With all the excitement online lately about the emergence of future technologies like ambient intelligence, ubiquitous computing and “everyware” into the consumer market, fewer people are talking about a keyword which used to be more commonly paired with “ubiquitous” within the counter-culture demographic: ubiquitous surveillance.
I haven’t minded so much the paradigm shift which has been hatching around these subjects. For one, “ubiquitous surveillance” is a passive “loser script” as Timothy Leary might have called it, and users of that sort of linguistic keyword technology tend to associate with it a certain amount of fear and danger. Re-focusing the lens of how people are looking at technological and social changes around the notion of “ubiquitous computing” is – to me – not unwelcome because it invites ordinary users of such a system to take a more active stance. If you’re simply being surveilled or watched, there’s nothing you can really do. But if you’re able to use that watching to input back into and actively change the system, then that’s something else entirely. I’d rather be able to program reality than have some faceless entity simply watch every move I make through distributed cameras.
Within a system of ubiquitous computing though, it seems to me that ubiquitous surveillance may be an inescapable component to making such a system work. That is, a truly ubiquitous metaprogrammatic computing environment will have countless customizable ways, tools, methods and paradigms by which the user can input, feedback, interact, control, modify and program their environment. Such a system is focused around the notion of universal communication and exchange in which any perceiving center within a given the environmental system or constellation can impact, trade, communicate or play with any other perceiving center. It becomes a living information ecosystem.
A quote from one of my online friends about ubiquitous computing:
“ubicomp 3000 AD: Every particle of air, soil, etc also a hypernetworked nanopiezocomputer reading/responding to brain activity”
Surveillance, then, within such a framework becomes not quite as scary or dangerous because it is turned into a two way street of mutual communication. What practical steps can the ordinary user take to make certain this is the shape our shared technological future takes?
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT BY TIM BOUCHER (Auto-Generated)
- I call it “Liberated Computerism”
- Last year they called it ubiquitous surveillance
- Here, There And Everyware…
- DIY Surveillance
- Home Automatons & Roman Genius Locii, Convergence of Animism & Shamanism Aesthetic w/ Ubiquitous Computing
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Association from picture 3 from the top:
The animé Dennou Coil which is about children who are using special cyber glasses to provide Augmented Reality. But as it turns out, these glasses are bear more secrets than anyone could imagine.
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[...] technologies, which are described as tools for cutting down crime, but which ultimately become viewpoints in the compilation of identity data. The government is trying to determine the narrative of your life by watching you from the outside. [...]