{"id":8663,"date":"2013-06-25T17:51:35","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T23:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8663"},"modified":"2013-06-25T17:53:07","modified_gmt":"2013-06-25T23:53:07","slug":"trope-tuesday-sinister-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/trope-tuesday-sinister-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Trope Tuesday: Sinister Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This was actually a real poster.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Someone is watching you<\/a>.\u00a0 Their eyes are everywhere<\/a>.\u00a0 Everything you do, everything you say<\/a> … it’s all being recorded<\/a> in a giant database<\/a>.\u00a0 But don’t worry–you can trust the ones watching you<\/a>.\u00a0 They have your best interests at heart<\/a>.\u00a0 They’re only after the bad guys<\/a>.\u00a0 You won’t even know that they’re there<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sinister Surveillance<\/a> is a hallmark of Dystopia<\/a>, as essential to the genre as the Crapsack World<\/a> and the Police Brutality<\/a> tropes.\u00a0 Often, you’ll find all three in the same story together.\u00a0 It’s closely related to Big Brother is Watching<\/a>, where the government is so powerful, and reaches into so many aspects of everyday life, that they see and record everything you do.\u00a0 Where Big Brother shapes every aspect of the society, however, down to the language of the citizens and the basic truths accepted as facts, Sinister Surveillance<\/a> is more about the surveillance itself, and the ulterior motives behind it.<\/p>\n

It’s not enough for the government to simply watch you, though.\u00a0 Even more important in some ways is the idea that you don’t know what they can and can’t see.<\/em>\u00a0 The reason for this is the same reason why, in horror stories, we almost never see the monster until the very end<\/a>–because our imagination makes things a lot scarier than they really are.\u00a0 If we<\/del> the bad guys know the limitations of our government surveillance, we<\/del> they can safeguard our privacy and basic rights<\/del> game the system.\u00a0 We’re all afraid of the dark<\/a>, not because of what’s actually there, but what could be.<\/p>\n

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The concept behind all this goes back to the Panopticon<\/a>, a hypothetical prison where the prisoners know that the guards are constantly watching them, but can’t actually see any of the guards themselves.\u00a0 Proposed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 1700s, the idea is to disempower the prisoners and empower the guards simply through the act of surveillance.\u00a0 If everything you do can be seen, and you don’t know exactly who’s watching, that puts a tremendous amount of social pressure on you to conform.\u00a0 As Michel Foucault put it:<\/p>\n

The Panopticon creates a consciousness of permanent visibility as a form of power, where no bars, chains, and heavy locks are necessary for domination any more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But if the prisoners are the citizens, and the guards are the government, how can such a system ever be democratic?\u00a0 How can the citizens of such a society ever give their informed consent?\u00a0 Well, that’s kind of the point.\u00a0 The government in dystopian stories is rarely democratic–it’s usually a dictatorship of some kind, or a system that turns well-meaning people into Knights Templar<\/a>, showing how even the best of us die like animals<\/a> when the game is rigged.<\/p>\n

As benevolent the intentions of the government may initially be, it is nonetheless true that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely<\/a>.\u00a0 Just as the Panopticon takes power from the prisoners and concentrates it with the guards, so does universal surveillance grant dangerous amounts of power to the government–not because the act of surveillance is dangerous in itself, but because it brings out the worst in the people doing the surveillance.<\/p>\n

In The Road to Serfdom,<\/em> Freidrich Von Hayek pointed out that self-serving, ambitious, power-hungry people tend to rise in government a lot faster than people who have others’ best interests at heart, especially when so much power is concentrated in the government.\u00a0 That’s one of the biggest dangers of surveillance–and in stories where Sinister Surveillance<\/a> is in play, the government has already passed that point.<\/p>\n