Big Brother is not Watching You

For the past week, I’ve walked past a dumpster that some young idealistic person stuck a sticker on. It says “ORWELL WAS RIGHT — Big Brother is Watching You”, next to an image of a CCTV camera. It’s orange and red and black and so it sticks out on the dull, dark-grey dumpster.

I don’t think there’s been a sticker that I’ve been more upset by than this one. Not because it’s right, but because it’s so shockingly wrong. It is, at least this week, the culmination of society’s collective misunderstanding of George Orwell’s classic. Because not every camera is automatically some harbinger of the Orwellian dystopia that the sticker on the dumpster proclaims.

Because cameras were never the point.

But There are Cameras Everywhere!

There are cameras and Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) cameras, generally referred to as surveillance cameras, and they are increasingly present in our everyday lives. To the point where nobody bats an eyelid at the little dome on the ceiling or the little box in the corner.

But just because our actions are recorded, the cameras are not Orwellian. Because the point is surveillance. Despite everything, surveillance is not the central point of 1984 and the regime of Big Brother and The Party.

What The Party Wants and Does

Before we get into all this, let’s have a look at how Orwell describes the government and the agenda of The Party.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

So they’re after power. They’re not even remotely interested in surveillance. Most likely, the massive surveillance apparatus required to put an entire nation under active surveillance, can’t even be sustained by the government of Airstrip One, the part of Oceania the book’s protagonist Winston Smith lives in. Because if there’s one thing that is indicated throughout the book is that the government of Airstrip One is — however totalitarian and powerful it might be — not all-powerful. It lacks in manufacturing and quite possibly in manpower across the board. Orwell touches upon this in two points.

At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades.

Despite the government and the media of Oceania constantly proclaiming how much better life in Airstrip One — perhaps all of Oceania — is getting, supplies are extremely limited. This limitation has been shaped into a way of life and thinking by The Party. Members of The Party, by the way, live increasingly lavish lifestyles the higher up the Party food chain they are. Meanwhile, those on the lower rungs of the ladder are being told that frugality is a virtue and they should be proud to be able to continue without any given amenity.

Then there’s the part where the police force of Airstrip One is not large enough to be able to contain a revolt by the working class. By sheer numbers, presumably, the Proles could overthrow Airstrip One’s government.

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!

So why don’t they? This is where Orwell becomes Orwellian. This is not due to some surveillance cameras that are everywhere. In order to understand the significance of the surveillance cameras, we need to analyze how The Party operates under the restrictions given in the early pages of 1984.

• By numbers, The Party is the minority
• The Party is not nearly as powerful as it would need to be in order to control a revolt by any large number of people

Before we get right into the main point of all this, here’s where Orwell hammers the point home about The Party not caring about surveillance.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever the wanted to. You had to live- did live, from habit that became instinct- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

How Does The Party Stay in Power?

The Party, however, has been in power for quite some time. To the point where they are, for all intents and purposes, all-powerful. At least when seen from the perspective of the citizens of Airstrip One.

The key to The Party’s power is control.

The Party is unable to handle the citizens at revolt, so they must have them in a constant state of calm. Historically, there are a few models to implement a sort of politically uninterested calm in the populace, mostly something that the Romans coined panem et circenses. Bread and Games.

The model of panem et circenses describes the superficial appeasement of the populace so that the governing party does not have to worry about its own performance. Of course, in today’s society, there’s a lot of that going on, but it’s still not Orwellian. TV networks like TLC and The History Channel — mockingly referred to as The Hitler Channel occasionally — appear to have panem et circenses as their driving force, but in 1984, the programming is not made by a corporation interested in profit.

Instead, in Orwell’s dystopia, panem et circenses is something the government does systematically and with the intention to appease the populace. This is Orwellian. A dedicated and targeted effort by the ruling government that seeks only to divert and distract from the crimes the government is committing.

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds.

It is also stated that the Thought Police, a secret police employed by Big Brother and The Party, is constantly moving among them. Unseen and watching. Given the above quote, the undercover agents among the proles are a paranoid delusion by low ranking Party members.

Control in 1984 is a mental thing, not something enforced by the presence of cameras in everyday life. Because Winston states himself that there might not be a single person watching him, even though he is being called to action by someone monitoring his telescreen feed during a morning workout routine.

Control in 1984 is maintained in two main ways:

1. Diversion
2. Deception

People in Airstrip One are constantly lied to in order to have Big Brother and The Party be displayed as a much bigger force than anyone could possibly believe. The Thought Police and all the other organs in Big Brother’s society are quite possibly a small operation, but their spectre is omnipresent and the fear of them is great.

How does Surveillance Work in 1984?

In order to best understand how Orwell has imagined the functionality of the state of surveillance in 1984, there’s not only the above quote that illustrates it, but the works of an author who was inspired by the works of Orwell: John Twelve Hawks. In his debut trilogy, the pseudonymous Hawk describes the perfect prison according to a faction in his book The Traveler.

Besides, they rarely recognize the prison. There’s always some distraction. A war in the Middle East. A scandal involving celebrities. The World Cup or the Super Bowl… Fear may induce people to enter our Panopticon, but we keep them amused while they’re inside.

What is this Panopticon Hawks mentions? It is a model drafted by philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It is a building, a circular structure with an opaque window towards a cylinder in the middle. Whoever is in the rooms can not see whether or not someone from the middle cylinder is watching.

The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly.

This is what The Party has created with its telescreens. There is no massive surveillance operation. There is only the spectre of one.

So Why Aren’t Our CCTVs Orwellian?

The word “Orwellian” is being thrown around for a huge number of things. Everything and their mother is Orwellian, just as things are “Kafkaesque”. They rarely are.

In the case of CCTVs, they’re not Orwellian due to the motives behind it. Sure, a CCTV camera wants to create a sort of panopticon and instill the thought of “You are being watched. Do not screw up” but the key of the Orwellian dystopia is that the panoticon effort is centralized.

The number of CCTV cameras is not the deciding factor. The number and power of controlling instances is the deciding factor.

Because if a bank, a supermarket, a paranoid tenant of a flat, a kebab shop owner and a bike shop proprietor monitor you, there’s not much they can do unless you screw up or commit a crime. However, if a malevolent government is monitoring you, you are constantly in danger.

So the CCTV in and of itself is far from Orwellian. It is all down to the people watching the cameras.

Why You Should Still Worry About CCTV

All that said, you should still be concerned about the effort put into CCTV and other methods of surveillance. Not because an enemy state that just might be your home state might be after you but because of a completely different topic: Big Data.

A number of advertisers have caught on that they’re able to not just optimise their advertising and therefore potentially boost sales, but they also sell the data they’re collecting. UK tech company Viseum even sells the technology to track individuals across the footage of several cameras.

Of course, they do it to stop terrorists. This has proven ineffective as most recent history should prove. No amount of cameras would have made the Batanclan attacks not happen. I remain convinced that the manufacturers of camera solutions are aware of this, but keep the ruse up due to business being good. What well meaning shopkeeper or city government would not want to protect people against terror attacks?

Far less obvious, but just as pervasive is tracking using MAC-Addresses. One known test run (link in German) may or may not still be conducted at train stations in Switzerland. Using a solution by German manufacturer Minodes, kiosk operator Valora is constantly pinging smartphones for their MAC-Address, a unique identifier that any device using the WiFi standard uses. Using this identifier plus the position of the Minodes system, a person’s location can be determined to be within a certain range. Correlating that data with the position of other Minodes sensors, a user can receive targeted advertising on their phones, advertising something that is conveniently within their walking distance.

Using customer rebate programs such as Switzerland’s Coop Superpoints card or its biggest competitor’s version, Migros Cumulus, submits a slew of data to the supermarket chains in exchange for a meager percent off of select items during specific hours, delivering even more data.

None of this, however, is Orwellian. Neither Migros nor Coop have the desire to control and subjugate people. They want money. Not power and control.

TLC and The History Channel might actively work towards a more stupid society, but they are also not Orwellian.

So while I appreciate the fact that there’s young rebels out there sticking stickers to dumpsters, alerting people to a clear and present danger, the book lover in me can’t help but be a grump about the blatant misunderstanding of pretty much everything Orwell is trying to say.

Sure, I sound like a grumpy old man, but honestly: Pick up the book, read it. Even if it’s not going to tell you that all CCTV is the devil, it will change your life for the better.