By Anonymous
Start thinking about the eyes that watch you. The ones that live on the traffic lights, and the ones that live in our pockets. And the smaller, quieter ones, behind each credit card transaction and web search and unencrypted text and email and google doc. The state apparatus has always relied on its many, many eyes. But before, those eyes belonged to humans. And when they brought what they saw to be analyzed, they brought it to human brains, with papers and pens and many, many file cabinets.
But now the eyes, they are not so human. They are produced by Huawei and Cisco and Amazon and Google and Sony and TP-Link and Arlo and ADP, the cameras of glass and plastic and silicon connected by airwaves and wires to the great, inhuman brain that sorts and sorts and analyzes and analyzes. The platform. The Algorithms. And the other eyes, that deal not in images but in ideas, in money, in words. The social-media-ears and the payment-processing-noses. These too feed in, to that great surveillance apparatus.
This was never acceptable, yet we have quietly accepted. There have always been other, more pressing concerns. More worrying injustices, more violent impositions of state power. And so that amorphous state body and its algorithmic intelligence brain keeps growing these eyes. Growing them at city council meetings where Flock contracts are approved, in corporate boardrooms where DHS contracts are signed, and on the houses of our scared, scared neighbors who install Nest and Ring cameras on their doorbells. The eyes sprout up with every no-cash business, with every fundraiser that takes Venmo with every service that requires an app. And the eyes sprout forth of our own hands too, with every tweet and blog post and Instagram picture and TikTok that brings the physical world of our friends and community into the digital world of their algorithms. Ever watching, ever searching, ever sorting.
But although these eyes keep sprouting out of the state like heads of a hydra, they are not invulnerable. Cameras are just plastic and silicon, they can be smashed with rocks or painted dark or burnt with lasers. Phones can be left at home, surveilled intersections can be avoided, cash can be paid. But to avoid the eyes, first you must notice them. Look up! Look up at the traffic lights, how many cameras are at this intersection? Look up the process for local police officers to access your personal files on whatever social media platforms you use. And look up into the eyes of the person you’re about to tap a phone for, ask if they might take cash. Say “Hi” while you’re at it. The eyes of state surveillance must be seen, before they can be avoided, let alone destroyed. So start thinking about surveillance. Because behind the airwaves and wires, in that deep mess of server racks and AI algorithms, the surveillance is already, assuredly, thinking about you.