Dispatch from the Surveillance Society: Panoptic Playthings

There are many ways to approach the study and critique of the emergent surveillance society. Often, those of us who take a strong normative stance against the expansion of systems and assemblages of surveillance will engage with this discussion by drawing on Michel Foucault's work Discipline and Punish, in which he uses Bentham's concept of the Panopticon as a metaphor for disciplinary technologies and related deployments of power and reorganizations of the social. It is also popular to draw on Orwell's image of Big Brother, the embodiment of sovereign power and Argus-like surveillance in the totalitarian setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both Orwell and Foucault offer useful entry points for the study of top-down and imposed surveillance, and a good deal of contemporary literature has drawn on them to critique the expanding infrastructure of the late modern surveillance state.

But the vast expansion of state-coordinated (and otherwise top-down) systems of watching is only one component of the surveillance society. Another component, and in the long run, probably a more pernicious one, is the growing banality of surveillance - the increasing normalization of watching and being watched that has come to characterize our digitized and monitored lives in the 21st Century. Foucault and Orwell offer us resources for making sense of this dimension as well. For Foucault, it is the internalization of the panoptic gaze and ensuing processes of self-policing and voluntary docility that marks the full realization of disciplinary power. And the true horror of Orwell's dystopian and prescient work of fiction is not found in the character of Big Brother, but in the fearful obedience of the populace, the inscription of citizens as components of the overarching surveillant assemblage (Little Brothers), and the way that total surveillance is experienced as a normal part of everyday life.

Indeed, insofar as surveillance powers remain associated with the structures of government, they are at least made intelligible as components of a set of class and power relations that can be identified and resisted. This is not to say that resisting the expansion of the surveillance state is an easy or straightforward task - but compared to the current state of things, a straightforward relationship between the totalitarian watcher and the surveilled populace would at least involve a manageable cast of characters. Alas, at present, when systems of surveillance and processes of watching have become diffused throughout the range of social interactions, resistance seems comparatively far more difficult.

Today, submission to processes of monitoring has become a prerequisite for access to the full benefits of late modern society. Examples abound, and I won't review the creep of surveillant assemblages in the form of 'preferred customer' technologies, identity verification schemes, and the growth of access-controlled spaces (both virtual and real, if such a distinction can hold).

Instead, I want to spend some time thinking about the onset of the contemporary surveillance society from the perspective of those who have been born into it and who are now being socialized to its normalcy.

My question is this: How will someone who was born in the opening years of the 21st Century (or even the last decade of the 20th) read Nineteen Eighty-Four? What will the dystopian vision of Orwell look like to someone who has grown up with biometrics, CCTV cameras on street corners, RFID, interconnected personal information databases, a dominant discourse that conflates surveillance and security, Facebook, MySpace, and a culture that recognizes social experience as having 'happened' only after it has been digitally recorded and broadcast on the Internet for posterity's sake? How will privacy be understood by those who come of age at at time when the profoundly anti-democratic but nonetheless popular slogan 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' coexists alongside forms of sociality that encourage us to live through our data doubles? Will the message of Nineteen Eighty-Four be lost on a generation for whom its vision of surveillance seems obsolete? Will the image of the telescreen on Winston's wall hold any horror for people who communicate with videophones and validate their identities with iris scans before taking a test in school?

I don't know. I'm not entirely pessimistic, and I don't want to appear dismissive of the spirit of resistance to be found in the coming generation. Perhaps it will take the widespread solidification of the most extreme forms of the surveillance society to wake up a somnambulant public; certainly, those of us who are living through its emergence are doing a bloody poor job of standing up for ourselves at the moment.

But I believe that resistance is an act of consciousness. And for there to be resistance to the growth of the surveillance society, there must be a conscious recognition of its existence, of its problematic nature, and of the possibility of alternatives. This is why I am concerned less with the growth of the surveillance state than I am with the broader development of scopophilia - a normalization (indeed, valuation) of watching and being watched, viewing and being viewed, throughout all aspects of social life in late modern society (see David Lyon's excellent essay "9/11, Synopticism, and Scopophilia in the edited volume The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility for more on scopophilia).

I get particularly concerned about the socialization of and towards surveillance when I come across things like this:

This is the Playmobil 'Airport Security Check-In' set, a toy set designed for young children. Playmobil's website says that "The figure's size is perfectly suited for the hand of a child and the pleasant facial expression makes it ideal for any play situation". Let's ignore the obvious superficial problems - the 'pleasant facial expressions' are entirely out of place given the setting, which almost universally regarded as, at best, a necessary evil; and the realism of the situation is lessened by the fact that the person about to be scanned is still sporting footwear.
At a deeper and more serious level, I wonder about what it means that we have, in the contemporary context, internalized the structures of the surveillance society to such an extent that we think nothing of making an airport security checkpoint the setting of a children's playset. What message does this impart? I would love to speak with a parent who has purchased this toy for their child. Does the security checkpoint now fall into that group of everyday life situations that we understand as normal, functional, and unproblematic? What social dynamics and power relations are being mimicked and internalized when a child interacts with this toy? For a hint, we might turn to Playmobil's description of the set:

"Every single smuggler is caught at the security check-in. With a modern X-ray machine every item not allowed on board is detected. At the same time, the passengers have to pass the passenger check-in under the watchful eyes of the security staff. Only then can they start in their hard-earned vacation."

At the risk of being accused of reading too much into this, I think it is important to note that even this short description reproduces the idea at the heart of the surveillance society - that the trade-off of privacy or personal information for some kind of benefit (in this case, permission to go on vacation) is normal and unproblematic.
Here's a breakdown of the parts in the playset:

It's all there, then. Two authority figures, some fancy and apparently infallible technology, and a citizen that need only comply in order to reap the rewards (vacation playset sold separately).

(It's unclear as to whether the second pistol is supposed to accompany the fellow with the scanner or the passenger - I'll leave that one up to the imaginations of children).

I'll close with an excerpt from Cory Doctorow's weekend article at boingboing, which is about the fingerprint readers that have become features of Walt Disney World's turnstiles, ostensibly to "keep Disney World customers from sharing or re-selling their admission tickets" (see also Clifford Shearing's classic article "From the Panopticon to Disney World: The Development of Discipline - 2002).

from Doctorow:

The readers aren't very effective at stopping admission cheats. You can choose not to register your fingertip, and to use photo ID for admission instead (I'm thinking of having a random piece of photo identification made with the words "OFFICIAL BOGUS SECURITY IDENTIFICATION FOR HOTELS, THEME PARKS AND OTHER JUNIOR G-MEN" printed on it). So it would be very easy to share your pass: the person named on the pass enters with his ID, and the person with whom he's sharing the card uses a fingertip -- you could visit with your sister's family and half of you could use the tickets in the morning while the other half hung around the pool and relaxed, then switch at lunch: the morning crew uses fingertip, the afternoon uses ID.

What these readers are effective at is conditioning kids to accept surveillance and routine searches and identity checks without particularized suspcion. One morning at Epcot Center, as we offered our ID to the castmember at the turnstile and began to argue (again -- they're very poorly trained on this point) that we could indeed opt to show ID instead of being printed, a small boy behind us chirped up, "No you have to be fingerprinted! Everybody has to be fingerprinted!"

To all those parents who worry that Disney will turn their kids into little princesses, it's time to get priorities straight: the "security" at the parks is even more effective at conditioning your children to live in a police state.

All the best,

- Mike