the timboucher experience

This Washington Post quote about new DARPA video surveillance technology comes to us via Cryptogon, and acts as perfect set-up for a subject I’ve been meaning to explore:

Real-time streaming video of Iraqi and Afghan battle areas taken from thousands of feet in the air can follow actions of people on the ground as they dig, shake hands, exchange objects and kiss each other goodbye.

The video is sent from unmanned and manned aircraft to intelligence analysts at ground stations in the United States and abroad. They watch video in real time of people getting in and out of cars, loading trunks, dropping things or picking them up. They can even see vehicles accelerate, slow down, move together or make U-turns.

You don’t have to be an Iraqi insurgent to see the tale being told here: Everything you do, say, think or feel can and will be recorded and used by us in any way we see fit. The attitude is the result of a certain strain of morally neutral Macchiavellian scientism used for the effective management of human communities as complex systems.

The thing that bothers me, I guess, with such massive doses of surveillance - on or off the battlefield - is not that they will eventually or already are happening. That much is a certainty, due to the underlying assumptions that drives this breed of scientism in service to territorialism. It eventually *will* be figured out, perfected and implemented. It’s the same as the all-seeing eyes of the sun’s rays touching and illuminating everything on earth.

It’s not that a representation of reality can be recorded. It’s the hubris that says *their* version of reality’s representations captured on their machines and instruments is THE OFFICIAL and only acceptable version. In other words, the ability to monitor and record (and not to mention influence) your actions and behaviors becomes their complete control over the narrative of your life. Except, you’re the one living it, the one experiencing it on a day-to-day basis. They may know what you look like from the outside, but they don’t - yet - know what you feel like from the inside.

Any given representation of reality emphasizes certain aspects over others. There is no such thing as objectivity when you have a fixed viewpoint. Many machines with multiple overlapping viewpoints covering all ends of the spectrum may be their response to such philosophizing. But it’s never mentioned that even covering activities from multiple viewpoints, from multiple perspectives and having to stitch them together still requires human intelligence, human decision-making, human prejudices and paradigms. They might own all the video and audio on somebody, but that doesn’t mean their interpretation of the story of that person’s life suddenly becomes more real {See also: reality television}.

Who or what then determines a person’s true identity and experience of reality? There’s no one thing. Any agency or corporation which claims to be able to do so will always be wrong, so long as it is required to tell the story of a person from or through a particular viewpoint. And first and foremost, that’s what a person is: a viewpoint for the interpretation of facts and actions based on perceptions.

This is why I’ve become so interested in Intellectual Property Law as the natural response of the free and sovereign being to the excesses of governmental and corporate surveillance and monopoly of interpretation on the narratives of a person’s life. They may one day legally be able to record everything you do, think, or say. But creating something like a personal corporation whose function is to record, edit, organize, transmit and monetize the narrative of your life, you stand a good legal chance of having a “more real than real” version of your life’s story, as compared to the hundreds of thousands of hours of un-filtered raw footage the government or whoever ends up having ownership of.

On a more practical, less super-spaced out, near-futuristic sci-fi level, this means basically: take control of your life. Live if the way you mean to, out in the open so everybody can see and be inspired by you. Tell your story by your actions, so they always “read” correctly, no matter who is holding the video camera and into whose database the experience gets recorded. Intent-action harmony on a cosmic-technologic perspective. Be you everywhere (B.Y.E.)

• 9/11 Is Meaningless
• Religion as narrative
• Police Or Politics
• The intrinsic nature of stories
• Story, Myth, Dream, & Drama