Big Brother Just Threw Up a Little

Yesterday, my good friends at Slashdot pointed me to a story about the city of Lancaster, Pennysylvania installing a boatload of cameras to deter crime. The story is mostly notable because it's a citizen's group watching the cameras and not "the man", but it gets the same response as the similar system they put in the UK. Specifically, people get all big-brother-is-watching, invasion-of-personal-rights about it. Personally, I'm not concerned as I see a certain amount of inevitability to it, but having given it some thought now, I see a pitfall to the whole system that could be truly catastrophic.



Sure, I can see the merit of those whining about the loss of liberties. Personally, I'm not doing anything I care about them watching. What's more, these things are always out on the street, so it's not like you're not in plain view of anyone walking by anyway. Seems to me the cameras aren't going to see anything that anyone else on the street was going to see, which is precisely where I become concerned.

See, instead of people losing liberty, I'm actually afraid of liberty being gained. Consider the following: what is the main difference between a constantly running camera and the regular flow of strangers in the average sity street? It's that with strangers, you know when they're watching, whereas with the cameras you have to assume that you're being watched all the time, which is theoretically going to stop the guy next to you from stabbing you in the head with a pencil to steal your pack of Mentos.



Why does this worry me? Well, knowing that eventually the prying eyes of strangers will go away, giving us a moment of privacy, means that we reserve certain activities until no one is around. If people start to think that they're always being watched, this decorum will be abandoned as hopeless. This means that all the little things that we like to pretend that people don't do (even though we know damned well that they probably do) will cease to be done in a clandestine manner, instead becoming a public performance.

You guys, we're talking about a serious breakdown of basic societal conventions here. No longer is that guy at the bus stop going to wait until you turn away before doing a nasal exploration and excavation. Gone are the days of the lady in line before you at a hot dog cart waiting to take care of that inappropriate itch until after she has made her purchase and found cover. We're facing the possibility of our major cities devolving into nose picking, butt scratching, wind breaking, wall whizzing, finger sniffing dens of disgustingness, and I for one want no part of it. If that doesn't worry you, consider this: the entire ritual dance that is currently being performed in an effort to fix a wedgie discreetly will be lost to our society forever.

At the very least, we need to begin filming instances of the latter every chance we get, if only for historical and socialogical purposes.