With squeals of delight they fiddle with their phones. Like little goblins they toy and tinker with their post-space age software. Remarkably uncomfortable with using the multimedia-version of utility pocket knives to access the collected knowledge of all of mankind, they are however adept at snapping and chatting and tweeting and whatever other inconsequential thing you can do with the latest piece of technology. Children truly are their ancestor’s progeny.
Anyone that has spent a working week in a room of adolescents will know that you shan’t escape being filmed, documented and recorded. They’re faster than a coiled serpent at snatching an immortalization of you when you’re at your worst. If you’ve failed at earning their begrudging respect, they’ll use the material they’ve collected of you to smear you. To ruin you. And if they, despite themselves, kinda like you, you’ll instead have to suffer pictures and films of you run through every gauntlet of silly filters that has ever been invented.
So, ruin or humiliation.
For anyone born on the old end of the millennial shift, such documentation will probably slither a creeping discomfort up along your spine. The fact and knowledge that you’re always being eternalized through their camera lenses. That anything you do or say will be saved to be turned and twisted to whatever fashion the mind of children can devise. Where not even malice, but mere recklessness, can cost you not just your job, but your career. And if nothing else, a pound of dignity.
Generation X and back have feared the surveillance society. We have written books about it. We have protested it. We have heralded it as the destroyer of both privacy and freedom of expression and thought. But as it turns out, it wasn’t just villainous governments or spy agencies that we should have been wary of. It was our young, paradoxically the “freest” generation yet, that brought us this citizen surveillance state.
TL,DR: Our governments don’t have to spy on us. Our young are doing it for them.
Personally, I feel a feverish discomfort by that. Even though I’m a journalist, and documenting life and the living is an integral part of that, surveillance still gives me the shivers. Yet the young don’t seem to share that sentiment. They seem to think that being watched is part of the course. Maybe their apathy to surveillance may come from their youthful naiveté. And perhaps the fear of being watched, and fearing the loss of privacy, is a fear that we have failed in instilling within them.
Or maybe, the times they are a-changin’.
Maybe this is how things will be from now on. Maybe our fears that the advances in information technology will devour personal integrity have already come to pass. Maybe this is just the next terrifying hurdle that we as an older generation will simply have to come to grips with. Like rock music and sword-n-sorcery role-playing games before it. Maybe it’s not the adolescents that need to be taught to fear the loss of privacy. Maybe it’s us that need to learn to live with this marshalled development, and to stop fearing progress.
It could be the case that the question is no longer if it’s okay or not to film someone without their knowledge or consent. Perhaps the question is what comes first. That our fear of ever present documentation will subdue individuality and personal freedoms, or that we’ll collectively stop caring whether or not we’re caught saying or doing something stupid on camera.
If citizen surveillance is the way of the future, which do you think will die first? Freedom or vanity?
/Sebastian Lindberg 8/8-2017
WastedWords 