What We Lose Under Surveillance
What does it mean for us to be under complete surveillance? We are under more surveillance now than we have ever been in history, why have we accepted a constant theft of privacy? People have meekly accepted near constant surveillance, a near complete lack of privacy. Someone, with access to our data, could potentially understand us better than we understand ourselves. It is not as if people don’t realize that they are being tracked by governments and corporations. For some reason, we seem to have collectively decided that this was acceptable, why? A lack of organized opposition has led to a real life dystopia. Popular attitudes about the likelihood of abolishing mass surveillance have to change. Despite a horrifying reality, people are so lethargic in their response because of learned helplessness. Unable to change their situation, they cope with these feelings with apathy. Being surrounded by covert surveillance devices is now an acceptable way for people to live.
It is not only that these capacities are present within our devices (though that is a large part of the problem), but that we are forced to engage with a system of surveillance. Data collection has become a part of most industries and a record trails you throughout your life. Every place you’ve been, everything you have bought, everything you read, watch, and say is recorded. We lack the language to completely encapsulate what we are losing when we lose our privacy. We excuse dystopia, telling ourselves it is for safety and convenience, that this total loss of privacy is the price of the internet, but these are excuses for an inexcusable injustice. When we lose our privacy our understanding of our lives is compromised because we have lost our ability to choose who we converse with and who is aware of what we’re doing. A stranger is privy to any conversation you are having and anything you are doing. For this not to be normalized would make us perpetually aware of a terrifying reality.
Mass surveillance alters our relationship with our society, turning institutions into things that have to be constantly answered to. This making supposed contracts systemically impossible to break characterizes authoritarianism. You are no longer merely punished for disobedience because you cannot disobey in the first place, even if you wanted to. We may only take this idea to be ridiculous on its face because we have accepted that human society is about obedience to a larger order that punishes you if you disobey. Under mass surveillance, conversations are no longer between two people they are between at least three or four, because someone is always listening and the information being gathered is sold and given to law enforcement.
Perhaps we just think there are bigger problems, perhaps organizing is more difficult to do than we think, or perhaps we have accepted the state as an adversary that it will always require some degree of surveillance. This liberal attitude stops us from going further. Our privacy being compromised is a constant violation where the very integrity of our personal experiences is not guaranteed. Authoritarianism attempts to override the foundational agreements we assume exist within certain societies. It attempts to make violation of the agreement impossible. Consent is impossible because not consenting is impossible, it disintegrates our ability to engage in mutual agreements within our society.
We cannot properly express what it feels like to have this kind of information gathered and shared about us without our consent or knowledge. It has inflicted its psychic damage onto our subconscious. The unnoticed effect of mass surveillance is an increasingly tight, unbreakable knot tied between people and their governments, where there is no place that is ever periodically free from authority. We are watched by someone at all times whether we are being recorded by devices, cameras, or both. We have lost something that we cannot properly express, an isolation from our government, corporations, and from other people in general. It is a distance we no longer have because we are wired into our society. We lack the space to separate ourselves conceptually from what other people might think of us. Our complacency with this indicates a sense of apathy or helplessness, or both, but it also indicates that we have become accustomed to a closeness, an existing lack of respect for our privacy.
Perhaps this is why the mass surveillance we experience seems less serious to many people than it is. I’ve heard that one of the reasons for our complacency with mass surveillance is that we haven’t entered into the draconian futuristic dystopian nightmare we thought we would. But this is an illusion because we have, this degree of surveillance is authoritarian enough and our data is used by law enforcement. In the age of “the future”, where once fictional dystopias are reality, we need to remember that the things we are expected to accept now would be considered preposterous in the past. Are we unwittingly self-policing ourselves into people who are less free in thought and less intelligent?
Mass surveillance is an inevitability under capitalism because information about people is valuable, with technological advancement a greater amount of this valuable information is gathered. Our economy depends on mass surveillance. Credit agencies rely on the gathering of financial data, but really any and every industry profits off of it. We live with potentially millions of people looking over our shoulders near constantly. We will never know who we would be without this level of surveillance, without all the self-policing that we don’t even realize we are doing. How would our lives feel if we were not continuously compromised by the presence of surveillance? We lose integrity when we accept mass surveillance, an integrity of our experiences. We lose agency over who we associate with and the situations we put ourselves are in. We have forfeited this agency continuously because we can almost never choose not to be spied on. We are constantly forfeiting our agency over our lives because there is no mass political movement taking on big tech. You are not alone right now, you are almost never alone and it is almost impossible to ever be alone. Every conversation you have is with at least three people. Does that not scare you?
