The Age of Maximum Security Society
Since the revelation of the United States’s large scope of domestic surveillance on U.S citizens conducted by the NSA, George Orwell’s 1949 thrilling novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, is recalled. The novel depicts such horrific vision of brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian with unprecedented methods of governing. A book that gave us Big Brother, sophisticated network of mass surveillance system that had been predicted by Orwell, thoughtcrime, and Newspeak and the memory hole, and the torture place set in the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into human face forever. But this world we live in is 2017 and it’s completely different from Orwell’s world.
It is unclear how the surveillance technology will continue to develop, despite the fact it is increasingly growing to evolve into many forms. The surveillance technology transcends distance, time, darkness, and physical barriers. Records can be stored, retrieved, combined, analyzed and communicated. It is observed that historical barriers to old Leviathan state lay in the sheer physical impossibility of extending the rulers’ and control to the outer region of vast empires, through closed doors, or into intellectual, emotional and physical regions of the individual. However, technology has steadily penetrated these barriers. Physical limitation and even human inefficiency have lost their usefulness to protect their own liberties and constitutional rights.
Computer records, video, audio tapes and discs and digital photos and various other technological apparatus can be transmitted and circulated in low visibility or completely invisible forms. The technological apparatus has become standardized and interchangeable. It becomes visibly clear for us to understand that it is ever more difficult to ascertain when and whether we are being watched and who is doing the observation. With high accumulation of CCTV cameras are installed in London, the city is markedly identified to be the most surveilled city in the world. Even Boris Johnson, before becoming an official Britain’s Foreign Secretary, served as the city’s mayor, joked that every individuals walking on the streets in London can be celebrities. Surveillance technology nowadays is also equipped with facial-recognition ability, to identify the possible wrongdoing suspects through eerie images of previous engagement in criminality. The architecture of surveillance industry surely terrifies every possibly law-abiding citizens and dissuades them from committing crime at any level.
The real question that we are dealing with over the conundrum of the expansion of surveillance technology, is whether we are approaching to a maximum-security society in Orwell’s vision where the anonymity, involving the right to be left alone and unnoticed, is currently diminished. The extraordinary power of surveillance lies partly in paradoxical, never-before combination of decentralized and centralized forms. It is palpable to witness the insidious side of surveillance that is capable of monitoring every single movement of an individual participating highly complicated and intrusive society. That being said, surveillance significantly determines new form of social control and governing methods, the state’s monopoly over the means of violence is supplemented by means of gathering and analyzing information that may even make the former obsolete. Control can be understood as symbolized by manipulation than coercion, by computer chips, Internet than prison bars, and by remote and invisible tethers than by handcuffs and warrants.
The surveillance technology is justified by social goals with specific needs to combat crime and terrorism, protect health and improve the productivity. The extension, on the other hand, occurs gradually, and we even miss the magnitude of changes and broader issues posed by the surveillance system. Our notions of privacy and liberty, and the rights of individuals are quietly shifting to become something less subtle, more vulnerable, with little public awareness or decisive legislative attention.
Orwell obviously did not anticipate a liberal democratic, industrialized, and developed state of Western civilization would adopt such odiously powerful, excruciatingly obnoxious and contagious form of policing methods, to exercise political powers, amplify social control and to correct unlawful behaviors. William Shakespeare once said in the Merchant of Venice, “to do a great right, do a little wrong.” In the current time, we are facing a moral dilemma of the state of liberty, privacy and autonomy in Western democracies being invaded, while we ask for a rational form of social control with sworn protection from the governments and law enforcement agencies. Orwell’s state had both violent and nonviolent form of social control. He adopted his experiences during the Spanish Civil War and observation of the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy, to envision a state with several models of totalitarian control. In the reality of a contemporary society, violent and nonviolent forms of social control are uncoupled due to undesirable differences in methodological approaches, and the latter is in the ascendance.
It is visible that the surveillance system is adhered to replace traditional forms of policing, and seemingly less coercive forms of control have emerged. Force and direct physical coercion are seen as inefficient tactic, brutish and anachronistic. The idea of universal citizenship and welfare state are more compatible with other means, but the reduction of physical coercion does not guarantee liberty. Additionally, the establishment of softer forms of surveillance and control within the democratic state does not signal a lessening vigilance. In fact, deception and manipulation replaces physical coercion. The control of information is thus significant, when we discover how manipulation of language and symbol can shape behaviors. The manipulative powers of mass communication and culture is an alternative to the mass surveillance devices, that is far more persuasive, subtle, and indirect than a truncheon over the head. We are not yet approaching to become a maximum security society, but the trend is continuously developing. Orwell apparently didn’t oversee the possibility that one could have a society where significant inroads were made on privacy, liberty, autonomy, even in a relatively nonviolent environment with democratic forms and ultimate supports against totalitarianism in place. Respectfully, Huxley’s Brave New World is probably a better guide to the future than Orwell.
