Social Media and The Control Grid

It is alarming to walk around any city in the UK (and in most of the world for that matter) these days and see the sheer amount of surveillance that is everywhere. Sure, CCTV has it's uses in businesses and private homes but the sheer amount of cameras that litter urban environments is worrying. You could say that if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide but that would imply that they are there purely to catch criminals. That may be the story but if I'm going to mug someone on a street with cameras then I'll just cover my face! There is also no guarantee that anyone is manning the cameras at any one time. Also why are there cameras going up in low crime areas? Do you really feel safer walking down a dark street with a menacing figure coming towards you knowing that a camera is going to film you being mugged or assaulted? The fact is that CCTV is expensive and ineffective for the aims the authorities claim it is there for.

What about smart meters? We will be told they're a good thing because you can monitor your energy usage. However with proposals of carbon taxes and the like they could be used to ration how much energy you use and that is saying nothing about the massive amounts of harmful radiation they emit or the reports of them catching fire and even exploding!

Anyone who has been on a social network such as Facebook can see how much personal information that is being shared by ordinary users. This is so common that I'm sure that many examples spring to every readers mind almost instantly. We also have the trend of 'after sex selfies' of people taking pictures of themselves right after sex (not to mention some during sex selfies). Also let us not forget the massive amounts of data that is being collected on every single one of us every time we use the internet!
 

It seems like young people in particular are being encouraged through the internet to abandon notions of privacy and put every detail of their lives out there for everyone to see. With my tinfoil hat cocked to one side it really does look planned. If you were an evil genius in a cape looking out of your sinister-looking tower wondering how to get the general public to accept a massive electronic control grid wouldn't it make sense to have people voluntarily sharing massive amounts of their privacy online? In this way as the grid gets larger former notions of privacy have already faded so the general public is less likely to ask why there's cameras on every street or why there is a council official in a uniform that looks like a child dressing up as a policeman watching you smoke a cigarette so that he can pounce on you with a fine if you drop the butt on the street (I have unfortunately witnessed just that).
 

So where could this lead? Well to Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. For anyone unfamiliar with this, the 18^th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with an idea for an institutional building where a single watchman could observe all the inmates without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. So the result is that all the inmates act as if they're being watched at all times so that they control their own behaviour. Now imagine that but instead of a building it's a city or even a country.
 

We can see that if we drop notions of privacy, even with something seemingly harmless like Facebook we will develop into a culture who are used to being under constant surveillance and will just accept a giant control grid. But just remember, once the grid is in place it's easy for the powers that be to strengthen it and very hard for normal people to break it. I will finish with a quote I have used before but it is by far the best quote on the topic and it comes from Benjamin Franklin “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

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Stop Smart Meters UK

Big Brother Watch UK

The Panopticon