Techno-Blowback

The following is an excerpt taken from an AlterNet article titled  Five Ways Techno Gadgetry Is Bringing Out The Worst In Humanity (written by Scott Thill on Feb 2, 2010). I chose it here because I just received one of these Traffic surveillance tickets myself, just mailed out a check to the Culver City Police Department for $520.00, and still have to find the time to do an eight-hour traffic school. This article is interesting in that it explains how such surveillance does more harm than good, and that, as I suspected, it is more an attempt at State revenue generation and a show of power than trying to create safer roadways. The fact that they monkey with the length of the yellow lights, and that our state representatives know about this, is just so fucking disheartening. I also chose this excerpt based on the fact that it quotes the author of the V for Vendetta comic, and I loved that shitz, as well as it discusses Jeremy Betham’s idea of “invisible omniscience” via the panopticon. Ultimately, this is an insightful and though provoking piece. Check it. And hey, Police State, I want my money back! . . .

Traffic Surveillance Technology: From the office to the freeways to the streetlights and beyond, surveillance of most any kind has led to less freedom, not more. And it hasn't really seemed to significantly reduce crime or prevent accidents. According to studies conducted in Oregon and Virginia, red-light cameras increased collisions rather than decreasing them, in some cases by 100 percent. Sure, fewer motorists ran red lights, but more of them crashed right into each other. Worse, whatever additional revenue the trend generated was sliced up by refunds to deeply offended parties entrapped by lame schemes like sped-up yellow lights, which encourage motorists to step on it or slam on the brakes. Instant accidents.

The idea that a patently invasive stop-light camera is incentivizing transgression is bad enough on the surface. It's worsened by the fact that some states allow its snapshot to be obtainable under Freedom of Information Act requests, so that literally anyone can have access to the event. Like its birth, the techno-blowback on this has become political and financial: Washington state representative Chris Hurst, a law enforcement veteran, sponsored a bill decreasing fines from nearly $125 to $25, and more importantly demanded that yellow lights last at least four seconds, rather than the scant two they've been reduced to in search of lethal regional profit. Now they're actually killing their citizens to make money off these things," he told the Seattle Times in January.

That's the overall plan of surveillance technology, Alan Moore, famed author of dystopian comic classics like Watchmen and V For Vendetta, told me in a 2004 interview. "V for Vendetta has had an annoying way of coming true ever since I wrote it in the early '80s. Back then, I wanted something to communicate the idea of a police state quickly and efficiently, so I thought of the novel fascist idea of monitor cameras on every street corner." Before long, Britain and America, Moore said, "had cameras on every street corner along the length and breadth of the country."

That impulse toward "invisible omniscience" dates back to Jeremy Bentham's infamous panopticon, a specially designed prison in which all prisoners were monitored simultaneously, without their knowledge. The result, Bentham explained, was not just invisible omniscience but also a "mode of obtaining power of mind over mind."

We have since upgraded Bentham's panopticon for everything from our rampantly escalating prison-industrial complex (which Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser once called "not only a set of interest groups and institutions," but "also a state of mind") to our so-called Reality Television. The latter is where we willingly turn the panopticon upon ourselves in surveillance spectacles like Survivor, Big Brother, Fear Factor, American Idol and worse. (Much worse).

"One of the reasons we singled out media in V for Vendetta was because it is one of the most useful tools of tyranny," Moore said. "[It] might be a horrifying notion, but I'm sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they'll probably believe the television set in the end. It's an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves."

The result has been our consensually mediated hyperreality and its very real consequences, including two devastating wars that have decimated millions in total, the destruction of our national economy (if not the global one) and an escalating environmental nightmare at the hands of excessive consumption. What follows from a serious political and economic addiction to incentivized pain and suffering? Nothing but abuse. Speaking of abuse....