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To navigate living in a modern America in which long-cherished liberties are evaporating before our very eyes, one must be able to detect patterns. The erosion of personal privacy in our tech-centric society is not occurring by happenstance. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the dominant media today engages with startling regularity in seemingly utterly pointless public shaming of totally unimportant private citizens. The astute observer will understand this is really aimed at any Americans who may be thinking of bucking the ruling powers that be in some way. It is conditioning, and it’s a warning: If you get out of line, the surveillance state can do this to you.
“The two rumored Big Apple lawyers caught on camera sucking face in Central Park have been identified as colleagues who work in the same department at a high-profile Manhattan law firm,” reads the lead sentence in The New York Post story “covering” the latest ridiculous gotcha episode to go viral. Two New York City employees of a prominent law firm were captured on video posted onto social media kissing on a park bench. The Post splashed it high atop its website on July 25, and followed up a few days later with a site-leading second “Exclusive!” article on the amorous co-workers.
Surveillance as Behavioral Control
It should go without saying that this is not news, even in the silly summer season. Neither of these two people qualifies as being in the public interest in any way, shape, or form. It’s a distinction that should matter greatly to regular Americans who also fall into that same category – because we are now being told this does not matter anymore. You may have certain basic expectations of personal privacy and a fundamental right to be left alone, but in the iPhone age, such quaint sentiments no longer hold water.
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These types of articles are meant to reinforce in the minds of a once-free citizenry that the technology exists to keep you under watch at all times. Now that doesn’t mean you are being watched 24/7; you just won’t know when the all-seeing electric eye is on you.
There has been no shortage of cultural thought pieces expounding the notion that the threat of constant surveillance and the disintegration of personal privacy constitute forms of behavior modification. Scientific studies have been conducted to back the assertion. Above all, surveillance culture appears to cultivate one particular overarching human reaction: conformity.
American Panopticon
“A newly published study from Oxford’s Jon Penney provides empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression,” Glenn Greenwald wrote back in 2016 for The Intercept. Think how much technology has advanced since then.
“There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant, conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without monitoring,” Greenwald wrote. “That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can be effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act as if they always are being watched.”
Bentham’s Panopticon was an attempt in late 18th-century Britain to design the ideal circular prison in which inmates’ behavior would be controlled by the realization that they could be observed at any given time. Tens of millions of people walking around with camera-equipped cell phones and sophisticated video systems – watching over houses, businesses, stores and markets, roads, cars, entertainment venues, etc. – can certainly make one feel as if all of America today has become one giant public Panopticon.
‘Wants People to Self-Censor’
“The fact that you won’t do things, that you will self-censor, are the worst effects of pervasive surveillance,” Bruce Schneier of Harvard’s Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Government and International Affairs was quoted as saying in a December 2016 Harvard Magazine article titled “How surveillance changes people’s behavior.”
Again, this was ten years ago – when things weren’t as bad.
“Governments, of course, know this. China bases its surveillance on this fact. It wants people to self-censor, because it knows it can’t stop everybody,” Schneier continued. “The idea is that if you don’t know where the line is, and the penalty for crossing it is severe, you will stay far away from it. Basic human conditioning.”
“[I]f your goal is to control a population,” Schneier declared, “mass surveillance is awesome.”
While Schneier and Greenwald are mostly talking about official government surveillance, the decade that has passed since their points were made has seen the enormous growth of a self-enforcing citizen-on-citizen invasion of privacy that is every bit as demoralizing and effective at moderating behavior.
Social media and cell phone addiction and a dissipation of communal ties that has alienated us from our neighbors have fueled an atmosphere in which Americans consume the personal scandals and flawed actions of their fellow Americans without ever seeing them as real people. We have become a nation of dirty sheet sniffers as a form of base entertainment and, even worse, as a momentary, cheap moral high. As much as this crass voyeurism demeans the individual who indulges in it, such public shaming rubbernecking also boosts the further acceptance of a future surveillance state operated by an oppressive government aimed at stifling opposition in the civilian sector.
“If you don’t want to be made famous, don’t act like a jerk in public.” “It’s not a problem if you don’t have anything to hide.” These are common arguments heard today.
The intelligent person realizes you’re not a normal human being if you don’t do something demonstrably wrong, foolish, or even merely embarrassing now and again. Like it or not, that’s part of existing as an imperfect being in an imperfect world. We are now entering a new societal age, however, in which our human imperfections can be captured on permanent record and weaponized against us at any time. It’s not total surveillance; it’s cataloging. It’s Big Brother and Brave New World mashed together. The private life is being destroyed in America, and the conformist masses are being conditioned to relish the humiliation heaped upon violators made available to them at the press of a button or the click of a mouse.
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