antipopper

Tom Coates has a funny idea: ubiquitous personal digital cameras that form local wireless networks within the viewfinder’s line of sight. Using such technology, these devices would have reactive settings (like “no photos!”) that would enable people to hamper their picture being taken or distributed! Interesting and cool as a “social play” phenomenon, and an inversion of the usual “cyber stalker” smart-mob model (i.e. according to your PDA, person X within your immediate vacinity is your perfect match.)

But what about this proposition as a serious (if soft) measure, as a form of “justice”? (No, I doubt that is Coates’ intention, but it’s an interesting thought.) Yes, if wireless digital cameras become ubiquitous, surveillance is an obvious concern to arise. But the point is that surveillance is already an issue, and has little to do with what “consumers” are doing, and everything to do with the power of the State and capital. It’s not so much an issue of “I don’t want my photo taken by your consumer camera”, it’s “we don’t want to be policed by the corporate media and the State”.

In a possible world of transmissive imaging ubiquity, what role could transparency, rather than privacy, play? David Brin‘s perverse vision of a transparent world without privacy may crassly misinterpret “extreme disclosure” as “justice” (just as liberal democrats confuse the formal right-to-vote-for-the-next-scumbag with “democracy”), but Brin’s vision does question the bourgeois individualist notion of privacy as the bulwark of resistance against the surveilling power of the State (even if it does substitute it with what Howard Rheingold, after Foucault, would call the “always-on panopticon”-effect that smart mobs could entail). If resistance to surveillance must equal more than “I don’t want my photo taken by your consumer camera”, then is Coates’ communicative model of liberal-pragmatic “avoidance” amongst “citizens” beside the point?

So what happens when police who are beating people up have their PDAs set to “no photos, please”? What happens to those guerrilla networks of grass-roots reporting, those next iterations of Indymedia or even Ohmynews, which have the potential to create strategic areas of transparency in our opaque world? Coates envisions a roughly consensual universe with a “rude” mode override, so of course this isn’t a problem. But in an episode of Galactica: 1980, Troy and Dillon go back in time to stop the evil Xavier giving the Nazis enhanced V2 rocket technology. They’re almost too late: the enhanced V2 launches. Dillon gets his laser pistol out and fires, but nothing happens! “Damn, it’s set to stun,” he mutters, before resetting his gun and firing again, in the nick of time. But what if he hadn’t been so quick to override? Therein lies the lesson, kids. Always shoot to kill. : )