Watching Walden
Imagine that you’ve parked your Subaru at a trailhead and hiked into a remote corner of the Rockies. Even in the middle of July, long drifts of snow remain on the untouched mountainside. Winded but exultant as you near the summit, you take a second to marvel at the cloudless sky. Not a building, road, or human being in sight—in fact, nothing is stirring except a single gray fox trotting toward the horizon at 14,000 feet. Such glorious isolation is exactly what you sought when you moved west to Colorado, exactly what you sought when you veered off trail just a few hours ago for a taste of radical solitude. Then and now, you headed into the proverbial wild, entering a mythologized space that has long captivated artists, environmentalists, and even political theorists interested in the relationships among democracy, individualism, and nature in the United States. Somehow America has always needed “the wild” as part of its self-conception, and somehow you’ve always needed it as well.
In your knapsack you stroke the cover of your paperback Thoreau and feel a rush of satisfaction. Even if The Maine Woods is not your favorite book, you brought it along because its narrative has a terrifyingly wild mountain at its core and because, hey, it’s Thoreau. For your bookmark you’ve inserted another happily symbolic item, a postcard of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a celebrated nineteenth-century painting that throws the European Romantic conception of nature into stark relief—or so you hope, because you teach the painting every autumn to teenagers in your AP European history course in the Denver suburbs. It’s not the American West, but the image captures something about the glory of the wild that seems vital and necessary. Lungs still straining, you peek at the postcard for the umpteenth time, studying the lone figure posed on a mountaintop above churning clouds, neither commanding nor recoiling from the wilds below. Like the figure in Friedrich’s painting—at least as you imagine it—you regard the uninhabited landscape as a force of regeneration and mystery, a sublime power to contemplate and internalize for the good of the soul. You want to feel the immensity of the mountains, their ability to blot out civilization’s traces until nothing is left but rock, water, sky, and trees, with their promise of unbreachable privacy and seclusion. As your entire being fills with something that feels like spiritual renewal, you unzip your jacket and dance an awkward jig, delirious to have found refuge from the traffic jams, subdivisions, and fast food that dominate your everyday living. Here in the middle of nowhere, you’ve attained a special kind of a freedom, a kind of deep autonomy, that often eludes you at home in the suburbs. Arcadian bliss is yours at last.
But then: bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
What a strange bird, you think at first. Blinking, you decide it’s a very small plane . . . but that’s not quite it. . . . Suddenly, you realize it’s one of those drones, a flying machine the size of a condor, purposefully circling your otherwise private mountaintop. At this elevation you are practically eye-to-eye with the thing, which you later discover is the county sheriff’s prized purchase. Soon thereafter you’ll read up on drones in the rural West, not to mention specially equipped planes and satellites with ultra-high resolution imaging capacities, learning enough that you feel embarrassed to have danced your celebratory jig in front of unseen spectators. Already you feel a little bit foolish, a little bit exposed. You want to ignore the drone circling the valley in front of you, but its presence gnaws at something in you. It seems wrong, out of place, weirdly unnatural. Something about it just chaps your hide. Walking the Maine backcountry in the 1840s, Thoreau described the endless challenges of “the grim, untrodden wilderness, whose tangled labyrinth of living, fallen, and decaying trees only the deer and moose, the bear and wolf, can easily penetrate.” Now the sheriff of some pissant county, not to mention the secretive overlords at Google and the NSA, can penetrate such “untrodden” land with high-tech ease—silently, efficiently, continually.1 A queasy feeling descends upon you as you wonder: Who else is watching?
You zip up your Gore-Tex in annoyance and head down the mountain, studying the landscape in a harsh new light. You run into some hikers taking photos on their iPhones and you wonder what their GPS reveals about their whereabouts. Further downhill you spot a “critter cam” and wonder if it’s broadcasting your face to the world, or at least to a classroom of curious school kids somewhere.2 Back at the trailhead, you notice a security camera with a National Park Service sticker that you strolled right past before. These cameras remind you about something you read about—something called Google Trekker, a way of capturing the natural landscape with an unprecedented level of detail. Back in your car, you find a headline on your phone that announces, “GOOGLE IS CALLING ON TREKKERS TO HELP CREATE STREET VIEWS OF HIDDEN CORNERS OF THE WORLD,” and you shake your head in wonderment.3 Once you start looking for surveillance in the wild, it feels like it’s everywhere—everywhere “the wild” used to be.
What we generally imagine as surveillance technologies seem as far from our ideal of wilderness as Diet Coke and video games. UAVs, ultra-sensitive microphones, spy cameras, thermal sensors—what is this high-tech stuff doing in nature? Indeed, the whole infrastructure of watching, tracking, and sorting seems like something for nervous cities and suburbs worried about car thieves and pedophiles, not the quiet calm of the tallgrass prairie of Oklahoma, the blinding white desolation of Utah’s salt flats, or the barren stretches of the Texas Gulf Coast, where normally nothing is in the air apart from a few whooping cranes. The idea that electronic surveillance is proliferating in such natural locations, many miles from obvious signs of human activity, is perplexing and maybe a little disheartening to imagine. Yet it is real: something big is happening out there in the places where surveillance technology and wilderness have begun to intersect. The surveillance is creating a new ecological crisis, one in which a new form of technology is intruding upon the landscape and quietly adding a new layer of “anthropogenic stress” on the integrity of ecosystems, without anyone seeming to notice.4
Some people might shrug at the prospect of CCTV in the wild, noting that the intrusion of surveillance into the natural world is a very old story. After all, what we think of as the wild has never been completely free from monitoring and tracking. Migrants have always traversed the toughest deserts with maps in hand; hunters have always followed their prey into the deepest underbrush; presidents have sent surveyors into distant landscapes in the name of empire and enterprise; and eventually ordinary people brought cameras, notebooks, GPS, and other tracking devices on camping trips and hunting expeditions. Yet there is a new level of intensity to this wild surveillance. With every passing year drones and satellites are coming in for a closer view of the treetops, arroyos, and scrub-brush critters, sometimes in ways that seem straight out of science fiction. To my mind, these UAVs, night-vision goggles, wireless CCTV cameras, and other forms of remote sensing are challenging long-held conceptions of untouched nature as a refuge from connectivity, a place where we can leave behind the feeling of being watched by governments, corporations, and our fellow citizens. Emerging surveillance technologies are altering our idea of the wild, perhaps even taming it, in ways that strike me as worrisome, if not depressing. The result is a wilderness that is increasingly under the watchful eye of the governments, corporations, and individuals who are asserting spatial dominion over places that once seemed free from obvious signs of human control. Even if seeming free was an illusion that grew sketchier with every passing generation, it was a potent illusion that spoke to a deep need in many people.
A natural landscape in which everything is illuminated, everything is instantly observable, everyone is on stage everywhere is a problematic thing. As surveillance expands into seemingly pristine environments, we will have to struggle a little harder to find an unobserved spot. Not to put too fine a point on it, this will represent an extraordinary transition in human consciousness: the end of rural solitude. Computer scientists describe an approaching moment in which computers attain self-awareness as “the singularity,” but I wonder if the term is equally suited to the time when the surveillance infrastructure completes its global embrace, finally wrapping its arms around city and country alike. Right now the system is incomplete, still lacking coherence and integration in significant ways (its many parts are often separated by national or commercial interests, for the time being). Yet someday soon, the singularity will change this, signaling the end of wilderness as we have generally imagined it. Even if no one will commemorate the surveillance singularity with a golden spike, as they did the transcontinental railroad, we should take note of this equally historic occasion in the history of technology: a significant new infrastructure will have engulfed the planet, as meaningful and transformative as railroads, power grids, and interstate highways. Even a humanless void in the Mojave will be subject to extraordinarily precise forms of monitoring, if it isn’t already. The most desolate wasteland will be incorporated into a vast system of knowing and remembering in the surveillance infrastructure. To those with the power to scrutinize, those fortunate owners of the means of surveillance production, this moment of singularity will bring an unforeseen level of control and illumination to landscapes near and far. As seemingly raw nature is incorporated into a rapacious machinery of knowing, a bright new light will shine on the small details of human and nonhuman life that now escape detection: the morning stroll of a lone Tibetan farmer; the relaxed goat-herding of a Ugandan villager; the morning trawl of a Haitian fisherman; the lighting of a match around an Alaskan campfire (which can already be spotted by a small sensor more than 12 miles away). Even those who are not political refugees, angry libertarians, or criminals on the lam might mourn the loss of hidden spots on the planet: escaping into the mountains or jungles or densest forests will have no plausibility outside of a Hollywood movie. Fleeing to the natural world for sanctuary and solitude will become a fantasy of the highest order, one that will require the suspension of our critical faculties. Listening to birds squawking and streams flowing, we might still pause on an isolated ridge and tell ourselves, At last, I’m truly alone. We might take a deep breath, or a sip of bourbon, to really complete the illusion of the world at bay, out of sight, out of mind. But more than ever before, that feeling will be a Class A delusion, a cruel joke on the technologically ill-informed who don’t realize what is occurring in the seemingly quiet skies above their head. For humans as much as any other creatures, electronic supervision will be as inescapable in the wilderness as in a the neighborhood shopping center.
What is the psychic price of this development? The philosopher Mark Kingwell has written about the importance of buildings to the cities in which we live: “the logic of inside to outside,” he writes, “structures consciousness itself.”5 But what happens when these two qualities collapse, when outside and inside start to blur, even in places that appear to be manifestly outside of the built environment? What does “outside” or “outdoors” mean if surveillance technologies have brought nature inside the web of constant scrutiny and urban knowing? How might the rapid expansion of surveillance into the wild structure our consciousness in new ways? All of the qualities we associate with a control society, for good and ill, are creeping into what was understood as uncharted, untouched, and uncontrolled. If by wilderness we mean a seemingly unmapped, uncontrolled, unobserved stretch of land or sea, will we have to shift our definitions and expectations?6 In other words, how will we reimagine (or cease to imagine) wilderness in the age of surveillance?
The reality of this predicament has been slow to seep into human consciousness, perhaps because the global embrace of the surveillance infrastructure is not quite complete. For now a few dedicated isolatos (Melville’s great term for the wanderers of the world), pot farmers in the Bible Belt, or stressed-out survivalists might still find a small gap in the information grid. If someone sits very still beneath a rock overhang in the desert near Moab, Utah, crouching into a small ball of undetectability, they might still enjoy a brief moment of uncompromised solitude, the thrill of human existence unregistered on any sensor whatsoever, whether a gauge hidden in the ground or a satellite camera hurtling through space. But it’s getting harder every day.
If it is still technically possible to hide somewhere between cell-phone towers and wireless sensors, the gaps are closing fast. When a white-collar criminal hid for almost a year in a makeshift tent in the piney woods of East Texas, locals were astonished that he was able to elude detection for so long, even though Nacogdoches County is home to some of the thickest, darkest underbrush on the continent.7 If nature has not been subdued—and out-of-control climate change attests to that humbling fact—it’s coming under supervision to an unprecedented degree. Theodore Kaczynski, the homicidal hermit known as the Unibomber, railed against such domination of the natural world in his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” In this screed he predicted that “whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to remnants preserved for scientific study and kept under the supervision and management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly wild).”8 Even non-psychopaths will agree with the bushy-haired mathematician: with a diminishing number of exceptions, the landscape and its animal inhabitants have been mapped, watched, sorted, and fenced for quite some time. It’s not a secret: Americans began fretting as far back as 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner announced the so-called closing of the frontier. “There is no question that wilderness, as we have understood it, has vanished,” writes political scientist Paul Wapner. “A world that is pristine, uninhabited, and unaltered by humanity is nowhere to be found anymore.”9
In some ways surveillance technology merely adds a strange new twist to an old story of wilderness in peril. Yet I want to ask what this new twist might mean. With satellite cameras, drones, iPhones, and Trekker looking over our shoulders even on the highest mountain peak, will we continue to look to the regenerative power of wilderness as a tonic to the enervation of postindustrial life in the suburbs?10 Will the prospect of desert solitude in the American Southwest be reduced to a quaint historical fiction? By putting the new surveillance into dialogue with concepts such as wilderness, individualism, and autonomy, I hope to weigh the implications of wild surveillance for the United States and for eco-consciousness generally. Much of this will happen in conversation with an unlikely theorist of surveillance, the nineteenth-century naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau. But first, treading carefully, I will take on the wilderness as an idea, often a highly problematic one, to understand where surveillance is going next.
Wild Ideas
The arrival of modern surveillance systems is hardly the first wrinkle in the story of North American wilderness. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans approached the so-called wilderness of the New World with more fear than celebration, regarding it with a suspicion that indigenous peoples could scarcely fathom. In his classic The Invasion of America (1975), historian Francis Jennings describes a natural landscape in which two dubious concepts—“civilization” and “savagery”—struggled for control. Jennings beautifully sketched out the contours of this essential American myth, one that continues to shape the conception of nature in America. Civilization, we are led to believe,
was required by divine sanction or the imperatives of progress to conquer the wilderness and make it a garden; that the savage creatures of the wilderness, being unable to adapt to any environment other than the wild, stubbornly and viciously resisted God or fate, and thereby incurred their suicidal extermination; that civilization and its bearers were refined and ennobled in their contest with the dark powers of the wilderness; and that it was all inevitable.11
For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European colonists retained their wariness of the natural landscape, even imagining wilderness as a vile place filled with physical and spiritual dangers that would thwart any attempts to exploit its seemingly boundless resources.
Something shifted, however, in the early Republic, and by 1800 the wild seemed to have secured a vaunted place in US nationalist mythology.12 Increasingly, this mysterious place of “resisting control” and wild “unknownness”—two qualities antithetical to the very idea of surveillance—became central to European Americans’ conception of themselves and the western territory to which they laid claim. As European Americans poured into the “maw of the unknown” throughout the nineteenth century, they fulfilled their “manifest destiny” to extend settler colonialism from coast to coast.13 No longer a place of demons and heathens, as seventeenth-century Puritans had feared, wilderness was fast becoming an aesthetic, moral, and national resource of the highest order, a sacred place for a regenerative experience that was not possible in the burgeoning cities of the East Coast and upper Midwest. By the time Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in the 1890s, the American city was already too wretched for his taste. “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again,” the English writer and poet complained. “I had never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of miserables. There was no color in the street and no beauty—only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.”14 As American cities grew into vast monstrosities that prompted similar alarm among progressive reformers, including nascent environmentalists, the wilderness was held up as the nation’s saving grace, a virgin land of problematically gendered possibility and renewal that the nation could not live without.
Yet wilderness was always a fishy proposition. In a famous essay in the 1990s, the eminent historian William Cronon unmasked the wild as “more a state of mind than a fact of nature,” a projection of a civilization looking for its antithesis.15 Even earlier generations had a sense that going off the grid required some wishful thinking. “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves,” warned Henry David Thoreau. “There is none such.”16 Similarly, Native American people must have been surprised by the idea of roping off a part of the world as wild and untouched. As an example of how native languages often lacked a word for “wilderness” as a distinct category of the natural landscape somehow separate from humanity, the contemporary Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso has said that in her tribe: “You can speak of places that are far away or places where there are few people, but that’s all.”17 Yet European Americans had a word—and a powerful appetite—for this idea and the real estate it designated. What literary scholar Michael Johnson calls a “hunger for the wild” has often been a problematic enterprise in the United States, where it often resulted in violence against Native Americans and the land they had long occupied. Indeed, the European American idea of wilderness has often been disastrous for native peoples, whose footsteps had long shaped what was wrongly perceived as untrammeled land in need of new forms of ownership and productivity. To the extent that we lose this problematic notion of the wild, we have lost very little of use to the present. But to the extent that we lose something that inspires and consoles us—the idea of the wild—we have lost something dear.
For all its problematic ideological shadings, the wild is still something that many people feel in their bones is meaningful and worth preserving. The mythic wilderness may be a cultural construction, but it feels very real indeed when we are standing in the middle of it. At the very least, it is this feeling that is in jeopardy at the present moment. We will continue to feel the enormity of nature long after the global population hits 10 billion and endures whatever ravages that inflicts upon the planet. But the sentiments that we have attached to that vast natural world may be altered, if not damaged, by the spread of new forms of surveillance into the hidden recesses of the planet.
The Googleization of Nature
Let me now concede the obvious: the introduction of new surveillance technologies into the wild is sometimes a marvelous thing. We should fawn over the scientific applications of CCTV, UAVs, and other forms of remote sensing that have tangible benefits for wildlife ecosystems—it is not for nothing that entire organizations have devoted themselves to spreading the gospel of UAVs in the environmental community.18 Although I wince at their choice of metaphor, I share the optimism of the ecowarrior website for “Real-Time Video Interactive Systems for Sustainability,” which celebrates Big Brother finally going green, as they put it, in order to protect the earth from harm.19 Without question, scientists are making good use of new technological opportunities to measure, watch, and record the natural landscape from great distances. For instance, California’s San Jacinto Mountains are strewn with “devices known as motes [that] measure light, wind, rainfall, temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure to detect the presence of a warm body.”20
From Iceland to Costa Rica, so-called eco-drones are going where no human pilot could safely navigate, bringing back essential data about climate change, volcanic activity, and other scientific matters.21 Scientists are gathering important data on hurricanes in the Atlantic with what National Public Radio insists on calling “spy drones.”22 Drones with thermal imaging cameras are following sandhill cranes into wetlands, while Predator drones are providing the intel needed to battle forest fires in Yosemite.23 One South African farmer owns thirty drones to protect rhinos from poachers, while the Indian government is doing the same for its beleaguered tiger population.24 Similarly, the Brazilian government is putting the Amazon under “permanent surveillance” to fight illegal deforestation.25
Meanwhile, in Appalachia, drones are visiting ordinary gardeners to help them monitor soil moisture and invasive insects. “Usually, I’m just out there in sweat pants,” one local said, “but if this thing is coming around taking pictures, I’m going to think twice about what I wear to the garden.”26 The federal government even has blimps with surveillance capabilities roaming the skies from Lake Erie to North Carolina.27
Government agencies are also investing in wilderness surveillance for nonscientific reasons. An Oregon man was busted in 2013 when his hidden marijuana fields were revealed on Google Earth satellite images. Such stories are not unusual in the United States and elsewhere, with the Swiss government pulling in more than a ton of weed through satellite images as early as 2009.28 The US Air Force drones equipped with the so-called Gorgon Stare can bring an extraordinary level of illumination to any landscape, using “an array of five electro-optical and four infrared cameras to capture day and night images from different angles, which are stitched together in a single mosaic scene much broader than what any single lens could deliver.”29 Even if Gorgon Stare has not been used in the United States, the astonishing optical powers of these machines are not entirely unknown here. We know, for instance, that drones belonging to the border patrol have been used to track and arrest US citizens in rural areas. In one case, a drone spotted a North Dakota farmer accused of stealing a few cows, resulting in a three-year sentence.30 If multimillion-dollar quasi-military drones chasing part-time cattle rustlers seem too absurd to contemplate, I would point out again that Google has gotten into the game as well, using its Google Earth program to pinpoint the location of marijuana fields for law enforcement not just in Oregon, but in Wisconsin and elsewhere.31
But as the infomercials used to remind us on late-night TV: But wait . . . there’s more! Backpackers can blithely stride past motion-activated remote cameras that can be squirreled away in a bush or crevice to send images wirelessly to their owners. These covert cameras are sold, according to the marketing materials, “exclusively for law enforcement, military, and corporate security to monitor marijuana fields, border security, graffiti, illegal dumping, and much more!”32 (In other words, anyone can buy them.) In 2009, the state of Texas set up a “virtual border watch program” to monitor the scrubland along the southern border of the Lone Star State, and suddenly thousands of “virtual deputies” were logging on to monitor empty stretches of the Rio Grande.33 Ironically, the same people who were joining the online posse to round up “illegal aliens” might reject a similar form of surveillance in the wild: Field and Stream magazine complained that animal-rights activists were selling small drones to anyone who wants to keep an eye on local hunters. The magazine quoted the sales pitch, presumably with gritted teeth: “Using your hobby drone, you can collect instant to-your-phone video footage of hunters engaging in illegal activity, such as drinking while in possession of a firearm, injuring animals and failing to pursue them, and illegally using spotlights, feed lures, and other nasty but common hunting tricks. Your amateur footage can be used to alert game wardens and other authorities to who is doing what to animals.”34
Apparently, everybody is watching everybody in the new American wild. A Canadian video-game developer wants to scan the entire globe to “reproduce accurately, at scale, the whole planet and its different ecosystems, environments, countries and cities using small civilian drones” to create a virtual world that replicates the actual world, like something out of a Borges short story.35 The giants of Silicon Valley have already devoted themselves to this project of global illumination. While Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg dreams of an Open Planet of total transparency in which all movements are tracked for the benefit of Facebook users (well, at least for Facebook’s advertisers), Google is also playing a part in taming the wild, and it has plenty of help. Hikers may now wear Google Glass on their favorite trails, recording the flowers as much as strangers wandering into shot. And going beyond that, Google is bringing its controversial Street View concept to nature with Trekker, a backpack-mounted data collection apparatus that can capture images of the natural landscape in stunning detail. With fifteen specially designed lenses mounted on a forty-pound device that pokes out of a backpack, Trekker has begun to pierce the mysteries of Mount Everest, the Galapagos Islands, Antarctica, and the Great Barrier Reef.36 “Since 2005, Google has mapped 28 million miles of road in 194 countries,” one report noted in summer 2013. “And it won’t rest until the whole planet is on its servers.”37 By harnessing the power of what Google dubs “citizen cartographers” (more than 40,000 worldwide as of 2014), Google Trekker will allow the company to tackle something that would have been impossible until just a few years ago: “Our goal is to put together a sort of digital mirror of the world,” says one Google exec.38
The pushback against this project, perhaps the greatest cartographic undertaking in world history, has been almost nil. One British newspaper wondered if Google Trekker would dull “the experience of traveling” by removing mystery and surprise from the landscape.39 I would add some other uncomfortable questions before we rush into Google’s perfect future. Do we really want a world in which everything is mapped, monitored, and accessible from any digital device? Do we really want a world in which the wild is forced to shed its secrets? Why does this transformation of the wild feel like a fait accompli rather than something for the public to debate? Such questions seem strangely absent from the broader discussions of Google’s project.40 This is something that geographer Jason Farman explores in an article on Google’s “digital empire.” Describing the shadow of colonialism that haunts the information giant’s quest for totalizing spatial knowledge, Farman writes: “The technological gaze of aerial and satellite imagery—the essence of the interactive maps presented in Google Earth—has a long history with war and imperialism and subsequently has a historical relationship in the ways maps delineate ‘us’ versus ‘them’ as well as defining ‘our territory.’”41
Even beyond the political economy and subtle colonialism of what I am calling “wild surveillance,” we might consider the emotional burden that these new technologies and practices are adding to the natural world. One scholar has written about the shifts that occur at the emotional level that might push against logic, intention, or explicit meaning: for instance, watching news broadcasts or game shows have an impact on us “not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning.”42 In other words, something in the room is setting the tone, but it’s not always the thing in the foreground. To my mind, Google’s website might trumpet the excitement of Trekker as a new way to connect with remote landscapes and natural wonders, thereby putting the grandeur of nature in the center of the frame, as it were, but something might still feel off. A person might even feel a sense of quiet desperation, a kind of sadness or intimidation, as he realizes just how much Google knows about his secret spots in the woods.
The taming of the wild simply feels bad to many people. For those who like their nature without a side order of scrutiny, surveillance technology is anxiety-producing in almost any context, even in the calmest corners of the woods or prairies. For others, wild surveillance touches on thorny political questions. I’m thinking, for instance, of Senator Rand Paul and other conservative libertarians who patently reject the prospect of Big Brother in the great outdoors: “My privacy’s only inside my house and not in open spaces?” Senator Paul, of Kentucky, asked incredulously on the floor of the Senate during his 2013 antisurveillance filibuster. “I disagree with that.”43 Even if our political sensibilities are not offended, some of us have an aesthetic beef: the ugliness of UAVs, CCTVs, and their ilk corrupts the beauty of nature as we would prefer to experience it. For aesthetic and sentimental reasons, keeping nature pristine is often its own reward. As ecologist Paul Wapner puts it, “People get pleasure out of protecting the nonhuman world.”44 It is a quaint sentiment that would have appealed to a canonical figure in American letters, someone whose voice has not been heard on the subject of surveillance, who might even seem an improbable commentator on technologies of control emerging in the twenty-first-century wilderness. Yet Henry David Thoreau is always more than we assume, and I think he can take us where we need to go.
What Would Henry Do?
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.” So begins an essay titled “Walking,” published in Atlantic Monthly one month after the death of its author, Henry David Thoreau, in 1862.45 Obviously, a mid-nineteenth-century writer will have nothing to say on the topic of electronic surveillance as we know it today. However, it is not unreasonable to imagine what he might have said if we had strolled alongside him as he mused, prodded, critiqued, and scoffed at the follies of his own age. As a political theorist, essayist, and cultural critic, Thoreau wrote eloquently about the role of individualism in a democratic republic, the necessity of privacy to the development of moral character, and the encroachment of technology on his beloved landscape. Perhaps because he is so indelibly linked to nature, we seem not to have noticed how much he offers to discussions of contemporary surveillance culture, especially as it intersects with the natural world in new and surprising ways. In his own peculiar and often beautiful manner, Thoreau may be an untapped theorist of surveillance. Given his profound attachment to autonomous living and other gently libertarian virtues, I suspect he would have recoiled from surveillance’s subtle claims on our lives—its implicit demand for social conformity and adherence to the law, its insatiable desire to pry into our personal affairs for commercial or bureaucratic reasons, its implicit threat to our mobility. In short, I think he would lament our contemporary surveillance culture for systematically stifling freedom, independence of mind and movement, and the dignity of solitude that, for him at least, thrived best in nature. Surely he would mourn for an America in which rugged individualism and pastoral regeneration had become dusty relics trotted out on special occasions, appearing in presidential speeches and advertisements for SUVs as mere fantasies for a citizenry huddled together nervously, wired up for endless infotainment and in a constant state of anxious self-defense in an increasingly urbanized nation. Most pointedly, I suspect that he would find the ruthless securitization of the natural world demeaning in the extreme. To put it mildly, it would cramp his style.
To those who imagine him as turning his back on civilization and its advances, Thoreau might seem like a strange commentator on the subject of electronic surveillance or any other emerging technology. Wasn’t he more interested in rivers than people, more attached to pastures than machines? Not quite. Contrary to stereotype, Thoreau was no Luddite. “Whatever he thought of the results of mechanization,” writes his finest biographer, “he clearly had a flair for machines and contrivances themselves.”46 In this regard, Thoreau was more sensitive to the benefits of new technologies than one might assume about the hermit of Walden.47 Even as he lamented the arrival of the railroad, he would also concede that its “sounds . . . and even its smoke as seen from a distance could add interest to a landscape.”48 And his appreciation went far beyond aesthetics. Perhaps the best surveyor in New England, an inventor who revolutionized the pencil for a few lucrative years, and a small-factory owner with a keen eye for the details of manufacturing, Thoreau was as skilled with new technology as he was in the woods around Concord, Massachusetts. Indeed, he brilliantly combined science and poetry in his later years, bringing together biology, statistics, and botany into a naturalist project of unprecedented depth and care.
Thoreau possessed a rare blend of relevant interests, an uncanny skill set. How often do we find someone whose scientific know-how is counterpoised by the perceptions of a cultural critic and the talents of a literary artist? (Let me know if you find others.) While he could be appreciative of the latest technology from an engineering point of view and could implement scientific methods of observing natural processes that foreshadowed contemporary eco-surveillance, he was still exquisitely attuned to the ways in which technological advances could create more trouble than they were worth. For instance, he famously fretted about devices that were “but improved means to an unimproved end,” and he lampooned the great breakthrough in communication technology of his adulthood. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he quipped in Walden, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Given his blend of technological know-how and skepticism, Thoreau is perfectly positioned to speak about the impact of new technologies on the natural landscape.
Students of technology may have overlooked the relevance of Thoreau’s work on some occasions, but environmentalists, naturalists, and eco-critics have always been closely attuned to his writing. Indeed, the philosopher Philip Cafaro puts him at the heart of American eco-criticism and environmentalism: “All the key American thinkers, from John Muir to Aldo Leopold to Rachel Carson, show Thoreau’s clear influence.”49 Few would doubt that Walden is an essential text in the ecological tradition, a book that informs so much of the American conception of nature. For this reason alone I am naturally curious about what Thoreau might offer on the relationship of surveillance technologies and the natural world. Would he relate to our dilemma as an intensification of one he knew in a simpler form? Would his practical side intercede, telling us to go about our business in the seemingly wild, calmly accepting the expansion of transparent society to the land and water at the extremes of the earth? Or would he rage against the machinery of knowing? Would he shake his head and rebuke us for spoiling a natural paradise with anxious gadgetry? Would he suggest that the ancient encounter with the ragged edges of the natural world is undercut by the mere knowledge that someone could be watching our every step, recording our every movement? Would he lament the fact that going off the grid is an increasingly quixotic enterprise in a world in which every location, every movement, can be tracked and plotted? Would he grit his teeth to see that everything, even the farthest reaches of the Rockies or the sandiest stretches of Death Valley, is now illuminated with an unprecedented intensity and accuracy? Surely he would wonder about this new level of scrutiny and control in “the wild” and whether it still makes sense to use that phrase for anything but a recurring cultural fantasy.
Such questions are the natural extension of his work as I imagine it. His writing was a poetic lament against collective pressures; his life was a very civilized protest against containment and accountability, two of surveillance culture’s defining qualities. Hoping to preserve the ideals of democratic autonomy, untrammeled mobility, and personal liberty, unrealized though they might seem, Thoreau thought hard about how civilization weighs upon us in subtle ways—and how it was weighing upon nature with increasing force as the industrial revolution gathered steam in the mid–nineteenth century. In making his quiet protest, he wasn’t positioning himself outside society, turning his back on neighbors, friends, and strangers. Instead, he stood in the doorway between two worlds, wild and tame, raw and cooked, natural and cultural, gazing in both directions with a wistful, defiant poetry. Ironically, the wild didn’t come naturally to him: he had lived a middle-class life in the comfortable home of a businessman who sent him to Harvard for a classical education. Yet, after college, he spent his life in pursuit of something wilder than he had known in Boston: he hungered for an unfettered life of radical autonomy, of dignified individualism, of passionate engagement with the natural world, whether in the gentle hills around Concord or the harsh granite peak of Mount Katahdin in Maine.50 He urged us to “separate . . . from the multitude” and to scrutinize ourselves internally, something that the surveillance regime, with its surface attentions, cannot fathom.51 Instead of allowing oneself to become lodged in a web of social expectation and tacit intimidation (such that drones and CCTV might suggest), he counseled a thoughtful retreat into unsurveilled seclusion. “There are times when we have had enough even of our Friends, when we begin inevitably to withdraw religiously into solitude and silence, the better to prepare ourselves for a loftier intimacy,” he wrote.52 These are not the sentiments of a misanthrope, but rather someone who prizes a deeper form of engagement that begins, somewhat paradoxically perhaps, with the care of the self. Privacy, distance, quiet, beauty, calm, solitude, trust, naturalness—these are his organic virtues, none of which are enhanced by plugging into a vast network of monitoring and sorting.
For reasons related to his political inclinations and personal ethics, Thoreau would never want us to be intimidated into higher purposes; he would not want pressure coming from an external force (the implied threat of the state’s camera, for instance) when we should be relying on our own inner lights as we make decisions about right and wrong. Thoreau lived in a time of bourgeois ascendancy, a period in which an emphasis on fashionable appearance was becoming more widespread and in which the open possibilities of the revolutionary era were being shunted aside by “constraints and contradictions.”53 I suspect that he would have viewed electronic surveillance as one more constraint closing tight around the throat of individualism, one more sign of the superficial attention to surfaces over depths. Control, order, expectations, social and legal norms—the virtues of surveillance culture are antithetical to living life as Thoreau proposed. After all, surveillance is always pulling us inside a system of accountability like a teacher watching wayward children in a classroom, while Thoreau wanted to live outside, sauntering amid his beloved wild apples and huckleberries. To one so inclined, surveillance is another affront to individual liberty, one more attempt to tame the human spirit, one more way in which the collective bears down on the individual.
Thoreau might even wonder if being monitored, whether in nature or in the city, would have a corrosive effect on our capacity for moral judgments. After all, his goal in going to Walden Pond was “to transact some private business with the fewest possible obstacles”; by obstacles he meant the gaze of the state, commercial interests, and bustling townspeople. I suspect that modern surveillance culture would intrude on his ideal of “private business” with an insidiousness that he would find abhorrent, even maddening. Because he loved the idea of having “a little world all to [him]self,” he appreciated fishermen who were thoughtful enough to leave him undisturbed when they sought his pond for night fishing. He was grateful when they “soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left ‘the world to darkness and to me,’ and the black kernel of night was never profaned by any human neighborhood.”
While surveillance culture asks for more and more information and interaction between strangers, Thoreau recommended firm boundaries, even “a considerable neutral ground,” between people. We were already too close, he complained:
We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory—never alone, hardly in their dreams.54
In a similar vein, he gently mocked the ills of “spectatordom,” the worthless gawking that might have felt especially painful to a man who considered himself homely. None of this sounds like the making of a surveillance apologist, especially in the context of the woods where he spent his most vital years largely on his own. In some ways he anticipates Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, in which she describes the external scrutinizing that I associate with surveillance:
The search for motives, the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation, since it actually demands the impossible, transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations. . . . It is, unfortunately, in the essence of these things that every effort to make goodness manifest in public ends with the appearance of crime and criminality on the political scene. In politics, more than anywhere else, we have no possibility of distinguishing between being and appearance. In the realm of human affairs, being and appearance are indeed one and the same.55
Despite her admiration for his civil disobedience, Arendt didn’t appreciate Thoreau as a political theorist, rejecting him as irresponsibly solipsistic.56 I see him as neither.
If we recalculate our sense of Thoreau, shaking off the thick layers of stereotype and myth about a canonical writer, we can see someone with a wealth of insight about the relationship of technology and nature, something that can then be applied to our current predicament. We can see someone who is far more than a Transcendentalist mystic and weather-beaten naturalist; we can discern a shrewd critic of civilization’s expansion and an underappreciated political theorist of the democratic condition. We can see someone with a libertarian heart, who “heartily accepted” the motto that “that government is best which governs least,” an idea that the modern NSA and FBI have forgotten to preserve in their endless files. Widely admired if seldom imitated for his civil disobedience against the federal government, Thoreau was willing to use his body in opposition to an unjust American war with Mexico, preferring to meet the government only once a year on tax day. He would be appalled, I suspect, to see how many “meetings” we have with the government in the contemporary United States, where various state agencies track our license plates automatically; archive our online activity; and request the titles of the books we check out from the library. “Must the citizen . . . resign his conscience to the legislator?” he wondered, 150 years ago.57 His ideal America was a place where citizens were ruled by their own consciences, not by state coercion or corporate seduction, a place very unlike the world in which we live—indeed, a world very unlike the actual world in which he lived. For this reason he wrote against the grain of America, pushing it in more hopeful directions that were rarely taken.
I wish he were here to give advice. As a card-carrying member of the “What Would Henry Do?” brigade, I am acutely aware that no one speaks for him (and few speak as well as him). Yet we can draw from his words and spirit to glean something we might otherwise miss. He wouldn’t be an antisurveillance zealot—his thinking was too nuanced for easy certainties, and he would have appreciated the scientific possibilities of wild surveillance. But I think he would be a surveillance skeptic in general, willing to pose some uncomfortable questions about our endless craving for security at the expense of beauty, dignity, autonomy, and liberty, all of which would strike him as equally necessary to a robust and meaningful life. To those who might wonder how beauty or dignity could rival security as a national interest, Thoreau would likely ask another question in return: What are we securing with our surveillance regime if not the higher virtues of our kind? Are we keeping out the dangers or fencing in our true natures? Thoreau had a genius for reversing the prevailing wisdom, something that would help us understand the latest outrage in the Panopticon.
He would also raise spiritual and aesthetic questions that are rarely asked about surveillance culture. For someone with a devotional approach to the natural world, someone with a vision of the wild that was simultaneously poetic and immensely practical, the encroachment of technology must have seemed like a desecration of what he loved best in the outside, not to mention all that he held necessary to the development of character and creativity on the inside. As Jane Bennett puts it in describing Thoreau’s techniques for developing the self, “One goes to the desert to escape the order imposed by the They”—the chattering, judging mass of men and women who dictate fashion, custom, and law at the expense of true individualism, as Thoreau perceived it. I imagine he would have resented surveillance in the wild as an intrusive presence breathing down his neck. He would resent the bright light of publicity shining on his private reverie in the woods. He would rue a world in which cameras and sensors could trespass on every river and stream; after all, he never wanted to “profane” an older “sacred” way of being.58 He might even view surveillance as a form of pollution, another of society’s “dirty institutions,” pursuing and pawing at us no matter how far we flee from its grasp. A child of European Romanticism, he would surely resent the taming of the wild, the measuring and monitoring of the sublime, the arrogant desire to dominate the natural world in the name of science, security, or profit (“defiant gestures of isolation and retreat are familiar to any student of Romanticism,” one historian has reminded us).59 In a society that celebrated fashionable trends and currying favor with tastemakers, Thoreau prized autonomy and a way of living in which we were the sole overseers of ourselves, living free and uncommitted. He wanted us to find the truly respectable in ourselves, rather than accepting what was merely respected in society. In Walden he asked us to live on trust, to eschew anxiety, to live on faith in ways that seem incompatible with our high-tech culture of suspicion. Nearly two centuries after he began writing, the bane of his existence—anxious conformity and needless scrutiny—has infused our lives in ways that would have astonished him.
What does all this mean for students of Thoreau’s politics? By looking beyond the usual stopping points for scholars of his politics, namely his essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” political scientist Shannon L. Mariotti helps us to see the deeper significance of Thoreau’s obsessions with autonomy, liberty, and privacy, three elements that come together in what she calls his practices of “democratic withdrawal.” Far from the self-indulgent retreat from civic obligation that is sometimes attributed to him, Thoreau’s “withdrawal” takes on a positive new light in Mariotti’s work, in ways that might help us to imagine Thoreau’s response to modern surveillance culture. For Mariotti, Thoreau offered a critique of a society in which it is maddeningly difficult to think and act with real autonomy, but his position was discounted, along with any other form of critique or negation. Here is where Mariotti makes her most interesting move: she puts the sage of Walden Pond into an unexpected conversation with Theodor Adorno. By pairing these two writers—two intellectuals who wrote on opposite sides of the American continent almost a hundred years apart—she examines their shared belief that an unfettered “critical self” was the essential wellspring of democratic culture. Opting out of the system, whether nineteenth-century taxation, the twentieth-century culture industry, or twenty-first century surveillance, is not running away from democratic responsibility to some private island of individual privilege. It is not a solipsistic retreat from the social accountability that society in general, and that system in particular, demands of us. Rather, this unplugging from society’s watchful mechanisms is a way of nurturing the solitary way of being that democracy requires as much as it does social engagement.60 Some care of the self, some preservation of the personal, is required for democratic culture to thrive. In using Thoreau as a political theorist who celebrates idiosyncrasy as much as solidarity, boundaries as much as belonging, Mariotti argues that civic engagement is much more than citizenship, and that “the democratic politics of withdrawal . . . need not necessarily be equated with apolitical apathy.”61 It makes running from surveillance seem quite reasonable.
Thoreau must have been aware of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of turning into an “invisible eyeball” while walking in the woods. His neighbor, friend, and sometimes employer was crafting a metaphor for the individual’s capacity to see beyond the mundane to the mystical, to feel the ineffable power of experience surging through the human body. Emerson could be a little more mawkish, a little more goofy, than his more practical protégé, but Thoreau was no stranger to this feeling of intoxication in the wild: it is what drove him to Walden Pond, the mountain peaks of Maine, and even into the upper Midwest for a spell to restore his health. After all, he lived in Concord at a time of rapid population growth that one scholar has called the “urbanization of Massachusetts,” a demographic fact that may partially account for his passion for solitude.62
Perhaps we can adapt Emerson’s famous metaphor for surveillance culture. A new set of invisible eyeballs is ascendant in the twenty-first century security state, the endlessly varied ways of seeing and sorting our actions online, on the street, and even in the woods where the Transcendentalists hoped to experience nonrational bursts of beauty and energy that flowed like a unifying force in the universe. Thoreau would have chafed at these hidden watchmen, perhaps running farther off the grid than the outskirts of Concord permitted, perhaps as far “into the wild” as the young romantic who died on the Alaskan tundra in the 1990s before being eulogized in a book and film of that name. But would that be far enough to avoid leaving tracks, to avoid being seen by these new invisible eyeballs in a version of nature that Emerson could hardly have imagined? Probably not. In an age of sharp-eyed satellites and UAVs, the wilderness no longer holds its secrets.
Not much has changed since 1850 for the visitor reaching the edge of Walden Pond today, at least not at first glance. The large pond is still bucolic to contemplate, its waters calm on the August morning when I wander its shoreline. As I move uphill and into the trees, the sun still pierces the canopy in a few places, while most of the forest floor remains in shadow. Animals and insects still move, seemingly undetected, in the stillness of the woods. Thoreau built his cabin not far from the water’s edge, just a short walk up the hill in an idyllic clearing. Now it is a shrine to the mythic past of the continent, the disappearing wildness of North America. It is a place where we come to ponder our relationship to the natural world, just as Thoreau did, though we tend to remain for an afternoon, not two years. What strikes me is how the land here is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, a common New England landscape that has been made sacred by a thoughtful conspiracy of bibliophiles and naturalists. For a nation as fraught with violence and delusion as the United States, Walden is as close as we get to an American Eden.
Yet something has changed. The original cabin is only a memory, a shrine to the pristine wild marked only with rocks and signs and, at least for today, a woman in an orange leotard practicing transcendental meditation. The cabin itself has long since disappeared, with only a replica near the parking lot to help us remember something of its old form while we pause for a photo, twenty feet from families unloading their minivans. Even at the old cabin site, the sublime calm of the woods is punctuated, sometimes quite abrasively, by the sound of helicopters overhead, cars on the nearby road, and visitors such as myself. A squad of runners tears through the woods while gossiping at high volume. Morning hikers consult their iPhones to keep up with the demands of social media. I certainly don’t judge them—I’m using mine to send a photo to my young daughter, a few ironic megabytes of “Look, dad is in nature!” I don’t mention the empty can of Bud Light and the plastic lid from a Big Gulp that I find where Thoreau famously grew beans. I don’t mention the not-so-subtle hints of the control society: official signs warn visitors to remain on trails marked with barbed wire in places (barbed wire at Walden Pond?), and tan-suited rangers prowl the grounds to ensure compliance, which is probably necessary when teenage knuckleheads are toting coolers of beer into the holy water of the American Renaissance. Even Walden has become part of the surveillance regime, and I fear that the Romantic “drama of the self’s engagement with nature” is subtly but decisively altered by the reality, or mere sensation, of being watched.63
I don’t mean to make too much of the changes, to buy into the decline-and-fall narrative that speaks to my inner Iron Eyes Cody (fake TV Indian extraordinaire, famous for crying over a spoiled landscape in 1970s commercials). I don’t mean to suggest that we’re dealing with forces that Thoreau and his contemporaries could never have fathomed. (Temporal hubris is one of the many pitfalls of the historical imagination.) Yet the interplay of what we might problematically envision as distinct entities—nature and civilization—is no more dramatic to us than it was to Thoreau in 1850. He was keenly aware of the advance of technology into “his” woods, and would most likely see our predicament as different in degree, not kind. Even if we permit ourselves a momentary feeling of separation from the thrumming machine of civilization when we head into nature, it is an illusion, just as it was for Thoreau in his recycled hut on the outskirts of the most intellectual town in antebellum America. The ants still bite, the “no-see-ums” are still an invisible nuisance, just as they were to Thoreau—yet something is shifting with the arrival of new technologies in the wild. Something is afoot.
Today on the banks of Walden Pond, my iPhone not only tells me where I am, ensuring that I will never become truly lost, but it tells the world where I am, where I’ve been, and, most ironically, where I’ve paused to think about being alone. My cell phone company may keep my secret, but more likely it will divulge my information to the NSA and other unnamed parties. Even something as innocuous as sending a message to my daughter from Walden Pond or stopping for a moment to play Angry Birds (an old game the NSA surreptitiously mines for clues about its millions of users) is registered somewhere, a matter of quasi-public record for those with the right security clearance to peek at my woeful video-gaming results.64 Of course I could turn off the phone or leave it at home, but that only helps me enact the fantasy of natural solitude with greater verisimilitude. Like some sort of Gore-Tex Garbo with a backpack stuffed with trail mix, I can shout “Leave me alone!” in the make-believe wilderness, but the invisible technologies of tracking and sensing will not honor my political, aesthetic, or psychological need for the dignity of solitude. In this sense, surveillance technologies are the new “no-see-ums,” always buzzing around us, a nuisance to those who crave a moment’s peace, a frustration to those who prize a sense of emotional liberty, of at least feeling free from the pokes and prods of the modern world.
The ubiquity of monitoring technologies would surely grate on Thoreau’s nerves. We imagine him as a cranky hermit with nothing but bile for others, but he could be surprisingly sociable, and we should not overlook his humor, compassion, and radiance (even in the face of death). Still, he often went to great lengths to avoid detection as he hiked around Concord. When he was sauntering through the woods, indulging his passion for unconstrained mobility, he made it plain that he wasn’t interested in seeing neighboring houses or other “cultivated parts” that would press upon his consciousness.65 Of course, walking is never simply walking in Thoreau’s mind: it’s a sacred enterprise for individual and nation alike. More than a pleasurable diversion, it instills a democratic way of being within the souls of Americans, preparing them for a more autonomous future when the government will not govern so much, “when the state will not form citizens into obliging wooden men.”66 As Shannon Mariotti puts it, “The experiential, adventurous nature of his daily walks oppose the modern convention for what we think and how we should behave,” putting him at odds with social convention and even property rights.67 Unfettered mobility in the public sphere allowed him to “work against becoming like a machine,” resisting the sort of scrutiny that the machinery of surveillance expects: these systems are waging war on unpredictability, the unknown, the wild. Being watched would violate the liberating spirit of his walks, so essential to his creative practice and political sensibility alike.68 Simply on a visceral or poetic level, Thoreau would have shuddered at the thought of a gaze other than God’s peering down at him while he roamed along the rivers of Massachusetts.
“Walking is a path to freedom, an organic activity that redirects humankind’s attention to the natural, organic, or essential,” writes Max Oelschlaager in his valuable study of the idea of wilderness, but surveillance is often an inorganic mechanism of control and containment—don’t walk here, don’t linger there!—that seems highly un-Thoreauvian.69 Deploying a revealingly military metaphor in the pages of Walden, Thoreau describes how he crawled through a swamp under bushes “to screen us from a house forty rods off whose windows completely commanded the open ground.” When he and his friend “emerged into the grass ground,” he notes how “some apple trees beautifully screened us.”70 The emphasis on screening is significant: it is the language of privacy, concealment, and modesty. It is precisely what surveillance seeks to penetrate: it seeks to look over our privacy screens in the wild or at home. It is at odds with “the tonic of wildness,” “the indefinitely wild,” the “brand new” land that Thoreau found essential to a life well lived: “We can never have enough of nature,” he proclaimed. “The most alive is the wildest.”71
Yet even Thoreau was part of the subtle dewilding of America in one sense: he was a surveyor by profession for long stretches of his adult life, and as such he was engaged in bringing order, boundaries, and measurements to the chaotic, unbounded, and unmeasured wild. If the surveillance of the natural landscape can be understood as a form of surveying—for it likewise establishes boundaries—then Thoreau was complicit in the surveillance of the wild in his lifetime. Perhaps his work as a surveyor is why he was so sensitive to the power of wilderness, which was disappearing even in his times—he saw and studied the changes in the landscape with much more range and precision than most of his contemporaries. As ecologist David R. Foster reminds us, “As Thoreau observed on his walks, the imprint of human activity was so great across New England that it seemed as if all the land was confined and bounded by stone walls, wooden fences, and ownership boundaries that had been surveyed many times over.”72 Surveillance, even as an extension of the surveyor’s art that he practiced, would thus be another insult to the Arcadian tradition to which he belonged. Lest his duties with a transit seem very different from those of a CCTV operator, I would note that the words surveillance and surveyor share a similar etymology. While Thoreau’s profession took its name from the Anglo-French surveiour (“guard, overseer”) and the Old French verb sorveoir (“to survey”), “surveillance” comes from the French surveiller (“oversee, watch”) and sur- (“over”).73 To very different degrees, both surveillance and surveyors are uninvited guests in the wild and, when connected to the government’s demands of its citizens, subtly authoritarian. Modern surveillance is the surveyor’s art on steroids: it maps, delineates, and records the soil, rocks, fields, rivers, and woods with a level of detail that Thoreau could scarcely have imagined. More than simply marking the lines of property ownership in the manner of a nineteenth-century surveyor, who measured the land and then departed, the modern “surveyor” is actively watching the wilds with GPS and high-res cameras, constantly alert to potential threats to ecological, political, or commercial interests, to which it can summon a police or military response.
Such scrutiny of the wild may stop poachers in their tracks; it may prevent forest fires; it may even provide data that saves the world from the ecological ravages of climate change. But it will also shift something in one’s experience of the wild, altering something more akin to poetry than science. The German poet Ludwig Tieck and other European Romantics of the nineteenth century enthused about the feeling of being alone in the woods, or Waldeinsamkeit, describing it as a rapture that we will soon not know.74 Some aspect of inscrutability and impenetrability is necessary to the Romantic conception of the wild, but the architects of modern surveillance are building a world in which everything, everywhere is readable, known, sensed, mapped, and archived in the most grimly un-Romantic manner imaginable. I’m not just talking about the surface of things—the rustle of trees, the movement of animals, the clothes we are wearing, the messages we send, the movies we watch, the payments we miss. I’m talking about the depths as well—the feelings one cannot hide from corporate emotion detectors, the stress levels one cannot conceal from a wireless heart monitor, or the composite picture of one’s psychology that emerges from one’s Google search history, insurance claims, and Visa statements, as well as the underappreciated emotional burden of living with new forms of surveillance and new contexts for monitoring. Surveillance is entering the wilderness of people’s inner landscapes as well as the actual fields and hills and streams outdoors. Surely surveillance of the heart is something that runs counter to Thoreau’s crusty New England independence and need for privacy, not to mention is an economical poetic sensibility with little room for the ungainliness of CCTV and TSA scanners. Better yet, Thoreau might inquire: What is it that we are trying to illuminate with all of these devices and practices of knowing, sorting, and storing? What room will remain for mystery, awe, and sublime humility when the whole world is tamed by technologies of knowing and measuring? As one scholar has put it, “Nature’s protection is not well served by making humans closer to it, but rather by fostering a sense of wonder and distance toward the natural world.”75 Perhaps the technocratic wild is no wild at all.
Yet Thoreau wasn’t naïve about the wild, and we shouldn’t be, either. He knew that even his own presence was complicating and sometimes hurting the thing that he treasured. He might have loved trees as much as people (as Emerson once joked). Thoreau loved the “nakedness” of nature, but he wasn’t some delusional purist of the forest primeval.76 Keenly aware of the ways in which nature depends on us as much as we depend on it, he would probably admire Paul Wapner’s astringent suggestion that “keeping wilderness looking and acting wild is hard work.”77 Thoreau would merely want to make sure we were tending to that work of preserving the wild in the face of new challenges, rather than neglecting our duty to the world. What we learn from Thoreau, as well as contemporary ecofeminists, is the impossibility of separation, the fallacy of cleaving civilization and nature into distinct but overlapping realms. This dichotomy does not exist outside our own cultural imagination. There is no Edenic nature that must be kept free from the dirty machinery of data collection and security. Instead, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization, are interwoven in subtle ways that Thoreau recognized more readily than some of his eco-Puritan followers. From this more balanced perspective, surveillance is not the snake in the garden—but neither is it innocent. It is a complex mechanism that must be watched as carefully as it watches us.
Some scholars have rolled their eyes about Thoreau’s retreat to the woods, seeing it as the privilege of a “Harvard-educated and genteelly subsidized misogynist nature lover,” but one in particular, Laurence Buell, pulls us back from easy disdain to suggest the complexity of Thoreau’s vision of natural refuge.78 Thoreau was never simply playing a man’s game in celebrating the pristine landscape, as Buell suggests. Moreover, Thoreau’s flight from civilization resonated with many women during his lifetime and (especially) after his death. After all, women were responsible for producing the first book to emulate Walden, the first dissertation on his work, one of his earliest biographies, and even the first Thoreau Society.79 The militant defense of unspoiled land may have masculinist overtones in the rhetoric of such successors as Edward Abbey, but Thoreau himself was no raging patriarch of the forest, no angry prophet of a gendered eco-consciousness: he was thoughtful, witty, mystical, ambivalent, and pained as he contemplated the encroachment of roads and trains and houses upon the deepest woods. I would like to think he would appreciate the work of the Finnish scholar Hille Koskela, who has documented the sexism of urban surveillance practices, but I’m not sure if he could quite wrap his mind around twenty-first-century feminism, given his melancholy disconnection from women in his time.80 (He was the original 40-Year-Old Virgin.) I hope he would appreciate the holistic sensibility of modern ecofeminism, with its assertion that humans and nature should never accept “us-versus-them” thinking.81 And he might come to appreciate the work of Carolyn Merchant, a historian who has described the conquest of the American West as “a story of male energy subduing female nature, taming the wild, plowing the land, making the land safe for capitalism and commodity production.”82 Certainly, I think he would share Rachel Carson’s humility in Silent Spring, in which she wrote, “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”83
No doubt, the desire to find true wilderness, untouched by the tentacles of society, has long resonated with ecologically minded men and women in the United States. As historian William Cronon puts it, “Wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest.”84 Indeed, an ecological mind-set has often been rooted in the wild landscape that Thoreau celebrated. As Laurence Buell writes, “The myth of actual regions, even continents, as properly ‘unspoiled’ has helped stimulate and bolster the authority of the ecological conscience.”85 The wild is the ideal to which the environmentalist often aspires. What will it mean to this eco-consciousness if new surveillance technologies expand into the last remaining wilderness, if any such thing can be said to exist at this point? What damage to the human soul might result from losing our ancient sense of nature as sanctuary, not to mention our ability to explore and wander and lose ourselves in something uncontrollable and vast? Will the loss of wilderness exact a psychological price for those who dream of something other than roads and bridges, buildings and runways—those who find inspiration and dignity in Arcadian solitude? Is it sufficient to sit at home playing the video game of Walden—such a thing will soon exist, irony of ironies—wiggling a mouse as we commune with virtual nature?86
If we extend Thoreau’s line of thought into the present day, as I have been trying to do, we might think twice about the further conquest of nature that electronic surveillance allows. We might think twice about further infringing on what radical ecologists call the “autonomy of nature.”87 It will pain those who seek the wild as a place of oblivion, a place where we can go to forget and be forgotten. Such oblivion will be unlikely in any natural landscape under supervision by a digital regime with an aversion to the delete key.88 Individualists who imagine themselves in splendid isolation from the pack will also decry this development, alongside poets and philosophers of a Romantic disposition. After all, Romanticism requires some space for secrets and shadows, neither of which are permissible in a surveillance regime that has reached a critical mass. The growing surveillance of the wild will also vex the ecologically minded, who may exist quite happily without the traditional fantasy of untamed land if it means that actual land is receiving better protections, but who also may have to make certain adjustments in their thinking. As the machinery of modern surveillance reaches into the deepest forest or the hottest desert, the rhetorical opposition of “pristine nature” versus “civilization” will seem increasingly strange. After all, electronic surveillance quietly expands the reach of the city, subtly urbanizing the natural landscape even where no other structures are in sight.89 Many fine scholars have explored the implications of surveillance technology in cities, suggesting how “practices and discourses that are uncritically placed under the banner of ‘crime prevention’ are actually better understood as socio-spatial ordering practices that . . . reinforce and reconstruct particular cultural sensibilities around crime, deviance and incivility.”90 What hasn’t been understood is how contemporary surveillance culture is bringing urban practices and mind-sets into nature. Perhaps Marshall McLuhan’s global village will be achieved—not with television, as the Canadian media theorist imagined, but with the complex infrastructure of contemporary surveillance culture.
It’s a strange thought, but so is the idea of a world without escape. Where is our Walden, our retreat from the endless scrutiny of our age, our “island of privacy” in the era of GPS and UAVs? Where is our wilderness, our frontier, our haven? Where is the outrage over what Christina Nippert-Eng calls our “shrinking islands of privacy,” which are becoming smaller, farther apart, more easily penetrated? Scholars have argued that the healthy functioning of society requires some private spaces in which we feel free from scrutiny.91 What will happen once we can no longer know the pleasures of life undetected, when we are unable to imagine life without monitors and sensors, even in the farthest corners of the woods? By then, our remaining spheres of privacy will have faded into the realm of folklore and legend, coming to seem as “fanciful as Atlantis,” as Nippert-Eng has put it.92
Perhaps the end of wilderness in a technical sense will have little impact on the hikers, campers, tourists, politicians, and boosters who look to the American West for the hidden spring of national essence and individual self-renewal. After all, we Americans have always had one inexhaustible natural resource: our ability to concoct comforting fantasies about who we are and what we are doing as a people. Like Winston and Julia hiding in Mr. Charrington’s attic in Orwell’s 1984, blithely unaware of the watchful eye of Big Brother as they enact their dream of domesticity, we can tune out the cameras and sensors in the wild as long as we don’t see them seeing us. No doubt, the deserts and mountains of the West will continue to dwarf the UAVs and other advance scouts from the mechanized control society for many years to come. For this reason, I suspect that we’ll continue imagining wilderness wherever we need its services on a symbolic or material level, even if we are no more “in the wild” than Thoreau was at Walden Pond—who, after all, was almost within earshot of the Emersons’ dinner bell and the other sophisticated sounds of literary Concord.
Maybe we should thank the drones for challenging the fantasy of the American wild. Scholars have hinted at the ways in which the idea of pristine nature has greased the skids for settler colonialism, environmental despoliation, and other nasty business. By fetishizing the romance of the mythic wilderness as a source of spiritual renewal and individual potency, European Americans have sometimes pursued their natural fantasies at any cost to the object of their fixation (and the people who have long inhabited the “uninhabited” land).93 Need roads to access Pike’s Peak? Build them. Need hotels and airports to enjoy the trails around Telluride? Build them. Need an escape from the real problems of American history? Take a hike! The wilderness offers what historian William Cronon calls “the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.”94 Perhaps we need to be shaken free from “the sublime’s alienation psychology,” the way in which we imagine the wild as something in opposition to ourselves, making it dangerously and irresponsibly outside of ourselves.95
Perhaps it is better to bring the sublime to our desktops, where we can admire the digital images of Google Trekker or a naturalist’s webcam, rather than chasing the rustic sublime in our gas-guzzling Jeeps or ATVs? Perhaps the drones will not subject the wild to a soul-deadening form of “zooveillance” in which the whole world is in electronic captivity, but instead will thwart poaching, animal abuse, illegal development, and other crimes against nature? Perhaps the humble UAV will become nature’s best ally as it provides scientists with data to combat climate change and helps keep human beings from polluting themselves into extinction?
I have hope as much as I have reservations. I know the sensation of the solitary wild has always included an element of wishful thinking. Perhaps we were never really alone in the woods, because there was always some possibility, however remote, that someone was peeking at us from along the tree line; that someone was taking note of our footprints and campfires; that some jilted lover, bounty hunter, or serial killer was tracking our movements in the desert outback. All of those baroque scenarios were quite possible and remain so—yet I still believe that something has shifted in the age of high-tech wilderness. What was once unlikely but possible is now possible and likely: it has become increasingly easy to follow our various tracks into the deepest wilderness. Even movements of the most innocuous sort are swept up into the vast machinery of observation and cataloging that churns away, day and night, for governments, corporations, scientists, and private individuals that we rarely glimpse ourselves, even as they are taking stock of our presence. Even far beyond the end of the longest dirt road, where we used to retreat for solace and contemplation, and where the Romantics reckoned with the sublime in glorious isolation, someone could easily be watching us on a monitor in an NSA bunker. I can’t think of anything less Romantic than that.
Devoid of romance though it may be, the juggernaut of natural surveillance rolls on, moving across the continent like the great railroads of the nineteenth century. I raise the train metaphor for a reason: it still rumbles just a short walk up the hill from Thoreau’s cabin site, just as it did when he was reckoning with its arrival in his woods. “The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell,” he wrote in Walden. “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard.” The railroad cuts a line through his celebrated woods, but also through the suburbs and urban core of Boston, symbolically connecting one of the key nineteenth-century sites for studying the relationship of technology, landscape, and privacy to its twenty-first-century counterpart. I’m interested in following the railroad’s symbolic path from Walden to downtown Boston, where an important chapter in modern surveillance culture was written in April 2013.
The pleasant shops and cafes of Boylston Street, in the heart of Boston, were the scene of one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism since 9/11. The bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon sparked a national conversation not simply about terrorism and immigration, but also about the proper role of surveillance in the post–9/11 United States. When the faces of the bombers were captured on the CCTV cameras at Lord & Taylor’s, across from the second explosion, many commentators claimed vindication for the massive investment in CCTV in particular and surveillance technology in general. Why? Even though security cameras had failed to prevent the atrocity—an obvious fact that eluded most reporters and pundits—the cameras’ role in aiding the capture of the Tsarnaev brothers was hailed with a kind of securitarian fervor: See? This is exactly why we need surveillance! Surveys revealed that the public’s support for blanketing the nation with CCTV shot up dramatically in the weeks after this tragedy.96 Perversely, the image of the Tsarnaev brothers wearing baseball caps and deadly backpacks was circulated around the globe as proof that CCTV works, that America needs many more cameras in its public sphere, that the machinery of surveillance needs expansion, not containment.97 No one seemed to make the opposite point: the Boston Marathon bombing demonstrated the abject failure of our post–9/11 surveillance state. Consider the facts. The bombers chose one of the most monitored locations anywhere in the United States for their crime. Beyond the dense array of private and public CCTV systems one could expect in any major downtown area, Boylston Street had thousands of spectators snapping photos and shooting video of the final stretch of the celebrated race. It was into this orgy of visibility that the bombers walked confidently, seemingly eager to have their deeds recorded for the whole world to witness, seemingly unconcerned that these same cameras would be used against them. The cameras were an inducement to their crimes, not a deterrent.
I assume that Thoreau would look with disgust on the bombers, but then turn the conversation from them to us, asking us to contemplate our response to their crimes. He might suggest that surveillance weighs more heavily on the landscape than the Fitchburg Railroad ever did, yet its benefits are more elusive than the train’s. What dignity, what trust, what autonomy have we forsaken in the name of security? What pathologies have we incubated in its midst? I think he would have a melancholy view of our fate. By installing a security system without end, a system of tracking and tracing with global reach, we have lost something that was dear to him. We have traded our liberty for the promise of safety, our autonomy for the pressure of authority, our wilderness for a machine. This is what I think he would see, because, if nothing else, he saw the ways in which we could deceive ourselves as a people. Thoreau had a genius for seeing cultural delusions at work, often long before his contemporaries, and he did so with a temperament that wedded poetry, philosophy, and common sense. It is a perspective sorely lacking in many contemporary discussions of surveillance culture.
This is not to say that Thoreau would be moribund with grief. After all, he warned in Walden that resignation to the status quo was a sign of “confirmed desperation.”98 Certainly he never surrendered to it, and for this reason I think Thoreau would counsel some degree of hope. By no means does the spread of wilderness surveillance represent “the end of nature” or “the death of the wild” with some shattering finality—except, perhaps, for those with unusually sensitive antennae, for whom any degree of oversight will poison their Arcadian raptures. For most of us, I suspect, the expansion of surveillance technologies into natural settings will simply drive us a little farther into the woods, a little farther away from the fray, where we will continue to enjoy the human fantasy of natural autonomy. Being in the high-tech woods may require a conceptual adjustment, a shift in how we think about the experience of wilderness, but I suspect that most people will quickly adapt. They’ll become accustomed to nature being a little less wild. They’ll get used to the idea of being seemingly alone while continuing to play the game of roughing it on their own—rugged individuals to the end. Few will protest. After all, as historian Frieda Knobloch once wrote, the transformation of the American West is often “understood as inevitable,” whereas the possibility that the transformation of western lands is “unwanted, unnecessary, or at least susceptible to critique” is rarely explored.99 Perhaps faux-wilderness will be good enough for most.
The situation is not entirely grim. The enormity of the challenges to the sovereignty of the individual and the poetic appreciation of the natural world might have dismayed Thoreau, but he was no defeatist. As H. Daniel Peck suggests, Walden was Thoreau’s utopian project of renewal and reclamation, not some apathetic hideout from reality. Even in 1850 Thoreau was working hard to conjure up “the wild” on the outskirts of bustling Concord. He would suggest, I think, that we simply have to work a little harder today, doing whatever is necessary to preserve our wild inheritance. Could we reimagine a more trusting nation, less in thrall to fear-mongering politicians and pundits? Could we learn to prize the wild as a part of true “homeland security,” poetically defined as a national resource of the highest order, somewhere above nuclear submarines and full-body scanners on the pecking order of necessities? Perhaps we could embrace the sense of technological restraint that Rachel Carson advocated with regard to pesticides—not to ditch the whole business, but to apply it sparingly and only where truly needed, not simply wherever technology leads us. Could we mark off certain spaces as surveillance exclusion zones where we could protect the endangered species known as privacy? Or should we relearn what we mean by privacy, searching for freedom from surveillance within our minds and souls, not on our streets or prairies?
I am willing to imagine such hopeful scenarios, as long as the techno-utopians (who have a fetishistic belief that new technology will solve every problem) and securitarians are willing to consider the darker implications of surveillance in the wild that I’ve outlined here. With those dark shadings in mind, I would like to check in again with our imaginary hiker from Colorado, the thwarted naturalist whose quest for solitude ran afoul of a sheriff’s department’s UAV in the beginning passages of this chapter. Let’s imagine that she is a resilient sort, that she’s already hatched another plan to encounter solitude in the wild far from the prying eyes of civilization. Her quest will take her from Colorado toward the Pacific Coast. She fills up her Subaru, ignoring the fact that Visa is categorizing her gas, Cheetos, and beer purchases in the officious manner of modern banking. She ignores the CCTV in gas-station parking lots and the prospect of unseen drones buzzing overhead; she turns off social media’s incessant request for her to “check in” and share her location. With nothing but natural solitude in mind, she puts the pedal to the Subaru’s rusty metal and plunges into the American West with abandon. An automated license-plate reader records her passing through Elk City, Nevada, at 90 mph; she’ll have a ticket in the mail when she gets home—but she has no knowledge of that yet. She passes through the endless miles of desert, land that looks like the inspiration for Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitude, but she sees the government signs that mark this place as mapped, monitored, secured: it’s a military installation, one of Trevor Paglin’s Blank Spots on the Map, even though no buildings are in sight for miles. She shakes her head ruefully: it’s under wraps. She can just feel it: the Man is watching closely, but she is going somewhere the Man cannot see.
At last she arrives at a desolate stretch of the California coast and pulls a diver’s bag out of her hatch. She needs it now: she needs to get away from the buzzing drones and peeping cell-phone cameras; she wants to free herself from the tentacles of the surveillance machines, the twenty-first-century equivalent of Frank Norris’s The Octopus, that nineteenth-century indictment of capitalist overreach. Diving in the frigid ocean in her wetsuit and scuba gear, she feels free from the tentacles at last, moving into a water of real octopi, not metaphoric ones. At last she’s found the sanctuary of the wild that she’s been craving since her disappointment in the Rockies. Blissful silence envelops her body as she descends twenty feet, fifty feet, eighty feet into the darkness, where she rests, suspended in the blackness of the sea for a long, intoxicating moment. It’s a glorious feeling, which lasts until she senses something moving. Turning on her flashlight, she spies a jellyfish moving toward her. It’s abnormally large and purposeful, and as she moves away, it seems to follow her until it’s inches from her mask. She studies the creature, which doesn’t look quite right, before realizing the problem: it’s some kind of machine, a robotic faux-jellyfish, with black wires dangling subtly from its underbelly and camera eyeballs. She pokes it and feels its hard plastic shell, on which she reads the creature’s name—“CYRO”—and its description. It’s a “self-powering, autonomous” machine that Virginia Tech University has developed for the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research.100 Cyro is just a prototype, it turns out, but the navy hopes to deploy these robotic creatures on secret missions in oceans around the globe. Ugh. Unable to believe her bad luck, she lets out a furious stream of bubbles and paddles to the surface. She decides there’s no point in running any longer, no point in trying to outwit surveillance machinery in the wild. So she peels off her fins and then skulks to a nearby motel that promises satellite TV and a well-maintained pool, where she reads Thoreau and thinks about the freedom and autonomy that once existed on this continent—if only for some people at certain times—in a mythic space called the American wild.