The emotional and psychological acceptance and trivialization of surveillance (and other things like violence) is also done through the work of artists (in tandem with other people, particularly those in academia, entertainment, mass communication, and certainly, science).

One very recent, on-going and hugely popular example is Endemol and their programs (i.e. Fear Factor, Big Brother, etc.) Have you ever seen Big Brother? As the joke goes, if Orwell was alive today he’d be rolling over in is grave!

Stimulus such as “Big Brother” are very effective in the habituation process, such that later, it will become easier to, for example, implement a national ID system (with RFID) without question or debate, because the resistance will be limited to only a small marginalized minority that can efficiently be ignored.

In Amsterdam, I noticed that shops that had surveillance cameras made it clear that there are such cameras by displaying stickers on their shop windows. People there are also very sensitive about being photographed. I don’t know if that is still very true. In Singapore surveillance systems are not very easy to spot - until you do something. While there, we joked that if we threw a piece of gum to the ground in a shopping mall, police will fall from the ceiling. If you honk your car horn out in the streets you will get a traffic ticket in your post tomorrow. If you e-mail your friend a file made through an illegal software Big Brother will be knocking on your door in the morning. Surveillance in Burma wasn’t even that bad!

In many places, resistance is futile (you will be assimilated). So yes, artists can provide new insights and new forms of resistance in these situations, insofar as they take great effort in understanding how the system works, and that their works enable others to understand how the system works too, and not just be auto-therapeutic visual statements made at the expense of the public. (If I was a fascist dictator I’d lock up Endemol people for crime against humanity).

Now there is renewed artistic interest and activity in the field of nanoscience. The Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology at the MIT is doing groundbreaking work in this field, and artists are encouraged to “play” with these research. Several years ago, biotechnology started to become a very active field of play for artists. The extent of scientific research in this field is now so enormous that artists will find the limitless possibilities almost tyrannical. Imagine the use of living organisms for detection and identification: from land mines to infected water to people of specific racial types.

One field that the US military and its allies do not seem to have enough research on is network-centric warfare, now broadly and safely called “network science”. What the military needs is a grasp on the rules of network beahvior, a formalization behind diverse systems that exhibit group behavior. I can imagine how important the contribution of social networks such as Facebook and Friendster are in this field. Imagine that - 60 million people, 60 million free guinea pigs for your research.

A very sensitive artist (and scientist) knows that his/her work is a double-bladed sword, it will cut both ways. How I “play” with GPS or nano-technology or bio-technology or complex networks will inevitably promote these mediums/technologies to levels that I may personally despise. When that happens, the artist (as surely the scientist) should be aware and responsible for the outcomes.

I had a colleague, whose father was dying of cancer, cursing science for spending so much time and resource in the invention of such things like Viagra.

Much worse, I heard that the American Cancer Society has “copyrighted” the word “Cancer” such that individuals (who are often cancer survivors) who wished to help others by campaigning, making wigs, etc., are being asked to cease and desist from their activities, and not use the word “Cancer”.

It appears that if something does not link to established industry profit or the war effort, then it must be illegal.

I have an on-going thought about what to do with these… More later as I resume my other conversations with dead people…

I very much appreciated your post and the concern about “habituation”.

I recently heard a talk by Barbasi where he talked about the ‘inevitability’
of total surveillance. As both police cameras and personal cameras proliferate
and more of this is dumped on line, it will become routine to be able to dial
up any locatioon and time on the planet and find who was doing what at that
particular place. Our cell phones with GPS will keen a record of all our movements.

Disconnecting is not enough because our friends have cameras and the walls see.

So what are we do to as slowly all previous ideas of privacy erode ? I think
that the work of artists in this area can be one element of resistance- inventing
new kinds of privacy and ways of subverting surveillance systems.

Even a work like Listening Post which makes visible on line chat,
hadsa subversive effect = overhearing all the conversations going on in line and realising their convergence to the mean.

What kinds of artists and scientists projects can contribute to not onlsy resisting but creating new ideas for a saner world

Roger

However, what most American excerpts and commentators seem to prefer to ignore are the perhaps much more fundamental criticisms of the American de-Nazification process, especially its own similarities with the original Nazification process practiced by Hitler and his friends. Perhaps (on one level) the two opposing projects only differ (in the use of social engineering techniques) through the American policy’s lack of internal and temporal consistency. The way (according to Mayer) the Americans indocrinated and re-militarised Germany (despite their own laws forbidding this) in order to use the Germans in general (and certain Nazi specialists in particular) in the fight against Communism -one sees a frightening similarity to the debacle of America’s de-Ba’athification and social engineering project in Iraq many decades later. Add in Guantanamo Bay -and one can probably agree when Tony Blair in the BBC report “Iran backing terror, says Blair” warns about the world facing a situation similar to “rising fascism in the 1920s”. Although some (who have perhaps read Mayer’s book) might disagree as to the location of the epicenter.