By Mark Pesce, ABC
This is the future of urban life, of civic life. No longer anonymous, no longer unbounded. Moving to the big city no longer means you are just a face in the crowd. You are known, thoroughly known.
This isn't the Orwellian dystopia of ubiquitous CCTV cameras and a pervasive surveillance state. Rather, this is the world of 'sousveillance', the bottom-up universe where six billion people are all taking photos that automatically get uploaded to Facebook and Google+, shared around, identified, tagged, indexed, and continually referenced.
This door swings both ways; not all mobs are the elemental embodiment of the forces of order. What would happen if, for example, the rioters themselves had the kinds of tools enjoyed by Vancouver's bloggers?
We saw this during the London riots of early 2011. To avoid being 'kettled' by the London Metropolitan Police, protesters turned to Sukey, a smartphone app that allowed them to report on, then share, the location and activities of police involved in protest management. This gave the protesters broader situational awareness than the police, which meant they could simply outmanoeuvre the police - making themselves absent where the police were, making themselves present where the police were not - thus there was never much of a mob to kettle. For several hours, rioters had their way in London's West End, around Trafalgar Square, and the Cenotaph.
The forces of order and the forces of chaos both gain incredible empowerment, but at the cost of anonymity. Those unlucky enough to be targeted by Vancouver's mob-of-order could have turned the tables on those persecuting them, using those same tools to harass the harassers. That will happen, next time, whether in London or Cairo or Beijing. Force will meet force, both sides fully revealed for the first time, each attempting to strike the soft underbelly of the other while shoring up its own weaker points. Bellum omnium contra omnes.
During the Arab Spring, pro-democracy activists discovered that Bambuser let them thwart the Egyptian secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn’t matter whether they were arrested and their phone confiscated: The footage had already streamed to the world, where it catalyzed political energy against the Mubarak regime.
“The police thought, if we take all the phones, we can control the information. But they didn’t,” Adler notes. “The message still got out.”
The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping up surveillance cameras all over the place. The fear was that they’d be used as tools of oppression. But now those tools are being democratized, and we are witnessing an emerging culture of “sousveillance.”
Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the ’90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, like electrical-code violations. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They’d ask him to remove the camera—and when he wouldn’t, they’d escort him away or even tackle him.
“I realized, this is the inverse of surveillance,” he said.
Sousveillance
Sousveillance Panel Discussion: Panopticon
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