We’re all Big Brother now
Big Brother today is a cyclist with a helmet camera wanting to gather evidence of driving misdemeanors. Big Brother is a motorist wanting to cut the cost of their insurance premiums by installing a dashcam. Big Brother is the consumer who gives their data away to download their running app in quick-time. Orwell assumed government would be the Big Brother, but surveillance is being in fact inadvertently privatised by the collective actions of individuals.
Many police departments are pre coordinating with homeowners to access “front door cams” In fact:
Doorbell-camera firm Ring has partnered with 400 police forces, extending surveillance concerns
Neighborhood watches have been around for a long time. It is expedient I believe for neighbors to keep an eye out for each other. But in the digital age we now have an app for that. Max Read in the Intelligencer wrote an opinion piece about the Ring doorbell, “I Got a Ring Doorbell Camera. It Scared the Hell Out of Me”, were he noted:
A sort of cross between the police-scanner app Citizen and the neighborhood social network Nextdoor, Neighbors is designed to allow Ring owners to upload videos taken by their cameras — and non-Ring owners to watch them and keep tabs on what’s happening in their neighborhoods, from the point of view of others’ Ring cameras. “When communities work together, safer neighborhoods become a reality,” the website copy reads. “Connect with your neighbors and stay up-to-date with what’s going on in your neighborhood.”
If you strip away the touchy-feely marketing or rhetoric about making wholesome local connections, Neighbors is a social network for crime. I’m not sure how else to describe it. If you open Neighbors and create an account with your home address (you don’t need a Ring camera to download or use it), you’ll find a list, arranged in the familiar, reverse-chronological feed format of your social network of choice, of nearby crimes. Or, maybe not crimes, but things that appear to be crimes, or seem like they might eventually become crimes, or should be crimes, or are, in someone’s mind, crime-adjacent.
And this brings me to my point: WWWII Germany in the beginning, the populace initially was used to spy on each other. After a time the laws came and then the Stasi came for the populace. My neighborhood has become part of the “Neighbor” ecology. It came to my attention that I was caught on a Ring camera walking in the street with my camera and all the paranoia red flags went up. After a welfare check form the local popo I was deemed not a threat. That made me feel good, but knowing that I live in a neighborhood full of Mrs. Kravitz, well that is not very comforting at all.
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