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Title: Lights, Camera, Action! Author: The Grievous Amalgam Date: Winter 2003-04 Language: en Topics: green anarchy, Green Anarchy #16, surveillance, panopticon Source: Retrieved on 20 August 2018 from http://greenanarchy.anarchyplanet.org/files/2012/05/greenanarchy16.pdf Notes: from Green Anarchy #16, Winter 2003-04
Surveillance is developing in more and more domains and at an extremely
rapid pace. Surveillance cameras are obviously involved, as are
miniaturized cards, portable telephones, the growing number of recording
devices of all kinds, the Internet and electronic “cookies.” This is the
era of Big Brother! Today, when cameras equipped with face recognition
software add their specters to the pantheon of the failed illusions of
security, the government is trying to pass liberty-killing laws under
the fallacious pretext of the “fight against terrorism.”
Here, we are made to live in the psychosis of continual control: filmed,
surveilled and filed all day, as if we are all criminal suspects, and
asked to accept the “fact” that — in the name of our security — men,
women and children will have to be killed. We denounce those truly
responsible for this masquerade, those thirsty for political power who
do not hesitate to use demagoguery and opportunism to inflame the fears
of “the Other” and who, even before September 11, were playing the
“Total Security” card in an attempt to get votes. We demand the
rejection, from now on, of politics in the service of the maintenance of
the market — economy and social inequities, of politics that have as
their guiding principle the enslavement of the general population and
the restriction of human possibilities.
We hope to live in a different world, one in which we don’t have to
submit ourselves to the government-subsidized industrial companies that
pollute our air, land and water, that rapaciously enrich themselves by
riding the backs of workers, those in precarious socio-economic
situations, and that set up the market in the surveillance of human
beings. The images of money-traffickers and fiscal paradises, political
operatives who can act with total impunity, and deal-makers working in
the rich soils of the powerful will not be captured by surveillance
cameras, despite the facts that they are the ones who are responsible
for the world in which we are forced to live, and who should be held
accountable for it.
The supermarket is surveilled, as are the streets, offices and
factories. What a plethora of images! And why are they captured? In the
supermarket, each movement and gesture of the apathetic consumer is
filmed and analyzed so as to discover the unknown factor that will
facilitate the sale of mad-cow-infected meats, spoiled cheeses, and
aseptic chickens. At the office and at the factory, we are surveilled in
the name of profits; in the street, we are surveilled so that we never
lose the sense of being watched! For what purpose? To force behavior to
become normalized; all movements other than normal become suspicious.
When will we address ourselves to the real problems, the ones that erode
our capacity for life? When will we have the intelligence — which is
lacking in this society, which turns in the wrong direction — to refuse
to accept these conditions, neither for us nor for the generations to
come? The progress of digitalization and computerized information
profits the type of social control that we fear will exist in the
future. Aren’t people already enmeshed in the gears of the market, which
without hesitation supports every political manipulation so as to have
servile consumers? We say “no” to the liberty-killing laws that would
legalize this fuckery.
We reclaim the right to possess “disguises.” We reclaim the right to a
private life. We reclaim individual freedom, not simply the freedom to
exist, but all freedoms.
We Are Being Surveilled - Camouflage Yourself!
— Collective for Individual Freedom in the Age of Information
Technologies
In recent years, the use of video surveillance cameras (also called
Closed Circuit Television, or CCTV) to monitor public and private spaces
throughout the world has branched out to unprecedented levels,
dramatizing the rise of a global, centralized One World State that
meticulously controls all aspects of political and social life through
the use of state power and its perfected technological systems of
suppression. The leader in this trend is the U.K., where it’s estimated
that between 150 and 300 million pounds per year are spent building a
surveillance grid involving 200,000 cameras furnished with full pan,
tilt, zoom and infrared capacity. The more colossal camera web covering
Britain is appraised at 1,500,000 cameras and counting, radiating
invisible lines of influence on the thoughts and actions of those living
under its predatory, voyeuristic Eye. Enveloping all, a frightening
electronic Retina is emerging as an absolute and uncontested regulatory
mechanism, from which no concealment, let alone escape, is possible. The
clarity of the pictures collected by these cameras is usually excellent
(for the State!), with many systems being able to read a cigarette
package at a hundred meters.
These cameras are intimations of the future, as Britain is in many ways
being used as a “social laboratory” for the development of technologies
that extend the pervasive homogeneity of the unilateral political order;
methodologies of enslavement are being formulated and installed, with
the aim of increasing obedient uniformity and snuffing out wildness on
an international scale. The U.K. Home Office estimates that 95 percent
(!) of towns and cities in Britain are moving to CCTV surveillance of
public areas, housing estates, car parks and public facilities. The
System, compulsively preoccupied with order, precision, utility, and
rationality, can now zoom in on the lives of its “citizens” and effect
the complete elimination of anonymity. Architects and urban planners in
Britain are already factoring cameras into the core design of new towns
and buildings, and our lives are all tarred with the same leveling brush
of what “civil engineers” are now describing as the “fifth utility.”
Cameras the size of a matchbox are commonplace and are being integrated
into urban architecture in much the same way that electricity and
telephones were in the early 20th century. Some of the “cameras” being
installed are “scarecrows,” empty shells meant to look like cameras, but
with their surface aesthetics reinforcing the same sense of estrangement
and extracting the same obedience from their ghettoized human
subordinates. Appearances are maintained — and monotony imposed — by the
invasion of this reifying technical progress that governs the details of
urban construction and social scheduling/ social dislocation.
The global system is striving to eclipse all contestable sites of
physical space and shape all interpersonal relations through the
establishment of a totalizing spatial enclosure. This is the process
whereby the explicit duplication of a characteristically capitalist mode
of production reprograms and utterly restructures the behaviors, life
rhythms, cultural habits and temporal sense of its subjects.
Nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and CCTV are all integral to the
project of taming wildness and pounding it down into the coin of
mercantile civilization.
The very presence of CCTV negotiates conflict between exploiters and
exploited, engendering human relationships that are stilted, artificial
and lacking in intensity. Public becomes pseudo-public and an
“apartheid” of inner-city spatial relations the norm, in a liaison
between architecture and the police state that inverts interior and
exterior reality. These surveillance technologies are converging with
sophisticated software programs that are capable of automated
recognition of faces, crowd behavior analysis, and in certain
environments, intimate scanning of the area between skin surface and
clothes. The U.S. government is now funding the development of “passive
millimeter wave technology” that allows police to peer under clothing to
see if a person is carrying contraband or weapons.
Through the implementation of CCTV, the political order accommodates
into its own structures a safety valve for sedition. When
disenfranchised factions within society rebel against the disempowerment
of a super-organized, vise-like system, CCTV isolates, enlarges and
creates permanent photographic evidence of the rebels’ transgressions,
recuperating them into bounds where they will have no consequences for
the authoritarian state apparatus. CCTV exists to create a sterile,
whitewashed world in which spontaneity disappears, our behavior is fully
law-abiding and humanity eventually sleeps itself to death.
The proliferation of video surveillance cameras and other technologies
of domination evokes all kinds of nightmarish, dystopian images and
scenarios, the most clichéd of which is the over used (and thoroughly
recuperated) term “Orwellian.” As important a book as Orwell’s 1984 is,
we feel we would only be doing our readers a disservice by drawing such
an obvious analogy, especially when far more potent and accurate
political models exist to describe the cage-like conditions of
techno-industrial civilization. Any serious attempt to analyze and break
down the locked doors that enclose our lives in the modern world will
inevitably lead to the observation that society itself has become a vast
prison, a monumental gulag of the body, mind and senses. Thus it’s
hardly surprising that many social theorists since Orwell have discussed
the character of modern Western civilization using prison imagery.
Max Weber depicted it as an iron cage; Gary T. Marx defined it as a
“maximum security society,” while others have represented it using terms
like “disciplinary society.” But Michel Foucault offers a more sinister
and arguably more precise concept to outline the facelessness of
high-tech political repression: that of Jeremy Bentham’s blueprints for
the Panopticon prison, where all prisoners were segregated into cells
around a central tower which allowed guards to watch prisoners without
being seen and where the prisoners sense that they’re under ceaseless
observation. Bentham, an English Utilitarian philosopher, unveiled in
1791 his prototype for the “all-seeing place” or panopticon, the
ultimate prison with the central goal of using the mental uncertainty
and paranoia of implied and constant surveillance as an instrument of
discipline, wherein prisoners constrain their own behavior. Bentham
found this Utilitarian ideal of oppressive self-regulation to be
appealing in many other social settings, including schools, hospitals,
and poorhouses, although he achieved only limited success in realizing
his twisted vision (at least in his lifetime).
Michel Foucault seized upon this metaphor of the Panopticon as the
perfect governing design for any institution in which discipline is
required. By encouraging self-surveillance on behalf of the prisoner,
the Panopticon assures the automatic functioning of power. Control no
longer requires physical domination over the body in modern society,
Foucault noticed, where our spaces are organized “like so many cages, so
many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly
individualized and constantly visible.” In the Panopticon all power
resides with the State and government control becomes internalized. The
gaze of someone in an authoritative position is a power/knowledge
mechanism, which contains and imprisons those subjects who come under
its scrutiny, its guardianship.
It follows that these examples of the “Panopticon Principle” equip
anarchists with a beneficial critical tool to comprehend the ubiquitous
spread of video surveillance cameras and the State’s scheme to control
the “psychic selves” of the populace and turn the mind itself into a
space of imprisonment. The “surveillance effect” of globally pervasive
“image catchers” creates mental chains as crippling as literal chains.
Believing ourselves to be under the microscope of the State at all
times, we are conditioned to act in accordance with the will of the
watchers. The urban and suburban zoos the System has herded us into
become increasingly claustrophobic as the techniques of social control
metastasize internally and externally, creating the impression of police
omnipresence and omnipotence. If they “know what’s good for them,”
people will conform to the whims of the electronic eye.
It would be a serious mistake to focus exclusively on the
“self-policing” quality of video surveillance cameras and ignore the
physical dimensions of this latest despotic encroachment of the State.
The ruling class is endeavoring to construct a “Total Institution” of
permanently entrenched fear, a digitally re-mastered menagerie, and
their cameras are there to archive and track our movements as well. The
state has a vested interest in establishing whether or not rules are
obeyed, who obeys and who does not, and how those who deviate can be
located and punished. CCTV cameras do freeze moments in time and provide
a reservoir of information to the probing, investigating eye of law
enforcement; in some of the larger urban labyrinths, these cameras are
becoming more common than wildlife.
Class struggle has always been a component of civilization and the War
on the Wild, and video cameras are the absolutist tool of a particular
social class (civilization’s ruling elite), wielded to sequester another
class. The exploited, the undesirables, the “bad consumers,” the natural
world, the wild—we are all to be reduced to high-resolution captivity
superimposed on us by video surveillance, and autonomy and feralness are
to be faded out cinematically. In the workplace video cameras are
proving to be a forceful new feature of the class war, as the roving
overseer or foreman is being substituted by the silent and untiring
electronic eye. The machine has (once again) replaced the presence of a
human being; instead of “breathing down one’s neck”, management now
fixes a seemingly continuous and unyielding gaze on one’s productivity
from the colder and more uncertain distance of the hidden recorder.
Scientific control techniques reach a new peak of intensity and the
shadow of the Panopticon extends further over our lives, immobilizing
revolt and endangering the traditional “weapons of the weak” (sabotage,
theft, wildcat strikes).
In the past, the exploited always knew that monitoring was episodic —
the supervisor could not be everywhere all of the time. In contrast,
camera and recorder can be omnipresent and allow our masters to even
analyze the friendships that form between fellow slaves. The CCTV
network threatens to smother all wildness, that “dreaming ground...
invoking ever new dreams,” as all conceivable sites of resistance are
absorbed by the Spectacle of self-oppression. The cameras of the State
seek to produce a new type of civilized slave, one that is satisfied in
its restricted possibilities, isolation and anomie, dreaming the
circumscribed dreams of the powerless and unimaginative, never crossing
the paltry bounds that the system provides. With no aspirations that go
beyond what exists in their plastic tombs, the exploited become like
wild animals whose teeth and claws have been removed.
But humans are not simply robots or “docile bodies” following the
dictates of coercive micro-mechanisms of state power, but potentially
feral, ungovernable agents capable of interpreting, rejecting and
destroying these structures. In his book Asylums: Essays on the Social
Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Erving Goffman discusses
how although “primary adjustments” or acts of conformity abound in
tightly run “Total Institutions,” rebellious individuals also make
“secondary adjustments” which defy the suffocating demands of the
institutional order. These acts of recalcitrance are practices of
“reserving something of oneself from the clutch of the institution...
like weeds they spring up in any kind of social organization.” To use
straightforward war terminology, for every strategy that is planned for
a particular purpose there are always innumerable tactics which can
spontaneously be deployed to counteract them.
Put simply, “strategy is the science of military movements beyond the
field of vision of the enemy; tactics, that of movements within his
field of vision.” For every new strategy of social control on the part
of the State, there is a novel and surprising tactic of negation, and
for every video surveillance camera installed, there is a complimentary
form of resistance, of subversion. For Big Brother’s telescreen has
blind spots just like the human eye that rests on the other side of the
lens.
In a Panoptic, conformist society of mediocrity and standardization —
where vanquishment, collaboration and/or capitulation (all unacceptable)
— seem to be the only responses an overwhelmingly technological,
capitalist civilization permits, it’s uplifting to see rebels around the
world roused to revolutionary action against the CCTV dragnet. In August
2002, a militant aggregation known as Motorists Against Detection (MAD)
started a direct action anti-“speed camera” campaign in Britain, kicking
it off with the UK’s most profitable speed camera located at the bottom
of the infamous M11 motorway near Woodford, Essex. This particular
camera was reputed to earn up to 840,000 pounds per week in traffic
fines, as it tracks the movements of all motorists and communicates in
real time via microwave links and the phone system to the newly upgraded
Police National Computer. Within two weeks, MAD had sabotaged a further
29 speed cameras along the whole 27 mile length of the A406 North
Circular Road between Chiswich and the east side of London.
A member of the resistance calling himself Captain Gatso (a
tongue-in-cheek reference to the inventor of the speed camera, Maurice
Gatsonides) released a communiqué soon after the CCTV Jihad started,
stating that “we are fed up with lining the pockets of police forces and
councils as a stealth tax revenue raising scheme. Everyday now it seems
we read stories about camera technology and hear people talking to radio
stations moaning about them. Up until now this has not made a lot of
difference which is why it is time for all of us to act before it all
gets out of hand.”
The balaclava-wearing highway liquidators of MAD vowed to burn, bomb,
and dismember all speed cameras within the range of their wrath. They
followed through on their threats with a string of attacks in the county
of Norfolk, where six cameras valued at more than 100,000 pounds were
set alight and vandalized. The secretive mutineers are fast becoming the
most popular outlaw folk heroes in Britain since Robin Hood and his
Merry Men stalked the countryside: from the south coast of England to
the Highlands of Scotland no camera is safe, as the “Gatsometers” are
being playfully destroyed in a carnivalesque transformation of the
State’s totalitarian topography. With each unit costing about $38,000, a
huge bill is being run up. But the rebels are unrepentant: “We are all
guinea pigs in a huge experiment that will restrict our liberty, not
just in London but the whole U.K.”
Communicating to the broader public through internet chat rooms, MAD
rails against speed cameras (calling them “Weapons of Mass Persecution”)
and warns of the menace of what they call the Talivan — mobile police
speed detection units. Particularly destructive MAD cells are known to
be operating in North London, Essex and Wales, while recent months have
seen new operations in central Scotland. Most MAD actions have involved
simple approaches like spray-painting camera lenses, burning them or
cutting them down with power tools. But Northhamptonshire police are
offering a reward for help in identifying the MAD members who used
plastic explosives to bomb a camera in May 2003.
MAD’s “mad antics” are definitely catching on, as the destruction of
these noxious devices has become a near-weekly occurrence in the British
Isles. To date, MAD has taken credit for the destruction of more than
700 cameras, while other clandestine groupings around England have taken
up the practice of placing tires over speed cameras and setting them
alight (and often posting images of their charred remains on the web).
Still other camera-haters are shooting them out with guns and one
creative hooligan pulled down a speed camera by attaching a rope from
the back of his car to the camera’s pole and driving away — a humorous
reenactment of the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue?
In early February 2004, a group called the Mendip Mafia achieved a local
publicity coup in its battle against speed cameras when it used dynamite
instead of the usual flaming tractor tire to destroy a CCTV camera in
the village of Emborough, on the A37 Road. This same camera had been
destroyed once before — by other means — and twelve of the fifty
surveillance cameras operated by the Avon, Somerset and Gloucestershire
“Safety Camera Partnership” (who “oversee” this district) have been
violently disabled since May 2003. And the camera rebellion is
spreading, a heartening sign of chaos in revolt! In Brussels, Willem
Laurens is accused of leading a gang that torched 26 cameras in the city
of Flanders, while in France, the country’s first radar camera was
vandalized just hours after its inauguration by someone who cracked its
armored-glass plating with a sledgehammer (equally determined police had
the $90,000 unit repaired the next day, and its images were being
examined for clues). In early October 2003, a pipe bomb took out a CCTV
unit in North Belfast, and on October 23, in Milan, Italy (as reported
in issue #15 of Green Anarchy) 101 security cameras were attacked
throughout the city.
While some people conceive of “rewilding” as scattering marijuana seeds
in the cracks around City Hall or learning the Latin names of “native”
plant species, we recognize that any serious rewilding will also
necessarily involve the destruction of the technological system. The
total administration of life is underway and to fight it we need to move
from arresting paralysis to the deployment of regenerative chaos, by
smashing the rational and institutional restraints placed on our lives
and rekindling the Promethean fires of the imagination. The struggle to
reclaim wildness is intrinsically a confrontation between chaos and
organization: whether we accept it unquestioningly or rebel against it,
technology has acquired not simply a life of its own, but a life that
substantially infiltrates our lives, warping our characters as we
gradually accept its mechanistic parameters.
If we succumb indifferently to the totalitarian reengineering of our
world, we risk becoming androids ourselves, animals made into machines.
To deny technology’s pervasive role in our existence means, then, to
deny reality — at a time when the prospects for life and liberty seem to
be rapidly drying up, and we are advancingly imbricated in the
Panopticon’s presence. Only by demolishing the System’s machinery itself
can we hope to get out from under the thumb of the political order and
achieve our vision of renewal. Technology and the State are two of the
more obvious enemies of wildness. Destroy what destroys you!