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Self-Surveillance



In A Scanner Darkly, sci-fi author Philip K. Dick describes the schizophrenic breakdown of a drug addict who is unwittingly committing surveillance on himself on behalf of the police. As I’ve begun carrying around a hand-held tape recorder and taking audio notes about various things going on in my life and thoughts crossing my path, it has made me more keenly aware on a personal level of what it would be like to be under surveillance. I find that I don’t really mind it so much.

Is that crazy? Is that wrong? Is that like so totally not ‘conspiracy’ of a thing to say that I’m going to lose all my street cred that I’ve amassed? Whatever.

I’m not saying I want the government to spy on me (or rather: any more than they probably already are), but I’m saying by being the one who is spying on yourself, it takes the power and paranoia out of someone else’s hands. It helps you maintain awareness of yourself, of your actions and your words within the moment.

Of course, running this as a little game/experiment on myself is all well and good because I’m *not* being surveilled (right?), but if you actually had this shit happening to you, then it would be a different story. Or would it? I don’t know. It’s an interesting topic: that’s for sure. I’m still fairly convinced that the legal solution to a surveillance society is to find some kind of way to trademark all video and audio and other derivative recordings of your person and your datawake, and then governments and corporations would have to license edited sets of data from you. Maybe that’s a crock of shit idea and it wouldn’t really work. Or maybe it’s just the kind of cockamamie bullshit that we’re all going to have to figure out very very soon…







5 Reader Responses

  1. Prenna Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 1:07 am

    I think the self-surveilance thing could be a good tool for the various activist groups that tend to get government attention. If they could monitor themselves and then have a more objective idea of how well they maintain their security culture.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 2:45 am

    That’s a really damned good idea. How can we re-package this idea to help them even more and how do we spread it?

  3. Dan Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 5:13 am

    This is like computer security hacking, intrusion for the sake of identifying and correcting any weakness

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 19th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    Yeah it’s a pretty good way of checking in with yourself and making sure you stay sharp in an increasingly dull world.

  5. alistair Says:
    October 20th, 2007 at 7:03 pm

    the government is paranoid by definition, so any interaction with government is going to create paranoia in yourself.

    the fun and games that the cia and the hippies got up to in the sixties and seventies proves my point.

    and to call them hippies is like calling deer bambi.

    staying sharp in an increasingly dull world is a tough path to walk.

    and lonely.

    i find that people really resist the sharpening process and few stay the course.

    i struggle every day with the fact that, for whatever reason, i`m switched on…..and that most are not.

    my study of gurdjieff and ouspensky and crowley and in the last few years bandler and r.a.wilson have shed some light on the problem, but not on the solution…….except to accept my solitude, for the most part.

    i have spent the summer trying to re-connect to a community after a seperation in marriage and have realised i don`t speak the language of consumer/robots.



SURROUND YOURSELF WITH STRENGTH.