In a characteristic Samizdata posting, Perry de Havilland regrets the modern use of the phrase “Big Brother” to describe reality TV shows, and harks back to Orwell’s original coinage, with grim pictures of CCTV surveillance cameras outside primary schools, and of propaganda for CCTV cameras in the form of big posters in the London Underground.
All this anti-surveillance thinking over at Samizdata is connected to the recent launch of this new blog, which will be concerned with civil liberties and “intrusive state” issues. I’ve already done a couple of posts here, the most substantial of which concerned organ donorship, and I intend to contribute many more similar efforts. The boss of White Rose is one of my closest friends.
However, I have long been nursing heretical thoughts about this total surveillance stuff, which it makes sense to put on a “culture” blog rather than on a politics blog. Because what I think is at stake here is a sea change not just in state surveillance, but in the culture generally. What is more, it is a sea change which places programmes like Big Brother right at the centre of what is happening. Personally I don’t watch Big Brother, or any of its various derivatives. Nor, to my extreme relief, do I feel any need to keep up with the soap operas. I recall reading a book years ago which described TV as the ultimate “psychic energy sink”, and although I watch a hell of a lot of it, I think that’s right.
However, I do think that Big Brother (the TV show) deals with a real question, a question worth reflecting upon. And that question is: what happens to, you know, life, when there are TV cameras trained on it twenty four hours per day? What happens to manners? What happens to the rules of how we ought to behave? What happens to the judgements we make of other people? When we see someone we know, and perhaps later meet up with, masturbating on camera, or scratching his bum, or having a seriously bad hair day, or cheating (maybe, hard to tell) on his wife, how should we then conduct ourselves?
These seem to me to be questions well worth preparing ourselves for.
Big Brother is closely linked to the also much complained about “cult of celebrity”.
But the “cult” of celebrity – which is really just being extremely interested in the lives of celebrities – seems to me to reflect the exact same pre-occupations as the reality TV shows. Celebrities are the people who are already enduring total surveillance. Their triumphs and agonies as they either try to dodge the cameras, or as they make rude finger gestures at them, or else as they try to be dignified when on them, are a taste of what the rest of us may have to be deciding about in years to come. Now the Beckhams, tomorrow it’ll be us on camera. How do the Beckhams handle it? How will we?
Popular culture is often dismissed as trivia and nonsense, by the guardians of “culture” in the more elevated sense of that word. But then these same guardians look back on the trivia and nonsense of earlier times, and suddenly they see that those despicably low-browed masses were actually dealing with deadly serious questions which the entire world and its various Presidents and Prime Ministers are now having to deal with in deadly earnest.
Take all those slam bang adventure movies of the nineteen eighties. I recall a wonderful fake cinema trailer done by some British TV comedians which advertised a movie called, simply, “Things Exploding”. Ho ho. And it was true. The collective sub-conscious did seem to be unnaturally obsessed with (a) huge and dramatic bangs, and in general, disasters of all kinds, and (b) how people should react to them. Well, in the era of Al Qaeda, this suddenly doesn’t seem quite so moronic and down market, now does it? Suddenly the world is filled, for real, with, if not an abundance of actual bangs, then at the very least the vastly heightened fear of such bangs, in official and respectable circles.
I believe that the exact same pattern will unfold with total surveillance. The “official” debate about this takes the form of saying either that we’ve got to have it (the government line), or that it’s creepy (White Rose).
Meanwhile the masses are off on a quite different tack. Instead of arguing about whether it should happen, they have simply accepted that, just like all those big bangs and disasters, it is going to happen, and for them, the question is: how do we live with it?
I believe that the masses are right. I have no problem with trying to help my White Rose friends in what they are trying to do with occasional postings, for I certainly believe that the matter of how total surveillance is done is extremely important. But I am with the masses in pretty much believing that it will happen. To ask how we can stop it is futile. What really matters is: how will we live with it?
To put it another way, the important discussions about total surveillance are at least as much Brian’s Culture Blog matters as they are White Rose matters.
End of part one. As so often with blogging, you blog away for twenty minutes, setting the scene and clearing away the undergrowth, as it were, for what you really want to get stuck into. But when you have, and are ready to get seriously started, you have actually finished a perfectly decent posting, which it makes sense to draw to a close.
If I want to pursue this, and I really really do, I will, but not here and not now.
Cross-posted from Brian’s Culture Blog.
Futile? I don’t think so. Sorry but I have no intention of just living with it. ‘Masses’ by their very nature are largely inert bodies responding to the glacial forces of culture and the prod of politics and for that reason, I really do not care much what they ‘think’ in aggregate. if they are too torpid to get in the state’s way, they are not likely to get in my way either.
As a host of minority activist groups have proven through history, all it takes is enough people to sympathize for a tiny activist minority within a minority to make the state’s writ largely worthless regardless of the fact the lumpen ‘masses’ clearly support (which really means ‘acquiesces to’) that government’s rule. Doubt me? Ask Sinn Fein.
I see my job as being that of encouraging the growth of that broader minority who is not prepared to just shrug their shoulders and ‘learn to live with it’. First we argue. Maybe later.. sledgehammers.
I think Brian is trying to tell us that the British public has now completely submitted to a permanent state of lumpen indifference. He is probably right but its is terribly sad nonetheless.
and Perry is saying that the public as a group is not who matters. They don’t care that they have it, and they won’t care if they don’t have it. There is a group that wants it and there is a group that doesn’t, the conflict between them is all that matters.
Unfortunately, for those who don’t want the surveilance, they have no power to resist the changes, without that they can’t get anyones attention. And the longer they stay on that issue the less time they will spend finding something people do care about and using it to get power for themselves.
For instance, periodically I recieve emails from the US Libertarian Party decrying something or other done by the US government. Frequently I agree with them, but I’m not going to vote for them based on “we aren’t them” except maybe as a protest vote. If they were to ever actually get ellected, it would be because one of them said “this is what I believe is important in government, and this is what I would try to get done during my term, how I would do it, and what I would make sure isn’t touched.” Until I hear that, and agree with them, I’m not going to try to get them elected.
Perry, it sounds like you have been reading the Socialist Workers activism handbook. I am deeply suspicious of single-issue activists (who often have many single issues and are generally wrong). With a broader agenda they are afraid to present because they know almost everyone will completely reject it.
I don’t doubt your objections to CCTVs are sincere and considered, but I am genuinely suprised to hear you dismiss in thi way those (myself include) who find them somewhere between innocuous and beneficial.
And BTW you may not like Sinn Fein, but they do represent a significant segment of Irish political opinion. Something they have consistently demonstrated, including at the ballot box.
p.s. On your site, selecting text to cut doesnt work properly – the whole page from the start of the selection is selected (using IE6.0)
Phil Bradley: If I am a single issue activist, then that issue is not surveillance but rather individual liberty. I have no problem with being characterized that way as liberty is a very broad issue indeed.
Of course I dismiss the views of people who are my ideological enemies. It is not that I do not listen to or understand or contrary views, just that I regard them as falsified… clearly you dismiss my views and I would not expect otherwise. My job is to convince enough people to see things my way or failing that, at least not your way. What you seem to be saying that you are surprised by the fact in a political struggle I am engaging in political struggle.
Also, did you actually read what I wrote? The Provo IRA is a minority group with Sinn Fein, a minority party, within a minority community. The fact they won votes within that minority just shows they had ‘enough’ support, as I pointed out in my original comment. What is more, the IRA and Sinn Fein are (rightly) vilified by the vast majority of people within the UK… and yet they have clearly defeated the British state in a multi-generational war of political and military attrition. Did what the majority of British or even Ulster voters want matter? Clearly not. The power of majorities is vastly over-rated.
Given the way you tend to spin my views, let me point out that I am not suggesting that at this juncture the correct response to the panoptic state and other abridgements of civil liberties in Britain should be establishing an arms length terrorist group to blow people up to further the political objectives of a political party (i.e. like the Sinn Fein/IRA relationship)… but merely that establishing within the population a minority who are active supporters and passive sympathizers is the key to waging any long term political fight against a powerful state. The fact the majority might not support my views really does not discourage me at all because that does not mean my views cannot still prevail in the long run.
Although we do not live in a profoundly repressive state at the moment (and the whole point is I would like to keep it that way), the infrastructure of repression is being put in place with the help of a great many well meaning fools. Fortunately it is always easier to smash something than to create it, which is why activist minorities can safely ignore the lumpen majority.
We do not need to blow things up to make our point but I cannot say I am unhappy about Captain Gatso’s antics.
p.s. the cut and paste problem is an IE bug that affects some sites but not others. Some builds of IE work fine that way, others do not… for example:
Explorer 6.0.2600.0000 can select text on this site… but Explorer 6.0.2800.1106 cannot. Take it up with Mr. Gates.
Do any of you know where I could find some information about the [complete in-]effectiveness of CCTV in stopping serious crimes? I had heard somewhere that the only crime to consistently be reduced in areas where CCTV is brought in was public urination, but I don’t know how reliable that information is and would like to check it.
Eldan, try one of our contributors, zem of vigilant.tv (http://vigilant.tv/). He specialises in surveillance cameras and the issues surrounding them.
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