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Title: Surveillance and Domestication
Author: John Connor
Language: en
Topics: history, surveillance, technology
Source: Retrieved on August 23, 2009 from http://green-anarchy.wikidot.com/surveillance-and-domestication

John Connor

Surveillance and Domestication

Surveillance is sold to us on the grounds that ‘the innocent have

nothing to hide’, but the reluctance of the watchers to also become the

watched-the police will plead ‘operational security’ to excuse

themselves from disclosing even the most trivial points of detail about

themselves, such as canteen menus, etc-shows this as both a transparent

excuse to extend surveillance way beyond the point where it should be

socially acceptable and a disguising of what is in the interests of the

powerful with reference to what is supposedly ‘in the interest of all’.

The Worm in Adam’s Apple

By way of excusing current levels of surveillance, where there is now

one camera / four people in UK alone, it is possible to present the

first band societies ‘where everyone knew everyone else’s business’ as

the most surveilled societies of all. This totally misses the point,

however, as people then felt they were ‘everyone else’s business’.

Although individual’s ‘right’ to ‘do their own thing’ in negotiation

with the band regardless of traditional custom was highly respected,[1]

there were not the firm boundaries of selfhood that characterise

capitalism’s atomised individualism, not least because personal and

societal survival were so intimately interrelated. Part of your identity

was your relationship to the rest of the band and you would not be

complete without this, nor think of withholding something from them as

you would from yourself. These were free, equal societies where an

unevenness of knowledge, where it was hoarded to advantage one over

another, was an entirely alien, civilised concept except possibly

between genders and then not always. In fact, continuous sharing of news

and skills were as much part of the fabric of daily life in

hunter-gatherer societies as the sharing of tools (usufruct) and

resources.

With the rise of class society, where it became in the interests of the

labouring majority to conceal resources and information about them, work

rates etc ,from the non-labouring minority overseeing them, it equally

became in the interests of the latter to try to find out what was being

concealed from them. This, in truth, was the birth of the surveillance

society, it’s limited effectiveness still pretty much restricted to what

could be seen directly by overseers and residual ‘group think’ that led

people to disclosure information they really wouldn’t in modern,

individualistic societies.

Alvarez’s Centuries of Childhood is very good in pointing this up in the

Medieval era, when any idea of an ‘internal dialogue’ was the privilege

of a literate monastic minority. Others would say what they thought,

their expression being limited to the presence of others with whom it

could be shared — possibly getting back to the ears of feudal law

enforcers and tax collectors. The most radical significance of the book

in terms of shaping the human psyche was that it allowed private

thoughts and expression in ‘dialogue’ (for surely the relationship is

not mutual in the way conversation is) with the page. The first diaries

— typically records of spiritual exercises by cloistered divines — are

thus Medieval.

The self-enclosure facilitated by writing led, of ruling class

necessity, to the elaboration of more sophisticated techniques of

surveillance — the spy networks engendered by Elizabeth I’s courtier Sir

Francis Walsingham, for example, still celebrated as original in

Establishment spook circles today. They would solicit disloyal comment

through infiltration techniques, pretending to be who they were not to

suspects, as well as incidentally engaging pretty comprehensively in

mail interception and attempting to crack counter-measures such as

concealment and cipher. They were still largely dependant on the word,

however, often words procured by duress (torture) and misrepresentation

(forgery or ‘over-reading’ of intercepted correspondence). Of course,

this was also the era of the witch hunts with their ‘spectral evidence’

(the testimony of ‘victims of witchcraft’), but this dependence reached

its apex in the reign of Charles II and the baseless conspiricising of

the Protestant fanatic Titus Oates and his ‘Popish Plot’. Simply on the

basis of tortured ‘confession’ and guilt by association, an

anti-Catholic pogrom was whipped up, though its only true substance was

Oate’s own paranoid fantasy.

The All-Seeing Eye

This sort of thing may have been adequate as an instrument of terror

befitting the majesty of absolute kings, but increased rationalism and

individualism associated with the ascendance of Protestantism, with its

claims of the believer’s unmediated relationship with the Divine, meant

consequent increased demands for physical evidence as a break on the

arbitrary power of courts (both kingly and judicial), especially in

matters concerning the ‘sanctity’ of private property.

Paradoxically, as well as demanding more explicit legislative

regulation, the bourgeoisie’s pet religion also demanded greater

self-regulation, the self now being bounded by contract — and financial

relationships rather than intimate, social relationships. Thus we have

the commonplace appearance [2] of the divine ‘all-seeing eye’, as seen

miserably decorating Protestant homes and chapels to this day, as well

as topping the Masonic pyramid Washington and Jefferson incorporated

into the design of every dollar bill. This idea of ‘the Lord sees all’

meant that even the individualistic Protestant clung on to the vestige

of community, of public being,, in the sense of being in a community of

two, s/he and the ever-watchful God, even if real community — typically

more reciprocal, less judgmental of ‘sin’ and ‘slackness’ — was

sacrificed to such an unremitting moralistic code in consequence. As

well as insisting that the worshipper be hard-working and thrifty, the

Protestant faith self-imposed harsh standards of personal behaviour when

it came to the body and bodily interaction with others. As Norbert Elias

classic study of the rise of ‘good manners’, The Civilising Process,

graphically documents, food became problematic, no longer to be indulged

in gluttonously or passed from mouth to mouth but rather, like sexual or

excretory functions, to be seen as a shameful concession to physicality

to be controlled and bounded by taboos, best a private thing the better

to avoid public shame. Such etiquette was literally domesticating,

confined to the home, and homes too became more elaborate, with

particular concessions to the body confined to particular rooms — a

dining room for eating, a toilet for excretion (the corners of rooms

having previously been preferred, even at Louis XIV’s Versailles!), and

the bedroom for sex behind curtained, canopied beds. The point of all

this specialised architecture — of privacy — was that as few people saw

it as possible. And so lose respect for someone shamefully indulging

their body, as if we all don’t. It was mainly something between a wo/man

and the all-seeing Lord.

Seeing by Numbers

A combination of capital accumulation secured by resultant fixed,

abstract laws and 18^(th) century innovations in food production and

transportation made the mega-cities that characterised the Industrial

Revolution possible. This, then, was when surveillance came of age. On

one level, faced with cities inhabited by millions, many born and raised

undocumented or newly immigrated from the countryside and forming tight

village / ghetto communities closed to casual investigation by

outsiders, it was impossible to surveil them using the old techniques of

gossip gathering. On the other hand, this redoubled the need for

self-surveillance as a curb on the spontaneous, riotous street mob

behaviour of previous centuries as the only practical guarantor of

social order.

On a general level, the inculcation of a self-denying moral code into

the poor was the responsibility of charismatic Methodism — as in the

ruling class dilemma of the early-1800s, ‘Wesleyism or revolution?’ —

and later ‘do-gooders’ dispensing unwanted advice about thrift,

temperance and other supposedly good domestic practice. For those who

wouldn’t accept social inequality as a problem to be resolved by

behaviour adjustment on their part, there was the hero of bourgeois

rational social calculation, Jeremy Bentham, and his panoptican, a

prisonhouse designed to do this architecurally.[3] It’s two key features

were (1) individual cells, a rule of silence and the hooding of inmates

outside their cells to enforce complete isolation from their community

and force them to fall back on the Protestant ‘God and I’ ‘community’

instead and (2) a central tower from which guards could watch each cell

unobserved, much like the Protestant God. Whether actually watched or

not, the prisoner had to assume the worst for fear of harsher

punishment, also inculcating a feeling of permanent surveillance and

thus self-regulation. Needless to say, in practice this brutal,

unnatural treatment amounted to sensory deprivation and whilst it made

some suggestible enough to be effectively brainwashed, it broke others

entirely, yielding horrifying hallucinations and self-harm. As

recidivists could expect many more years in such a system than first

offenders, there was naturally an attempt to evade such treatment by

increased anonymity and impersonation of identities amongst the urban

poor.

Of course, Michel Foucalt dealt with this extensively in his Discipline

and Punish, but it is often forgotten that the first concern of the new

generation of surveillants was not to control crime but rather to

contain disease, a much more widespread and deadly threat to the rich

living in close geographic proximity to the poor. High walls, sturdy

footmen in livery and a mastiff would no way keep cholera from their

doors, so we find as early as the 1830s the first epidemiologists

descending into the unplumbed depths of ‘darkest London’ to identify

sources of disease and its carriers. This was rightly seen as social

control being imposed on areas that typically rioted before admitting

even one of Robert Peel’s newly-minted ‘blue devils’ (police). The

proletariat typically refused to acknowledge the reality of epidemic

crowd diseases such as cholera (uniquely deadly in the early

megalopolises and once a key check on their development) and to destroy

cholera carts intruding into their space as a conspiracy to confine the

poor to ‘houses of death’ (as they reckoned hospitals, not without

justification) for the sadistic amusement of surgeons, during and after

life.[4] And, of course, the poor only had to look to the panoptican to

see with what degree of humanity they would be treated by the new

impersonal total institutions we seem so disturbingly accepting of

today.

A combination of a bureaucracy not sophisticated enough for individual

documentation of entire populations before that developed out of

regimented military practice during the American Civil War, and

widespread illiteracy and resistance by its intended target population

meant that the issuing of identification documents to the poor for

voluntary presentation was not practical. In fact, it was so impractical

that the threat of epidemic disease wasn’t resolved by way of

identifying and confining individual carriers (typically bourgeois

moralistic ‘blaming the victim’) but rather by anonymous sanitation

measures such as the building of London’s sewers in reaction to the

‘Great Stink’ of the 1850s, even though the idea of the state assuming

responsibility for such massive, tax-eating public works would have

previously been anathema to bourgeois sensibilities.

The breakthrough came in Paris as late as 1870 when a Surete clerk

Alphonse Bertillon developed biometrics from a 14^(th) century Chinese

model. Bertillonage considered of individually identifying anonymous

individuals by a 20 minute examination when many key features of their

body — their height, the length of their limbs, the spacing of their

facial features — were systematically measured and then recorded to card

indexes. Potential recidivists were typically uncooperative during these

examinations, later (1903) augmented by ‘mug shots’, so called by the

subject ‘mugging’ (pulling faces) at the camera in an (often amusingly

successful) effort to make themselves less identifiable in future. It

should be noted that Bertillon was heavily influenced by the imperial

anthropology of its day, with its emphasis on the physical

classification of ‘types’. Like the absurd Italian criminologist

Lombroso, he attributed mental and moral characteristics to these

physical signs, typically in a classist and racist manner than only

served to reinforce such ideologies in future.

Bertillonage finally failed and fell out of police use not because it

was racist or unwieldy or even because it was felt to be an excessive

intrusion on individual privacy (’sir, my statistics are my own’) but

rather because it couldn’t do it’s job. In 1903, a man called Will West

was confined to Leavenworth jail for murder on the basis of biometric

measurements actually appropriate to another man, coincidentally also

called William West, despite a supposed 243m-to-one chance against this

happening (not counting any slips of the police tape measure!). Besides,

by then they had something quicker to collect and easier to file, which

didn’t require the perp’s physical presence to identify him. It is

probably no surprise that fingerprinting arose from a colonial context,

that other great ‘submerged mass’ that caused the Victorian elite such

worry. A chief magistrate in Jigupoot, Sir William Herschel first

noticed in 1856 that Indians either illiterate or otherwise unfamiliar

with English script signed themselves with thumb prints instead of

writing, an administrative procedure for unique identification he

adopted himself. From there, it was a short step to Darwin’s pal Sir

Francis Galton writing this up in the scientific journal Nature and a

former supremo of Bombay’s colonial police, Richard Henry introducing

fingerprinting to Scotland Yard’s repertoire of crime detection

procedures in 1896.

Learning to Love Big Brother

Although the state had a technique for distinguishing one anonymous

individual from another with unerring accuracy,[5] this was fairly

useless if that individual could disappear into the anonymous urban

mass. As former Resistance fighter Jacques Ellul noted in his

Technological Society, an immediate consequence of seeking to surveil

particular individuals is that the whole society in which they might

conceal themselves has to be surveilled also, the ‘innocent’ majority as

intensively as the ‘guilty’ few.

Perhaps more surprisingly, by the time fingerprinting was initiated, the

resolute resistance to classification of the early-19^(th) century was

crumbling. There were a number for factors accounting for this, but key

was the inducements offered the majority not to remain anonymous. Mass

education on a monitor system — much like that adopted by Napoleon’s

Grand Armee, the basis of Bentham’s panoptican — not only provided a

more literate, technically sophisticated workshop with a greater chance

of individual socio-economic betterment, it also meant the young came to

accept such treatment as normal — both classification by name and number

and harsh restrictions on personal behaviour in class (’no talking, no

fidgeting’) — and could be systematically documented, generation by

generation. This was augmented by the centralisation of registers of

births, deaths and marriages in places like Somerset House instead of

scattered through disparate parishes, the taking of censuses to

facilitate national planning,, and the creation of employment-based

taxation which meant both bosses and workers (unless inclined to fraud)

had to declare their identities along with their earnings if they were

to make a living at all. Even systematic mapping, such as carried out

initially for military reasons by the Ordnance Survey, meant that space

in which people could exist anonymously evaporated (’everyone in their

place’). This process was only accelerated by the Liberal welfare

reforms of the early-1910s and the post-World War 2 creation of the

welfare state, both of which had disclosure of identity as prerequisite

requirements of receiving their services. It was a citizen’s ‘right’

(the ‘carrot’) and ‘duty’ (the legislatively-enforced ‘stick’) to enter

into all this, without realising that by surrendering their anonymity to

the state, they were also surrounding a key check on its otherwise

unlimited power.

I could rehearse at great length the elaboration of technological means

that now exist to strip us of any possibility of anonymity, but this is

done elsewhere this issue and besides, there is always Privacy

International to consult. I will note that when a text like The

Technology of Political Control was written in the supposedly paranoid

1970s, the suggestion that a comprehensive database could be linked with

face recognition programmes and cameras blanketing every public space in

the country was regarded as pure science fiction, something out of

George Orwell’s dystopian 1984. But today this is, of course, a reality

and augmented by overgrown police and internal security agencies,

parallel services like social workers and market researchers that want

to know everything from the value of your home through to your

children’s eating and TV watching habits the better to predict and

manipulate you, easily surveilled e-communications (ECHELON) and card

transactions, ‘predictive’ databases and profiling,, and any other

amount of technical intelligence. No — the point of this section is to

explore why people have come to accept that quarter of a century ago

would’ve been thought totalitarian (’like Russia’) and nightmarish.

We’ve already had the homo Economicus version above — that people gained

in terms of access to education, employment and healthcare by bringing

themselves to the attention of the state and lost in terms of

prosecution if they failed to do so. However, I think there is more to

it than this. A phenomenon like mass observation in the inter-War years

was popularly and eagerly supported in its detailed documentation of

everyday life — and what do you make of the dating rituals in Chile

where, after years of state-orchestrated surveillance to the nastiest of

ends, courting couples now trail each other round with video cameras,

‘romantically’ building files on each other?

The point is that with all the mass institutions that came out of

Bentham’s panoptican, the traditional role of the community in providing

education, employment and neighbourly care has been replaced by these.

Community has been replaced by institutionalised specialisation and so

people feel it only natural that such specialists look out for them now

there is no meaningful community to. They have been given no reason to

get to know other people and so have no reason to trust them. Far from

it — as society atomised, anyone can be a criminal under the rubric of

surveillance and lacking any social feeling except fear of punishment

under the eye of the camera only encourages selfish behaviour. Of

course, the cameras are sold on the grounds not that we are the

criminals, but that they are there to protect us from everyone else who

potentially is. The old Wesleyans were right that give someone a penny

in their pocket and the slightest whiff of a chance of advancement and

they’ll see everyone else around them as a threat to that, either as

potential thieves or as temptations to be repudiated with the zeal of

the tempted. ‘Terrorists’ are currently flavour of the month threat.

Before that it was ‘paedophiles’, meaning kids had to be microchipped

and cameras installed in every family home while a generation of kids

turned into scared, whiny couch potatoes alongside their parents. Not

many years ago it was witches, for fucksakes, absurd social workers

seeing cracking the local coven of ‘satanic abusers’ as their next step

up the career ladder. If this doesn’t convince you what nonsense it all

is, it’s agreed that now surveillance is so ubiquitous it can’t displace

crime anywhere else (itself surely an exercise in imposed policing),

it’s not actually reducing crime rates. Offences of violence people fear

most — irrationally, as they’re still rare — are committed spontaneously

by people too drunk or angry to be deterred by a camera or too cunning

to get filmed by one.

Why do people still welcome surveillance despite this? Well, the

reliance on experts and definition of ourselves that comes through

identification with their institutions and their representations of us —

qualifications, income, birth and marriage certificates, conformity to

consumer trends, and all the rest of that inane kit and caboodle —

continually serves to emphasise our insignificance, an eight digit

number in their overwhelming megamachine. It is this that leads people

to love Big Brother, essentially a show where we pass tabloid-like

judgement on intensively surveilled wannabe nonentities undergoing

months of sexual frustration in the hope of getting to be childrens’ TV

presenters at the end, Endemol’s even more sinister Shattered where

people were subjected to voluntary sleep deprivation in the manner of

victims of Stalin’s Cheka, and even lower on the totem pole, searching

for themselves in crowd shots (be it big sporting events, pseudo-archaic

spectacles typically orchestrated by the royals, or futile ‘crawl round

London’ marches) or 5 second slots on clip shows using RL footage the

police or whoever have cobbled together as an extra earner.

One in the Electronic Eye!

How do we put an end to the reign of surveillance — assuming you don’t

want to lead over-controlled lives like shadows until you die of boredom

and insignificance, that is?

Well, firstly don’t take advice from me and start thinking for yourself,

but a few suggestions include:

First realising that there is not a quid pro quo between you and those

surveilling you, that they are not accountable to you, that they have no

right to do to you what they would not tolerate done to themselves, and

potentially these voyeuristic parasites have the power to make quite a

mess of your life from as little motivation as boredom-induced whim.

They are the enemies of a free society, not its guarantors, a further

concentration of state power that prevents any injustice being righted.

Unplugging yourself from all the BS images surrounding you — the

clowns in the Big Brother house, the endlessly banal biogs of the lives

of the rich and famous, the five day fashions, all that irrelevant crap

— and learning to laugh at them and (with consequent increased

self-confidence) yourself and your past folly

Unplugging others through irreverent satire and sheer indifference to

the manufactured dreams they undoubtedly hold so dear. You’ll probably

start with the people you know best (typically a tiny number now people

have careers, not friends) but best try to broaden it out a bit more

than that, as a key factor for sustaining a surveillance society is

intolerance and fear of anyone at all different. The new / old you will

have better things to do and talk about, maybe even the recreation of

authentic, trusting human connections without constant manufactured

electronic babble and distraction, of baseless paranoia.

Disconnection and direct action of a more ‘hands on’ kind, a refusal

to fill in tax returns and other official or quasi-official requests for

information — the census, market research, card applications — or

responding to them in absurd, misleading ways to gradually fill their

databases with (even more) useless shit. Believe me — when up against

it, you’ll find it’s really possible to live without that credit card

and all the form-filling bureaucratic BS, especially with a few mates on

board with you too. Reformists please note: denying paperwotk and

opportunities to surveil the public cuts the lifeblood of the dozens of

agencies that exist principly for that purpose, so they can start being

laid off as irrelevant too. And the campaign against speed cameras is

way to go for all intrusive surveillance and related records, the

creation of genuine unmonitored space (at risk of sounding bogus:

‘liberated zones’) and the return of the lawless, deprogrammed 18^(th)

century King Mob!

In conclusion, I’d like to say that I am not arguing for ‘privacy’, a

thoroughly bourgeois concept based on self-disgust and shame. No, let

yourself go and do what comes naturally — fuck in the streets, I say! I

am arguing for the revolutionary re-creation of original, genuine

community where there are no secrets, no shame and no surveillance of

the powerful as a tool to rule over the powerless.

[1] In his Human Cycle (Touchstone, 1983), Colin Turnbull cites a Mbutu

(Pygmy) lad taking a nanny goat as his ‘wife’, something his band

members discourage not with the horror of taboos against inter-species

sex being violated you might expect in this society (they have none,

though the situation was unusual) but because, as a domesticated village

animal, the she-goat could not be expected to cope adequately in their

beloved forest. The Mbutu typically extend refusal of the distinction

between self and other to that between human and other.

[2] It had its origins in the early individualism of monasticism, of

course. We have not missed the irony that though denouncing ‘monkery’,

Protestants bought monastic practice outside its traditional confines,

universalising its body-loathing codes of behaviour.

[3] The first such panoptican was HMP Pentonville, London, where I was

myself confined in 1988.

[4] Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1987) is excellent on this. See also my forthcoming essay,

‘When Doctors Were Hated’.

[5] In fact they did not. As with Bertillonage, there is an outside

statistical chance of accidental correlation of fingerprints from

otherwise dissimilar individuals — and there have been documented

miscarriages of ‘justice’ arising from this — and twins always have

identical fingerprints. As de facto clones, even DNA doesn’t distinguish

twins, only retinal scans as the pattern of blood vessels at the back of

the eye develops post-natum.