Feeling Surveillance
One episode of the TV drama Breaking Bad begins with a wonderful surveillance moment. Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher who has traded his soul for a meth empire, is sipping coffee and looking unusually pleased with himself. He is alone in some sort of industrial basement, standing amid shining air compressors and filtration systems that, as one of his criminal associates puts it, wouldn’t be out of place at Pfizer or Merck. Certainly the high-tech equipment is more than adequate to supply what the show calls the “scabby tweakers” of Albuquerque with an astonishingly powerful high.
On this particular morning Walter has good reason to eye his underground lab with satisfaction. Driven by a toxic blend of hubris and humiliation, he is rising quickly in the drug underworld. No longer a broken middle-aged man reduced to moonlighting at a car wash, where he is mocked by high-school seniors with sweet rides and healthy bodies, he is now feared and in control. In some twisted fashion, the drug trade has helped him to discover what he imagines as his long-lost cojones, along with a previously undetected aptitude for savagery and deceit. This perverse quest for masculine autonomy is essential to his story: he craves independence, respect, power, and dignity. If he can’t have it as a law-abiding teacher with a beater car and a terminal diagnosis, he’ll have it as a gangster PhD with endless cash buried in the desert.
But on this occasion, still in the opening seconds of a characteristically taut episode, Walter’s manly reverie is disturbed by an unexpected whirring sound. He walks a few puzzled steps before hearing it again. Suddenly he spots a new CCTV camera looking down at him, providing his criminal associates with a high-resolution view of his work habits. His body rigid with anger and humiliation, Walter storms around the lab like a great ape in senseless captivity, quickly realizing that there is no place to hide, no spot from which he is out of view. No matter where he goes, the security camera tracks his movements like a sniper with a scope—a visual parallel that the cinematography seems to emphasize. Gazing down at him from the elevated perspective of the CCTV camera, the viewer is invited to consider the great Walter White as a puny figure, impotent to avoid our scrutiny. Apoplectically helpless, he rushes toward the camera and thrusts a defiant middle finger at it, the very last thing we see before the opening credits roll.1
Walter’s hatred of being monitored in his secret lair is palpable. For him the security camera is not just intrusive; it’s emasculating in the most intimate way he can imagine. Later in the episode he hears complaints that he’s “not man enough,” to which he responds with raw anger, a symptom of his fragile masculinity—he can’t stand being unmanned by another man’s controlling gaze. Just as a crucifix on a wall is a symbol of hope and redemption for Christians, the CCTV camera is an icon of humiliation and anxiety for someone like Walter White, and perhaps even those who are far from the moral shadows where he plies his trade. Even for regular people with the proverbial nothing to hide, the rituals of surveillance culture can feel humiliating and exhausting—but what else does surveillance feel like?
We know it’s not just what Walter White experienced. We know it’s not simply the bummer of Big Brother, the post–9/11 tightening in the chest, the anxious sense of an alarm half-sounded. It’s not simply the nervousness of living with imminent threats, or the shame and discomfort of negotiating the small indignities of the TSA and Facebook. It’s not simply the panic of reading about the latest privacy scare, the latest drone strike, the latest police atrocity caught on camera, the latest breach of some perimeter somewhere. It’s not even the shock of learning that our government is sucking up every speck of personal information in our digital lives and storing them somewhere in the Utah desert on a server farm straight out of The Matrix or some other sci-fi dystopia. Such revelations might wallop us into a permanent funk, as we forever wince at the weird fate of the republic, not to mention that loss of personal privacy, dignity, and autonomy. But that’s only one way in which the machinery of modern surveillance touches our bodies and souls.2
Surveillance: it’s also light as a feather. It overflows with libidinous energy. It makes us laugh at some innocent Candid Camera moment or leer at a celebrity caught in lurid wardrobe malfunction. It lets us hope that our property, and our loved ones, are a little safer from harm. It lets us imagine that the government can stand between our bodies and random acts of terror. Because surveillance tends toward the serious, anxious, and unpleasant side of life, we can forget that it can also bring happiness, love, and reassurance—we can forget that it has many forms, textures, and resonances. Depending on who you are and where you sit in relation to various systems of surveillance, it can feel very different indeed. This chapter sketches some of the heavier ways of feeling surveillance: boredom, rage, indifference, anxiety, and even madness. (Of course there are many other feelings to be considered, and chapter 2 looks at some of the happier experiences that are driving the expansion of surveillance culture.) We’ve become so habituated to the presence of surveillance that we hardly seem to notice its bodily impact, the way it roils the senses, the confusing and contradictory ways that it encourages us to feel.
One thing is increasingly clear: we live in its world now. As we move through this maze of sensors, monitors, and electronic archives, trading scrutinizing glances with people and machines, dimly aware of the traces we leave behind everywhere, we experience a dizzying array of security-related feelings: confusion, fear, delight, relief, desire, concern, reassurance, safety, certainty, weariness, wrath, exhaustion, hope, melancholy, indifference. While surveillance in the vein of 1984 (George Orwell’s dystopian novel that introduced the world to Big Brother) can feel ominous, creepy, or brutally invasive, most forms of surveillance evoke a blasé shrug. Whatever. Some even thrill us with the miracle of seeing and hearing from afar—their Dick Tracy powers of detection. Think about how much has changed. Two hundred years ago, optical surveillance meant peeking through a keyhole. Now anyone can order a video-equipped drone to hover above sunbathing neighbors, creating a Peeping Tom’s delight to which there is no legal remedy, only ethical queasiness and YouTube. Meanwhile the rest of our bodies are increasingly exposed to various forms of sensing, sorting, and archiving. Voiceprint technology might be handy for accessing one’s bank account without a card, but it also raises the possibility of surreptitiously being identified whenever one speaks in public.3 Some airlines are monitoring passengers’ food intake—but not because they’re concerned about our health. It’s to keep track of requests for halal meals to expose the hidden link between lamb chops and terror.4 Not even the invisible realm is safe from surveillance. Hoping to use subtle biological cues to flush out nervous terrorists in a crowded public space, China’s government is developing an emotional X-ray machine that uses “hyperspectral imaging to detect the amount of blood in oxygen and calculate stress levels.”5 Even banal objects are turned against us. Enter a hotel elevator with a towel you’re trying to permanently “borrow,” and a sensor will notify housekeeping and you’ll have a very awkward conversation at reception.6 Ratted out by the microchip in the bath towel? What a strange new world.
Our culture is vibrating with the feelings of surveillance, and they are more various and subtle than the best novelists can imagine. Still, the bodily impact of surveillance demands attention now—even if we are not quite up to the task. If we have produced the most elaborate, cross-referenced multimodal system of observing, sorting, and remembering in the history of the world—a system far beyond the best efforts of Joseph Stalin or the most censorious ministers of Puritan New England—why wouldn’t this omnipresent system have subtle effects that we have only begun to understand? Why wouldn’t it register on our flesh, shaping its internal contours in ways that are not necessarily welcome, and not necessarily in the best interest of our liberty, autonomy, and dignity?7 We have become masters of high-tech surveillance, culturally speaking, but it has also mastered us, working its way into our bodies in ways that are powerful, mysterious, and often insidious.
After all, surveillance invites us to share its worries. It wants us to screen potential dating partners on websites that can expose criminal records. It requires our bodies to wait in a line while our bags are scanned for bombs. It asks us to wonder if what we type and even how we type might give away our identity to an authoritarian regime eager to stamp out dissent, now that keyboards can identify anyone from their unique “keystroke dynamics.”8 It asks us to think about the pattern that our VISA purchases suggest, at least if we know that credit-card companies make interest-rate adjustments depending on how and where we use our cards. It invites us to feel self-conscious about how we appear to someone who may be watching, to flush at the realization that our discreet underwear adjustments were recorded on CCTV and might end up on YouTube or America’s Funniest Home Videos. It asks us to produce the ideal face of a compliant, nonthreatening citizen—the furthest thing from a terrorist—whenever we spot the TSA or law enforcement. It asks us to modulate behavior in light of how things might appear rather that just being in the world without second thoughts. In short, it asks us to internalize an exhausting regime of predictability, to repress chaotic human urges and organic feelings, all to make sure the system doesn’t misread us in a way that might cause problems. It even invites us to wonder how well the system knows who we are. As the novelist Philip K. Dick famously put it in A Scanner Darkly:
What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can’t any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone’s sake the scanners do better.
Living in a surveillance culture invites such existential queasiness: Am I safe? Am I free? Am I wrong? Am I bad? Such queasiness about the emotional experience of surveillance is not something easily tuned out, at least not entirely, even while sitting on a very privileged perch that offers the illusion of control over the crudest forces of regulation. No one can tune out the background noise of modern life, the subtle grinding sound that isn’t always heard until we stop to listen—at which point we might hear something unsettling: a digital blip, a wire being pulled taut, a mechanical whirr, a heel coming down the corridor. Like an air conditioner, it’s always working on our bodies, shaping our environment, always in motion even when we’re not. But what if we were free from the intrusion of security-mindedness or the glare of the social-media spotlight? What if we were free from the feelings of watching and being watched in the age of Snowden, Snapchat, Google Analytics, and Homeland Security? In other words, what if we were really free from all this scrutiny?
Perhaps surveillance narrows the options, creating a particular emotional path to follow whether we want to or not, whether we realize it or not. Perhaps it’s a path that power has cleared, a path that is antihuman, antirevolutionary, antihope, antisolidarity, antidemocratic, antidignity, anti-autonomy, antiliberty, antiserenity, antiprivacy. If so, then we are creating ways of feeling “safe” that work against our own best interests.9 In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris in late 2014, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek described how the “terrorist attacks achieved the impossible: to reconcile the generation of ’68 with its arch enemy in something like a French popular version of the Patriot Act, with people offering themselves up to surveillance.”10 Who could blame us? We live within a system that rewards the pose of maximum compliance. “In contemporary society, fear has taken the place of moral norms,” writes the scholar Hille Koskela. “The question of ‘what is suitable’ has been replaced by the question of ‘what is safe.’”11
Naked Rage
FIRST VIDEO. A middle-aged man is talking on a phone in front of a store in the Seattle area. Although he’s sipping coffee, he seems engaged in something important. Suddenly an uninvited videographer sits at his table and trains his camera on the stranger’s face. From his voice he seems young, maybe twenty-five, not more than thirty. He’s calm, soft-spoken, and weirdly polite—yet extremely upsetting to the people in his viewfinder, the people that I now see on YouTube.
“Why are you taking a video of me?” the man with the coffee wants to know.
The man looks at him in disbelief. “I’m just trying to have a private conversation.”
“It’s just a video, man.”
The man with the coffee seems to ponder what a physical assault would entail, but then settles for storming off in disbelief.
SECOND VIDEO. Now it’s later in the day or maybe another day. An athletic young white man is walking out of a drugstore with his bike helmet in hand when he notices the camera pointed at him. “What are you doing?” he asks, skeptical and a little tense.
“Oh, I’m taking a video.” It’s the only explanation the cameraman ever provides, and despite the lack of affect in his voice the phrase is rendered as if it has vast explanatory power, as if he’s saying, “It’s all right, I’m a medical doctor.” Playing with the semantic possibilities of this stock phrase—“I’m taking a video”—seems like it’s part of the game.
The cyclist looks unhappy. “Why are you taking a video of me?”
He gets a calm, almost philosophical reply. “Why not?”
The cyclist studies him for a long moment. “I don’t really care for other people just taking a video of me.”
“Didn’t you just come out of the drugstore?” the cameraman asks with utter calm, seemingly unconcerned by the rising threat of violence. “They have cameras in there.”
“So?” The point is lost on the cyclist, who puts on his helmet and pushes past the videographer with less violence than some of his other subjects. Other people want to arrest the videographer or even beat him for recording their presence in a public place. An African American woman exits her downtown office when she realizes she is being filmed through the glass doors of the building. She walks up to the camera, puts her hand on her heart, and looks at him with a mixture of dignity and dismay: “It’s not okay. You didn’t ask me if you could take a picture of me, sir. . . . That’s not okay with me. That’s an invasion of my privacy and time. Why are you taking a picture of me, sir? This is America and I have a choice that you not take a picture of me.” Other people seem even angrier when he approaches with his camera—people of color seem particularly irate at his antics. If he continues this project with random people on the street, he will almost certainly be harmed, so much so his subjects resent the presence of his camera. It’s obvious in his videos that many people hate being filmed by a stranger, at least when they’re prodded to really think about it.
We don’t know much about the mysterious man with the camera. It’s not clear if he’s a provocateur performance artist willing to take a punch for his art or just a voyeuristic nut job. All we know is that he uploads his footage under the name Surveillance Camera Man and that, since 2013, his YouTube channel has gotten hundreds of thousands of views and a great deal of impassioned commentary, much of it intensely negative. No doubt, his videos are often painful to watch. Half of his unwilling subjects threaten to smash his camera, if not the face behind it. The other half look freaked out and scared. “Some mute creep taking pictures” is how one person describes him after just a few seconds of being filmed. Others imply that he’s just been released from a mental institution. Hurt, angry, scared—those are the typical responses.
What is going on with Surveillance Camera Man? At best, it’s a cruel social experiment to see how much people hate being filmed in public without their permission. (Answer: a lot). At worst, he’s an asinine prankster without a conscience. Whatever he is, he’s right about one thing: what he’s doing is not that different from what the other security cameras are doing all day long. What’s interesting is how most people want to maintain a distinction between the indignities of Surveillance Camera Man and the normal flow of surveillance in our lives. In a Twitter conversation called “Why Does Everyone Hate Surveillance Camera Man?,” one person said, “There’s a big difference between a camera passively recording everything and some dude actively shoving a camera in your face.”12 What is the fundamental difference? Is the drugstore or post office somehow more trustworthy, more transparent, more innocent in the purposes to which it puts its security footage? I don’t think we have the ability to make that judgment in most cases. It’s just that we’re accustomed to institutional surveillance that almost blends into the background. When cameras come into the foreground, we seem to remember how much we dislike their presence. And if we can’t do much about the security cameras in public places, we can push back against a single individual with a camera. We remember how much it pisses us off.
Some people are doing more than pushing back against surveillance—some are shooting back. In 2012, a group of libertarians gathered in central Texas to make a political point with semiautomatic weapons and a few drones from an online store.13 These were tough-talking men who railed against the surveillance state through magazines, websites, and videos devoted to their project of maximizing individual liberty. Their hatred of state surveillance is visceral: you hear it in their language, and see it in their bumper stickers and t-shirts. They’re sick and tired of the surveillance state. They’re not going to take it anymore. On this sunny morning in the beautiful Hill Country not far from Austin, these young and middle-aged white men are engaged in a symbolic protest against surveillance drones: they’re filming a video in which they blast drones out of the sky. With cameras rolling to record their antisurveillance rage, their guns start popping until a drone explodes midair. The men cheer one another like it’s the Boston Tea Party for the age of viral video. These are middle-class men donning war paint, raging against imperial schemes, enjoying a vandal’s orgy–cum–street theater in order to strike a blow against Barack Obama’s surveillance state, as they see it. “The answer to 1984 is 1776,” one of them says darkly, before posting the video online (where it received a half-million hits and counting).
What makes these men so angry about the perceived Panopticon in their midst? For these men, state surveillance is slavery, not freedom. While they talk less often about corporate or peer surveillance, government surveillance is imagined as a form of abjection, degradation, and even emasculation (especially true, it seems, during the Obama administration). To listen to them talk on the radio or online, it’s clear that the bars on the cage are shutting tight on men with deep investments in words such as freedom, autonomy, privacy, and individual rights. For many of them, I suspect that privacy and masculinity are inextricably linked. Confronted with the prospect of their own impotence, these men find it empowering to rage in the dark against perceived abuses by the system. Their collective rage creates an imagined community of resistance, a symbolic rebel army of brash patriots. Putting up a symbolic fight against the surveillance regime preserves an old-fashioned illusion of individual control for these men, just as embracing the latest spyware and CCTV applications does for other people.
As their old bête noir, Bill Clinton, used to say, I feel their pain. There’s an element of pathos to their outsized protest. These blustering men are engaged in more than a lost cause—it’s a sentimental enterprise that is symptomatic of their collapsing faith in social norms. Alienated from mainstream politics and the state that derives from it, these men have embraced a fantasy of last resort: maximum individual sovereignty. In many ways it’s a masculine fantasy of empowerment (guns are no different). Shooting down drones (especially those they purchased), raging about Orwellian conspiracies, screaming about Obama’s violations of person and property, imagining themselves at the center of a vivid political melodrama—it’s not changing the proliferation of actual surveillance technologies. It is, however, registering the humiliations of living within a culture of intense surveillance.
More than a decade ago, well before omnipresent drones and TSA screenings, the sociologist William Staples wrote insightfully about the quasi-pornographic qualities of what he called “bodily surveillance.” At its core modern surveillance is a “systematic, methodical, and automatic” effort to control human bodies and their movements. It pushes toward constant exposure, a “state of permanent visibility” in which the threat is “the act of being watched” in either a literal sense (CCTV) or figurative (Big Data). Not only is the “methodical, technology-driven, impersonal gaze” quickly becoming an essential tool for postmodern social control, it is doing so in a way that casts the net of potential “deviance” ever wider. As we witness a “historical shift from the specific punishment of the individual deviant to the generalized surveillance of us all,” what separates the “criminal” from the “non-criminal” when both are subjected to the exact same monitoring? Staples is quick to note that surveillance regimes are far from egalitarian. In thinking of the inherent biases in surveillance architecture, he points out that we are not “all necessarily subject to the same quantity or quality of social control.” But the net is being cast much wider than in the past, and middle-class white men cannot use race or gender privilege to circumvent the security screening at the airport or CCTV at the bank. Indeed, they are feeling a form of political shame that is unfamiliar: the shame of exposure.
Underneath the macho posturing, something else is happening among these libertarian men. If their response to surveillance is infused with various sorts of race and gender privilege, it is also a legitimate response to “social sadism made explicit,” to borrow a phrase from the scholar Claire Bishop.14 They’re quite right to object to a government that treats one’s very existence as criminal and in constant need of reassessment. You weren’t a terrorist yesterday, it seems to suggest, but you might be one tomorrow. After all, who knows what lurks in the depths of your soul?15 I understand why libertarians, or anyone else, would find this offensive and degrading. The fact that many antisurveillance libertarians are white men accustomed to the privilege of being relatively unmonitored only fuels their anger. Even if they’re exempt from the worst abuses of a racialized security apparatus, white men are increasingly subjected to invasive monitoring.
Women have even more reason to feel angry about surveillance, which, as Torin Monahan puts it, “operates much more on the masculine and controlling end of the gender spectrum.” More interested in ogling than providing security, CCTV operators watch one out of every ten women for prurient reasons. TSA body scanners are often experienced as a humiliating form of sexual harassment.16 “I feel like I was totally exposed,” said one woman, who was told by airport security that she had a “cute figure” before asking her to return to the full-body scanner. “They wanted a nice good look,” she complained, prompting Texas State Representative Lon Burnam to say, “I think it’s sexual harassment if you’re run through there a third or fourth time.”17 What if ogling (“the giving of admiring, amorous, flirtatious, or lecherous looks”) has more in common with surveillance than has been previously understood? Casino operators, cops, and security guards have all been charged with using CCTV for licentious purposes. Perhaps the surveillance gaze has something in common with the cinematic gaze that feminist film-studies scholars have described in classic films such as Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Powell’s Peeping Tom, and other films that depict the camera as a “weapon of phallic power.”18 I suggest that surveillance brings the cinematic “male gaze” out of the theater and into the streets, where it is applied whenever it suits the needs of government bureaucrats, corporate profits, and creepy individuals. But men who might have relished the leering, asymmetrical male gaze in Rear Window, or even on a security camera, now find themselves the unwilling subjects of a similar gaze from the state and other institutional forces, all of which direct far more cameras and recording devices at them than Hitchcock ever commanded. For anyone assuming that racial, class, and gender privilege provides greater freedom from social scrutiny, it’s no surprise that new forms of surveillance are often experienced as disempowerment, humiliation, and tyranny.
Invisible Men
On August 19, 2014, less than two weeks after a police officer’s high-profile shooting of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburbs, a young man named Kajieme Powell shoplifted two energy drinks and a donut from the Six Star convenience store in a nearby community. When the police arrived, Powell paced in circles and then started yelling “Shoot me!” After he allegedly failed to drop a small knife that he held in his hand, two inexperienced officers let loose a hail of bullets at the young man. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! And that was that: his body crumpled from a dozen shots from cops who had been on the scene for less than twenty-three seconds. Powell spent his final moments dying on the sidewalk in broad daylight.
There are two reasons we outside of the St. Louis area know something about this case. First, Powell fell to the ground just a few miles from where police left Michael Brown’s corpse on the hot summer pavement for more than four hours. Like Brown, Powell was a young African American in a poor neighborhood. Like Brown’s death, Powell’s death would receive more attention than most police shootings in the United States. But Powell’s story was short-lived in many ways. Cable news had little to say about the shooting, other than to note its eerie similarity to the Brown case. Powell became a mere footnote to the Brown shooting, which attracted a month of consistent national and international media coverage.
A second reason sets Kajieme Powell apart from Michael Brown: a bystander recorded the whole tragic event on a cell-phone camera.19 When I first read about this graphic video of a man’s last minutes on earth, I didn’t want to watch it. But I had been thinking about the extraordinary attention given to a similar video in late August 2014—the beheading of American journalist James Foley in Iraq. Nothing rattles American journalists like the death of one of their own, which may explain why Foley’s execution received an extraordinary amount of coverage, while almost no one heard about Kajieme Powell. There were two gruesome videos of Americans being killed in the same week, but the attention of the corporate media went to Foley. What was less important, less awful, less tragic about the Powell case? That he may have been mentally ill? That he was in the American Heartland rather than some exotic locale? That he was black?
I searched for the Powell video with some hesitation. Although I refused to watch the Foley beheading, I had seen the infamous Rodney King video on several occasions and even showed it while teaching a class. I assumed I could put on my scholar’s hat and bear witness to whatever happened to Kajieme Powell without it hitting me too hard. But that’s not what happened: I felt a spasm of grief as I watched the video. Watching a human life ending so abruptly and so needlessly is an agonizing experience. I’ve long been inured to the horror of make-believe death that we see in Hollywood action films and on police procedurals like CSI: Miami. I don’t know that I’ve seen an actual death on film, at least not the death of someone whose name I knew, someone I was watching from street level. Like most people, I’ve seen some footage from a drone strike on the evening news, in which we are looking down on targets (actually, human beings) who suddenly are maimed or killed for geopolitical justice (or so we are told). The footage inevitably draws a comparison that I detest—it was like watching a videogame. But nothing about the shooting of Kajieme Powell is like a videogame. It is raw, sudden, shaky. It has narration, a very poignant play-by-play from the eyewitness with the camera. It has visceral impact.
“Powell looks sick more than he looks dangerous,” the journalist Ezra Klein observed about the video, lamenting the fact that the St. Louis police seemed primed for deadly force rather than patient negotiation with an apparently sick man. “If the police had been in their car, with the windows rolled up, he could have done little to hurt them,” Klein noted. “There is no warning shot, even. It does not seem like it should be so easy to take a life.”20
Surveillance conducted by citizens, or sousveillance, is supposed to shield us from the worst abuses of the state. It’s supposed to act as a deterrent, as well as a way of making law enforcement accountable to the communities it serves. For this reason, community activists often sound optimistic about the corrective power of sousveillance—it feels like one of the great tools for curbing police misconduct and safeguarding the lives of the most vulnerable among us. As Black Panthers founder Bobby Seale recently said, “I tell the youth today, ever since Rodney King, I say today, you don’t need guns. Let’s use the technology to observe the police.”21 But he picks a tricky example to inspire faith in citizen surveillance: despite the bystander video, and in some ways because of the infamous video that showed King charging the officers along with their horrific beating of the unarmed motorist in 1991, all of the LAPD officers were acquitted in the highly publicized case.
Of course, citizen surveillance may have other benefits, and some of these seem genuinely hopeful. Writing in MIT Technology Review in 2016, Ethan Zuckerman notes that citizen surveillance can inspire and inform even when it does not prevent police misconduct. “Sousveillance offers fuel for the activists who are trying to turn powerful images into justice and systemic change,” Zuckerman writes. “And most critically, ubiquitous cameras and viral video means we are now all aware of America’s epidemic of civilian death at the hands of the police.”22 In other words, sousveillance might not stop police misconduct from happening, it might not lead to an arrest or conviction, but it might educate the public about these tragic interactions between African Americans and law enforcement.
That is cold comfort to the family of Kajieme Powell and others like him. While it is encouraging to realize that citizen cameras can instantly connect to YouTube, or to wonder if police will feel differently about the use of force when they are required to wear body cameras, we shouldn’t forget the extent to which power is asymmetrically wielded against impoverished communities of color in the United States. In cases such as Powell’s, sousveillance seems far from its utopian promise to level the playing field. Mostly, what we get from his video is knowledge, not justice—a documentary record, not a preventative measure that stops the abuse. Because of the video, we know the police were on the scene for only twenty-three seconds before discharging their weapons. We know that Powell did not have his knife overhead in a stabbing gesture as police claimed, but down by his side as he walked erratically toward the cops. We know what witnesses were saying as the tragedy unfolded. We know something of what people were feeling, their fear, anger, and even resignation, as these gruesome events went down. We hear the distraught voice of the man filming the scene from before the arrival of the cops, through the shooting, and for several minutes afterward. We hear him talking to other African American men in the street. “Here we go again. They just killed this man. He’s dead. . . . I’ve got everything on camera. Oh my God. . . . I got everything on tape. They could have tased him or shot him in the leg. Oh my fucking God, this again?” Later in the recording we see at least four African American men holding up their cameras as the police approach them to clear the street. The camera is their only protection against the police, but it’s not enough, at least not for someone like Kajieme Powell, at least not yet. No matter how much we might feel the stirring of utopian possibility when we think about citizen surveillance, right now it’s not enough to save a young black person. For people historically pushed into the sort of social invisibility that Ralph Ellison explored in the 1952 novel Invisible Man, electronic visibility is not always enough.
Citizen surveillance is in its infancy, and its real power is not yet known. If we have faith in the power of ordinary people to document the truth of their lives, we should have a sense of hope and possibility about sousveillance, as long as it’s not seen as a high-tech panacea for chronic social ills. After all, not everyone has the same ability to deploy citizen surveillance. The Italian sociologist Andrea Brighenti recalls protests in which visibility was the essential issue for him and his radical friends. “I personally remember more than one anticapitalist demonstration where one of the culminating points was someone climbing up to a bank’s CCTV installed well above the street level in order to put a thick black plastic bag around it—in a kind of postmodern version of the blinding of Cyclops.”23 The celebrated street artist Banksy might feel similarly empowered, as might the Bay Area firebrands who run the “Filming Cops” project. But the politics of visibility are much trickier for poor and working-class people of color in America, people for whom blinding the Cyclops is often an impossibility.
Nanny-Cam Horror
The surveillance camera, as if bored with nothing to do, began to scan the house in close-up. The superb lenses, representing the most advanced optical technology, showed every detail with unnerving clarity. The camera panned along the plate-glass windows of the lounge and dining room. The undisturbed furniture could be clearly seen, even a clock registering 8:20 on a mantelpiece.
—J. G. BALLARD, RUNNING WILD (1988)
“There’s always the crazy thoughts you get from watching the news stories about people catching their nanny on the ‘nanny cam’ doing terrible things to their kids,” said one young mother in Colorado to Fox News. “It can be pretty scary.”24 No doubt, it often feels scary for parents who are watching the news—nanny-cam horror stories are everywhere. Almost 400,000 views for a Fox News clip called “What Is Really Going on When You Are Away.” Two million hits for “Home Invasion in Millburn NJ Caught on Nanny Cam—Brutal Beating in Front of Daughter June, 2013.”25 Nine million views for “Child Abuse—Nanny Caught on Tape,” in which the mother explains, “I probably never would have suspected if not for the camera. . . . It scares me to think what could have happened to my children.”26 Far less attention is paid to the statistical rarity of nanny abuse.27 Far less attention is paid to the story of a Florida nanny wrongfully imprisoned because a nanny cam, which records at 5.5 frames per second instead of the normal thirty, made it appear that she was violently shaking a child. After two and a half years in prison, the nanny, a Peruvian immigrant named Claudio Muro, was cleared of any wrongdoing and filed suit against the camera manufacturer.28 Instead, the stories pile up on tabloid television and online: “Monster Nanny,” “Killer Nanny,” “Abusive Nannies Caught on Video,” “You Can’t Be Too Careful,” “Horrific: 96-year-old Elderly Woman Tortured,” “Babysitter Swings Infant into Door Frame,” “Nurse Caught Peeing on Kitchen Sink.” One ethnographer has shown how parents in Brooklyn use nanny cams, cell phones, and parent blogs with names like “I Saw Your Nanny” to watch their West Indian employees with almost as much vigilance as their own children.29 This is how race, class, gender, and immigration status can conspire against someone: bad-nanny videos are circulating like crazy in the news media and online, while their abusive employers remain almost invisible. In the first category are many working-class people of color and recent immigrants, almost all of them women; in the second category is generally the white middle class. (As one scholar noted, “Race and ethnic differences between the employer and the employee are distinctive characteristics of domestic service in the United States.”)30 Fear is pushing these devices into the homes of millions of Americans, with little regard for their impact on children being raised under new forms of surveillance, on parents feeling obliged to monitor the home front while at work, or on domestic workers who must labor under increasing scrutiny. One product review of these devices in the Wall Street Journal alluded to “the apparent creepiness of having a running Web recording of our private living spaces,” as well as the danger of having endless video footage uploaded to the Cloud with only a password to shield it from hackers, but the author quickly decided that it was worth the risk for the “peace of mind” that the camera allegedly provides its owner.31
Yet the nanny cam sees more than just the nanny, of course: others ignore its gaze at their peril. Realtors are warned to look out for surveillance devices in the homes they are selling: “You and your buyers should walk through every home like there is a nanny cam recording your private conversations. If you are recorded, the information gleaned from your private conversations with buyers could be used against you in negotiations.”32 Spouses are not safe from scrutiny. “I’ve been spying on my husband for a month now,” confesses one puckish English writer.
Ever since our house was fitted with a home safety device called Piper, all domestic privacy has been eroded. It’s not so much a nanny cam as a husband cam—a boredom cam that I can call up on my tablet from anywhere in the world, allowing me to watch our sun-blanched sitting room in Beverly Hills from sodden London, curse my husband for leaving the TV on standby, and myself for allowing our bird of paradise plant to die.33
Not every parent uses surveillance technology to watch their nanny, as I know from my mother’s work in several private homes in the 1990s and early 2000s, though you can never know for sure—cameras are hidden inside teddy bears, clocks, and baskets (as one Airbnb user discovered, to his distress).34 And not every parent imagines the nanny as a figure of imminent monstrosity—but I suspect that nanny cams are creating a climate that often works against such humane relations. Prescient as ever, J. G. Ballard imagined the impact of such technologies more than a generation ago: “With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives,” he wrote. “Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials.”35 It’s a sobering vision of the future of the wired American home, but it seems hard to avoid when the news is filled with sensational headlines like “NANNY CAM CATCHES WOMAN ATTACKING INFANT, POLICE SAY.” Describing events in the Bay Area in 2016, the ABC affiliate article is accompanied by a mug shot of a dark-skinned Latina, yet another nanny horror story to keep white, middle-class parents in the market for high-resolution cameras to protect their kids from an overhyped threat.36
Vigilance Fatigue
Writing in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin in 2012, a psychologist named Meredith Krause described the risk of what she called “vigilance fatigue” for law enforcement and other professionals charged with threat detection, risk assessment, long-term surveillance, and “decision making under uncertainty” in the years since 9/11. With an eye toward the creation of “proactive countermeasures designed to bolster vigilance,” Krause looked at four factors that contribute to vigilance fatigue: “overwhelming pressure to maintain exceptional, error-free performance,” “prolonged exposure to ambiguous, unspecified, and ubiquitous threat information,” “information overload,” and “faulty strategies for structuring informed decision making under conditions of uncertainty and stress.” Although Krause summarizes existing research that “underscored the negative impact of stress on vigilance” in order to find ways to make security professionals more efficient in their jobs, we might think about the converse for a moment: the negative impact of vigilance on stress. Moreover, we might think about ordinary people instead of simply considering the plight of security professionals. If some FBI agents lack the “mature tradecraft” needed to avoid the state of “degraded vigilance,” as Krause coolly puts it, they can always choose another line of work if the burdens of surveillance are too onerous. The rest of us are not so lucky. Lacking proper training or even the vocabulary to describe the emotional burden of surveillance culture, ordinary citizens might be even more vulnerable to vigilance fatigue. Regular people are often stuck in a condition of “prolonged exposure” to “information overload” about proliferating threats that require “informed decisions” and “error-free performance” to keep us safe from the danger du jour (al-Qaeda, cyberstalkers, online pedophiles, hackers, or micromanaging bosses). In this sense we might suffer as much vigilance fatigue as burned-out security professionals, who at least have some control over the corporate or governmental surveillance systems they operate.37 By contrast, citizens are often pawns struggling to survive a wearisome game that they barely understand.
What would it be like to be Asad Dandia, an idealistic young Muslim activist (and US citizen) living in Brooklyn, who learned that the NYPD was monitoring his charity work, even to the point of sending an informer to infiltrate his circle of friends, whose main activity was distributing food to the poor? In early 2012, Dandia invited a friendly stranger to his parent’s home, fed him dinner, and invited him to stay the night as a guest of the family. When he later learned the man’s true identity as a police informant, Dandia was horrified to have offered him hospitality and intimacy. The experience changed him. He lost trust in his neighbors and began to worry about his photo being taken. “I used to try to be as inclusive and public as possible about my charitable work,” he lamented in a blog post. “Now, I communicate mainly with people I know personally.”38 For simply feeding the poor—or, more specifically, for being a young Muslim in Brooklyn—he now has to look over his shoulder, second-guessing even his most benevolent impulses before they can be used against him. What an exhausting way to live—yet not that different from what many people experience in post–9/11 America. Accidents of birth and circumstance might intensify the emotional burden of surveillance for those without means, without documents, and without certain forms of racial and gender privilege, but nothing exempts us entirely from having to swim against the vast tide of uncertainty and vulnerability that surveillance is designed to manage.
In true twenty-first-century fashion, the responsibility for our salvation is ours alone: if only we choose the right service, the right security system, the right password, the right neighborhood, the right school, and the right fortification, we might reach the nirvana of total security, that elusive place of serenity and bliss that beckons to our insecure souls like a tropical island resort in the dead of winter. In this cruel fantasy, we’re asked to deal with insecurity on our own, secure the perimeters on our own, endure the endless vigilance on our own. We’re not huddled together like Londoners in a tube station holding firm while the Luftwaffe did its worst to the streets above. Instead, we’re atomized, disconnected, free-floating, privatized, insecure creatures with an immense social weight balanced on our individual backs. One scholar has written about the way in which people in the United Kingdom internalize widespread fears about terrorism or crime, making them their own personal responsibility, requiring each citizen to “vigilantly monitor every banal minutia of [their] lives,” since “even mundane acts are now viewed as inherently risky and dangerous.”39 In an individualistic country such as the United States, the burden of personal responsibility must be even greater, even crueler.
For all of these reasons, surveillance is often exhausting to those who really feel its undertow: it overwhelms with its constant badgering, its omnipresent mysteries, its endless tabulations of movements, purchases, potentialities. Its rituals of compliance would test the patience of a saint—take off your shoes, stand in that line, remember the password, avoid the speed trap, go through the metal detector, hide from the boss, keep the hoodie down, don’t make eye contact with the cops, don’t joke with the TSA, don’t act in a way that could end up on your permanent record. How could we not have vigilance fatigue from dealing with surveillance culture? How could our nerves not be frayed at times? How could our emotions be untouched? Yet almost no one in power asks how we’re bearing up in the years since 9/11: they just add more cameras, more data collection, more scrutiny, more drones, more surveillance. Consequently, no one seems to notice that many people are tired of being wired up, inspected, counted, distrusted, and asked to sit still for whatever monetized, securitized, racialized, nationalized outcome someone has planned for our lives. While some young people seem more accustomed to the pressures and pleasures of a surveillance-obsessed culture, a lot of us are tired of what might turn up in our urine, tired of security guards at kid’s sporting events, tired of metal detectors in high schools, tired of geo-locating RFID tags in our employee ID badges, tired of smart cookies that stalk us from site to site, tired of undercover cops in our mosques, tired of Russian hackers that rip off our credit cards, tired of civil servants reading our metadata in the name of freedom.40 (Insecurity is the new banality.) Many of us are tired of the whole securitarian show, tired of second-guessing, tired of performing civic virtue for the camera and the omniscient database, even tired of how bad it must look to someone with a bird’s-eye view of the sad little scramble toward safety and security.
In a bravura bit of cultural criticism, the African American novelist Colson Whitehead imagined the burden of living in a mundane surveillance culture. In an essay published in 2015, he envisioned just how dismal our visible lives would appear on camera, especially the dull and sometimes shameful bits that comprise the majority of our time between Facebook boasts about how well it’s all going. In the language of reality TV, when someone is kicked off a show like Big Brother or The Bachelor, the most embarrassing bits are compiled into a “loser edit” that provides an ignominious farewell. At least in some poetic sense, Whitehead imagines the shame of visibility that the ultimate “loser edit” would elicit:
The footage of your loser edit is out there as well, waiting. Taken from the surveillance camera of the gas station where you bought a lottery ticket like a chump. From the A.T.M. that recorded you taking out money for the romantic evening that went bust. From inside the black domes on the ceiling of the train station, the lenses that captured your slow walk up the platform stairs after the doomed excursion. From all the cameras on all the street corners, entryways and strangers’ cellphones, building the digital dossier of your days. Maybe we can’t clearly make out your face in every shot, but everyone knows it’s you. We know you like to slump. Our entire lives as B-roll, shot and stored away to be recut and reviewed at a moment’s notice when the plot changes: the divorce, the layoff, the lawsuit. Any time the producers decide to raise the stakes.41
Living on camera, even in a metaphorical sense, is draining because these systems add a level of scrutiny that is wearying, whether it’s utterly abstract (“I have a feeling that the NSA might be reading this!”) or utterly concrete (“I just found out our houseguest was a police informant!”).
Michael Haneke makes this point beautifully in the opening sequence of his film Caché (2005), one of the great inquiries into the emotional stress of life under surveillance. A mystery in many senses, the film begins with a simple question: Who is watching? In the first several minutes, which include the title sequence, Haneke gives us a static shot of a quiet street in a European city. Nothing interesting is happening, not even by the standards of European art cinema, until we learn that we’ve been watching surveillance footage from a videotape that a French television personality and his book-publisher wife have received. Not only are the tapes appearing on their doorstep without explanation; the front of their house is the subject of the footage, which has been recently recorded from very nearby. The sudden awareness of being watched throws the family into increasing turmoil: What have we done to deserve this scrutiny? Why are they watching us? Who is watching? At first the videotapes are not particularly threatening, but the mere idea of being under surveillance is enough to unsettle the family, eventually knocking it from its secure bourgeois perch at the height of French society into contact with all sorts of hidden histories and memories (the English title of the film is Hidden). The film scholar Todd Herzog has observed how the main character, and perhaps the audience as well, internalizes the gaze of a CCTV camera over the course of the film, writing that the main character learns “to view his life after the end of privacy through the lens of the surveillance camera that has become a standard feature of twenty-first-century urban life: detached, objective, unemotional, unedited.” Or, as another film scholar has noted about Caché’s ability to raise questions about the emotional strangeness of surveillance, the film imagines the phenomenon as “a visual model of ‘intimate alienation’ in that, although it represents an intrusion of the camera into once private spaces, it is also characterized by boredom, ambiguity and a lack of expression.”42 By often inviting us to share the unblinking POV of the security camera, Haneke’s film suggests the fatigue of dealing with the subtle ubiquity of surveillance, the cold eye of a machine that infects one’s sense of the landscape whether we know it consciously or not. In this sense contemporary surveillance culture creates a constant burden that is not quite Orwellian in scope, but rather something quieter, less dramatic, and less stark, but often equally exhausting.
What do we make of this endless vigilance that never lets us rest in the calm state of security achieved, that never lets us turn off the surveillance cameras and biometric sensors? In many cases people simply spin their wheels in noncomprehension, feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about what is really happening. At other moments they are surely overcome by its wearisome inevitability. Writing in the Guardian in late 2013, journalist John Naughton lamented the way in which surveillance has spread into our lives: “And yet the discovery that in less than three decades our societies have achieved Orwellian levels of surveillance provokes, at most, a wry smile or a resigned shrug,” he marveled. “And it is this level of passive acceptance that I find really scary.” He then quoted his colleague Henry Porter, who had expressed a similar thought: “Today, apparently, we are at ease with a system of near total intrusion that would have horrified every adult Briton 25 years ago.” He continued, “We have changed, that is obvious . . . and, to be honest, I wonder whether I, and others who care about privacy and freedom, have been left behind by societies that accept surveillance as a part of the sophisticated world we live in.”43
Yet most Americans are not quite “accepting” of surveillance. Surveys reveal a widespread sense that government and businesses are invading our privacy in very troubling ways.44 They know something is wrong. Whether it’s a traditional landline, cell phone, text, email, chat, or social media, “there is not one mode through which a majority of the American public feels ‘very secure’ when sharing private information with another trusted person or organization,” according to a November 2014 Pew Research survey. The same survey revealed that 91 percent of Americans “believe that consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies,” and “a further 80 percent also felt that Americans should be concerned about government surveillance.”45 People clearly dislike a great deal of what is happening—yet they seem relatively compliant, even docile, in the face of new surveillance technologies and methods. How can we explain the apparent disconnect between how we feel and how we act?
Some of it may be an understandable choice to save one’s energies for a foe less abstract, less omnipresent, less subtle. Fighting surveillance feels so overwhelming: should we stay home, disconnect our computer, get rid of our phone, and close the curtains? What are we supposed to do? Perhaps we can avoid vigilance fatigue by deciding not to get worked up about surveillance, by simply choosing not to dwell on the implications of new surveillance technologies, or by embracing the securitarian politics behind them. Why would we not look for an emotional survival strategy that can get us through these strange times of rapid change? In his influential essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), the German sociologist Georg Simmel described the risk of living in the overstimulation of modern cities. He claimed that many people would, quite naturally, turn their backs on the noise and chaos of the urban environment and retreat into what he called a “blasé outlook” that resides, as I imagine it, somewhere between resignation and apathy.46 More than a century later, many Americans seem to have adopted this sort of blasé outlook to deal with surveillance culture: it’s easier to shrug in sadness than to shout in opposition, especially when confronting a phenomenon so ubiquitous, subtle, and potent.47 Perhaps people are resigned to being on camera—or resigned to not thinking about it.48
It’s easier to feel other ways. I’m sure they have a good reason for whatever they’re doing. If I’ve got nothing to hide, I’ve got nothing to worry about, right? Perhaps this is why the most common response to the latest development in surveillance capabilities, from hummingbird-size drones to televisions that automatically monitor our private conversations, is a collective shrug of the shoulders. Surveillance seeps into another realm that had been behind the velvet rope of privacy, and few have the energy to kick up any real dust. Politicians don’t talk about it, pundits don’t pontificate about it, rappers don’t rap about it: like global warming, the sheer size of the problem has an immobilizing effect. It’s just something “out there,” constantly humming in the background, an impossible enemy and an uncertain friend. It’s implicitly sold as an electronic salve for vulnerabilities, a vast machinery of protection and defense, a necessary evil for a world filled with innumerable threats. It promises freedom from fear and at least some relief from risk, yet it delivers the opposite in equal measure: a gnawing sense that something is wrong, that people are vulnerable and exposed, that their perimeter is not quite secure, that they must remain forever vigilant.
Surveillance Anxiety
There is almost no way of talking about surveillance without talking about anxiety, a condition that has exploded in public and private consciousness in recent decades. And one way to get at the possible connections between these two defining features of contemporary life—anxiety and surveillance—is to consider the work of Scott Stossel. In his 2014 book My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, he shows how anxiety has been a debilitating part of American life throughout the postwar era, with its symptoms seeming to spike after 9/11.49 I say “seeming” only because concrete data about mental health across time and place is often elusive. Yet we know this much for certain: America is an anxious society. Anxiety is higher here than in other countries.50
In fact, anxiety is now the most common mental illness in the United States, with one in seven Americans in its grasp and its sufferers outnumbering those with all other mood disorders. Although Stossel doesn’t address surveillance, he does provide some information that is relevant.51 For instance, social phobics, some 15 million strong in the United States, are exquisitely attuned to potential signs of negativity in their environment. Anxiously monitoring facial expressions, vocal tones, and body postures that could suggest any hint of criticism or threat, social phobics run endlessly on a hamster wheel of insecurity that rarely pauses. According to a National Institute of Mental Health study, their brains even respond differently to perceived (as well as imagined) criticism in the environment. Recent fMRI studies have recorded their amygdalas firing with unusual intensity, even in response to nonconscious stimuli, in a way that produces feelings of shame, anxiety, and negativity.52 Could omnipresent CCTV, invasive workplace monitoring, and ambitious data-mining be part of the conscious or even nonconscious stimuli that make some people feel judged and insecure? Could the general atmosphere of surveillance add to these distressing feelings of being judged? I can’t help but wonder about the inherent anxiety of living inside a surveillance system that expects submission to its needs: don’t steal, don’t jaywalk, don’t slack off at work, don’t cheat on the test, don’t screw up your credit score, don’t make that Facebook faux pas, don’t bring scissors on the plane, don’t let your data get hacked, don’t let the boss see that email. With increasing frequency and stealth, surveillance systems are evaluating our behavior in ways that can have a real impact. Whether sitting at home alone with the computer or walking to the bank, people are being evaluated by corporations, state agencies, and peers about their worth and suitability. Speeder? Credit risk? Twitter follower? Terrorist? Facebook friend? Lackluster employee? Mediocre student? Home buyer? Some of it is very Willy Lomanesque: Are we well-liked? Successful, trustworthy, legitimate, appropriate? A good person, a good customer, a good American? These are the implicit questions of the surveillance systems in which we live. Is it any wonder that 15 million Americans suffer from social anxiety disorder—the excessive fear of being judged in public?53
But there is a solution—a pharmacological remedy for the ills of the system. Millions of prescriptions are written each year to quell social anxiety with powerful selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In the year I took one of these medications—while in my middle forties, as a two decade–long marriage was slowly unraveling—I found that it made a tremendous difference in my experience of the public sphere in general and surveillance in particular. I went from feeling the stereotypical anxieties of the surveillance-averse to being a chilled-out subject in the kingdom of calm. It produces a kind of chemical confidence in strangers, a blasé sense that being watched is no big deal. I sometimes wonder if we would have ever heard from Edward Snowden and learned about the overreach of the NSA if he had been taking Zoloft.
Totalitarian Feelings
One of the best illustrations of the emotional price of living in a culture of deep suspicion can be found in the loosely autobiographical work of the English writer Patrick McGuinness, whose beautiful first novel, The Last Hundred Days, follows the uncertain path of a young expatriate academic into a bizarre teaching post in the waning moments of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania in 1989. “This is a country where fifty percent of the population is watching the other fifty percent,” the protagonist is told. “And then they swap over.”54 As the young man feels his way into a corrupt surveillance state during the final implosions of the Cold War, the reader is given poetic insights into the experience of being watched from afar (and not so far away), both in the casual surveillance of neighbors peering between curtains as well as the more ominous forms of government intrusion into the lives of private citizens (if such a designation has any meaning in a totalitarian state). Even on his first day, as he negotiates the unfamiliar smells of Bucharest—“petrol fumes, the juice of rubbish bins, the sharp, empty scent of hot dust”—he is constantly reminded that he is being watched, as when a neighbor pretends to fumble with her keys after he notices her stare. “Nothing had changed, yet everything had that slight emphasis that comes from an awareness of being watched, as if the whole street were now suddenly in italics.” (I love that sense of emphasis and italics as the byproduct of surveillance). As he senses the surveilling gaze on his body through his first weeks in Romania, he almost appreciates the “clandestine savour” as “another of life’s minor reassurances, like regular bus service or dependable weather forecasts.”55 In a place like this, you can count on being watched, on never quite being alone in the world.
Soon, however, McGuinness suggests a darker side to the psychology of being watched. Once he had been living in a society of ubiquitous monitoring, “there was no need to watch me all the time,” he explains, because “I would be watching myself. That was how it worked: you ended up doing the job for them.”56 The impact is subtle, at least to an external observer: “starting to sing in the kitchen, I stopped; in the shower I closed the bathroom door, even reaching to bolt it shut. This is what surveillance does: we stop being ourselves, and begin living alongside ourselves.” In a sense, McGuinness is fleshing out what Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault predicted about the internalization of surveillance, giving it human palpability and psychological shading in a way that makes the novel a useful source of insight. “Human nature cannot be changed,” McGuinness goes on to say, “but it can be brought to a degree of self-consciousness that denatures it.” Of course, what festers as an internal state of self-consciousness does not remain exclusively within the self but rather is reflected back upon the world in dispiriting ways: “So it was that the feeling of guilt and furtiveness that had suddenly grown in me I now projected over the whole indifferent street.” In the movies, the sense of being watched is part of a “ratcheting of tension that must always lead somewhere,” but in reality it is “an aimless affair, a pedestrian shaggy dog story with no beginning, middle, or end.”57
After reading such lines, those who are complacent about the proliferation of surveillance in Western democracies might wonder if this shift in consciousness, this lessening of social trust, is what is really being sold under the red, white, and blue banner of security. How different is modern America from the old surveillance states of the Eastern Bloc? Americans sometimes imagine they exist in a separate category of human experience, yet they now live under the watchful eyes of a violent state run by a thin-skinned billionaire with authoritarian tendencies, along with the increasingly constant supervision of Big Data and various forms of peer surveillance. In McGuinness’s novel, a wizened Romanian intellectual, whose own memoirs are constantly being redacted and rewritten by state censors, asks the young protagonist: “You’ve heard of the Freudian talking cure, where the mere art of saying something to someone who is listening is sufficient? Well, we always have someone listening here, we are the Freudian state.”58 Surveillance is an extension of the violence that undergirds the Ceausescu regime, and only the few impotent souls who are too old and feeble to pose a threat are exempt from its inquiring eye.59 “Retired technocrats, ex-apparatchiks, bonjouristes from the pre-communist era . . . the police wasted little time watching them.” To not be watched, however, was its own psychic burden, for it was a clear sign of being beneath contempt. The protagonist muses darkly, “It never occurred to me that irrelevance might feel much the same [as being watched].”60
Are Americans that different, or anyone living in democratic nations who imagine themselves in a star-spangled world quite unlike Ceausescu’s Romania? And can a democratic culture thrive under the weight of constant monitoring? Will we shift our behavior when we sense that we’re being watched—especially with the threat of violence behind that gaze? We can see the impact on the narrator of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a sci-fi novel about an African American woman who time-travels from contemporary Los Angeles to the antebellum South, where she risks certain death if she doesn’t acquire the most acute form of surveillance consciousness. “As the days passed, I got into the habit of being careful,” she explains after some harrowing experiences with slave masters. “I played the slave, minded my manners probably more than I had to because I wasn’t sure what I could get away with.”61 This grinding awareness of being scrutinized was one of the most difficult lessons for a modern woman to accept in early-nineteenth-century America. “See how easily slaves are made?” she muses at one low point in her journey into the past.62
It doesn’t require time travel to the Old South to instill the fear of being seen, the exhaustion of watching and being watched, the degradation of being monitored and judged, always aware of the results of nonconformity: bullying, insults, exclusion, scorn, blows. Surveillance consciousness is shaped in the most quotidian confines: school, church, home, shopping mall. It can come wrapped up with, or enabled by, anxiety, depression, and torturous forms of self-consciousness and mental illness. And it teaches all but the bravest or craziest to buckle to its demands, to do what is expected, to dance for the master somewhere at the center of its circuitry. “See how easily slaves are made?” And still we could ponder Octavia Butler’s question about surveillance culture in its myriad forms today. See how easily obedient children are made in the domestic Panopticon? See how easily obedient friends are corralled on social media, where users quickly realize what sort of posts, what sort of pictures get the most likes and shares? See how easily obedient subjects are made under the whip of CCTV? Under the drones of Homeland Security? Under the pressure of surveillance, the prying eyes of bosses and colleagues at work, the withering scorn of angry parents, bitter priests, and cops writing citations for the mysteriously problematic “manner of walking along roadway,” to cite the notorious statute in Ferguson that was applied almost exclusively to African Americans?63 It all fits together. Self-consciousness, anxiety, depression—all exacerbated by living in a culture of constant monitoring, where at the far end of the spectrum is madness, the place where surveillance paranoia, no matter how justified in origin, spirals out of control. Let me end this chapter with a visit to eighteenth-century London—not to encounter Jeremy Bentham and his Panopticon, but instead a fellow Londoner from Bentham’s world.
Surveillance and Madness
The Welshman James Tilly Matthews, an erstwhile architect and political reformer, could feel that he was being watched. Less than a thousand feet away, nefarious agents operated a secret machine that did more than keep tabs on his movements through King George III’s London. Matthews was being subjected to something worse than what a CCTV camera could pick up today: he was wracked by a diabolical form of surveillance emanating from a mysterious machine that could track him personally, plant foreign ideas in his mind, and immobilize and even poison his body—whatever was required to undermine his self-assigned mission to broker peace between England and France. He called this machine the “Air Loom,” believing it to be run by “spies” without mercy.
Because of such troubled beliefs, Matthews was imprisoned in London’s notorious Bethlem (Bedlam) asylum, enduring harsh treatment that included the withering scorn of the asylum’s apothecary, John Haslam. Despite the protests of political allies and a few doctors who attested to Matthew’s sound mental health, Haslam refused to release his controversial patient. In 1810, perhaps to silence a campaign for Matthews’s release, Haslam published a damning account of his patient’s condition, ridiculing his fears of being watched and controlled by secret agents pushing buttons and pulling levers on a fantastical machine. As a result of Haslam’s remarkably titled Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion: Developing the Nature of Assailment, and the Manner of Working Events; With a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking, and Lengthening the Brain, Matthews remained in shackles, and his case became known as the “the earliest clear description of schizophrenia in British psychiatric writing.”64
What the Matthews case also provides, I suggest, is a prophetic metaphor for the psychological burdens of a surveillance culture in which individual autonomy is continually disrespected and increasingly eroded. Matthews may have been mad, but he was also on to something.
What Haslam mocked as “maniacal hallucinations” leading to a “deranged state of intellect” rendering the patient “wholly unfit to be at large,” Matthews experienced as “atrocities practiced upon him by the workers of this infernal machine.” Providing elaborate drawings and descriptions, Matthews explained that the Air Loom was designed to control his behavior through “magnetic impregnations” and “pneumatic chemistry” that could even penetrate walls to assail body and mind. What was the nature of this “assailment”? Like a paranoid protagonist from a Philip K. Dick novel, Matthews described a “gang” of spies with dramatic names, including an ancient doctor and the mysterious Glove Woman, who were hiding in the walls of old London. With the Air Loom directed at Matthews and other political figures, no one could retain their normal sense of self. No longer autonomous, human beings could be reduced to mere puppets, each of whom might fight against the hijacking of their minds and bodies but could never prevail. Once hijacked, a body could be made to do anything, often through baroque processes that Matthews described in vivid detail. Ideas were floated into a subject’s mind through a process called “kiteing,” the stress of being manipulated from afar was known as “lobster-cracking,” while “lengthening the brain” produced “distortions” that could make someone a pawn in a political game rather than a self-governing subject. These were not the only ways in which spies altered his mind with their surveillance apparatus: “Cutting Soul from Sense” caused “his feelings to be severed from his thoughts,” and “the extraction by suction of one train of thought and its replacement with another” was a torturous process he called “thought-making.”65
Maddeningly, such surveillance was often half-detected. Even if he knew spies were nearby, Matthews could never quite see them. “On some occasions Mr. M. has been able to discern them,” Haslam reports, “but whenever he has been watching their maneuvers, and endeavoring to ascertain their persons minutely, they have appeared to step back, and eluded his search, so that a transient glimpse could only be obtained.”66 Like the main character in J. G. Ballard’s unnerving short story from 1962, “The Watch-towers,” Matthews seems driven mad by his sense of being watched and an inability to see who is watching. Only at a moment of what seems like true insanity can the surveillance agents be seen. For Ballard’s protagonist, it comes at the end of an Orwellian tale of ominous surveillance towers that may or may not exist in reality, even if he seems to see them clearly in the final paragraphs of the story. For Matthews, observing his torturers occurs during a similar revelation: a burst of magical telepathy in which he travels “magnetically” to their secret lair, and is finally able to glimpse the entire operation, an early vision of the NSA. If Matthews couldn’t literally see them, at least he could hallucinate them quite vividly.67
“Even paranoids have real enemies,” as the poet Delmore Schwartz famously said, yet surveillance alarmism is often seen as a sign of mental illness. Popular culture has been unkind to those who fret about being watched: crazy Mel Gibson as a crackpot taxi driver in Conspiracy Theory (1997), Dale Gribble reaching for his tinfoil hat in King of the Hill, paranoia as a sign of madness in Shutter Island (2010). At least Keanu Reeves losing his mind in A Scanner Darkly (2006) is the result of an actual conspiracy. For me, Matthews offers a powerful metaphor for a mind cracking under surveillance, one to which I am sympathetic today, even if he also offers more bizarre formulations that were either evidence of Haslam’s bias against him or legitimate suggestions of a schizophrenic mind (or both). “In order to ascertain whether a person be impregnated,” he allegedly told Haslam, “imitate the act of swallowing, and if he should perceive a grating noise in the ears, somewhat resembling the compression of a new wicker-basket, he is certainly attained.” More indelicately, he swore that the spies could drain vital fluids from his body in a “very dexterous manner,” extracting it “from the anus of the person assailed, by the suction of the air loom.” “This process,” we learn, “is performed in a very gradual way, bubble by bubble.”68 Schizophrenia may have been the real agent of his demise, not the Air Loom gang, but in either case, he suffered in body and spirit, with all signs of a body violated, an autonomous self in shatters.
Bringing surveillance inside our bodies is more than a metaphor or a matter of schizophrenic fantasy. As we blur the line between human and machine, with a bone-resonating sound system in our Google Glass headset and data being transmitting from our RFID-tagged heart valves, we will have embodied surveillance in strange new ways that we can hardly imagine. Its impact on our mental and emotional health is unknown, yet it is barely considered. No doubt, many people are struggling with unfamiliar feelings that new systems and practices bring into the most intimate quarters of their lives. And some people have been enduring aggressive forms of surveillance for a long time, and often for the ugliest of reasons, having to do with racial, gender, or class biases. With the indignities of the TSA scanner and the watchful eye of drones overhead, middle-class white men are finally getting a taste of what women, poor people, and racial and sexual minorities have long known about the burden of living under supervision.
At the very least we need to understand that feeling surveillance is a complex experience with real implications for individual emotional lives as well as our collective political lives. We need to consider the possibility that it feels worse to some people than others, and for very good reasons. And we need to consider the possibility that by embracing certain feelings that help us endure the airport, the gang-proofed school, or the suspicious boss, we may be doing more than just surviving the unforgiving institutions in which we find ourselves—we may be unconsciously signing the terms of our surrender to the status quo. Instead of rendering ourselves frozen with fear, apathetic, or hyper-alert in response to the scrutiny of the powerful, we could think about the alternatives, the other ways of being in our bodies in this country right now. We could even seek out an emotional space for autonomy, resistance, outrage, or utopian yearning, creating a space for saying “no” to the demands of surveillance systems, “no” to the generalized sense of fear and loathing that has haunted American life since 9/11, “no” to the bad vibes of fortress America and its obsession with monitoring and archiving our every move. It’s possible for the country to feel different, better, freer.