can conceive of what that digital space is or not, it's a normality.

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