Forbes just put together an excellent package on the 21st century city, including my editorial about the future of urban surveillance, called “Snitchtown”:

The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag. But you don’t make eye contact and exchange a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure that it’s as fleeting as it can be.

Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who’s got his finger so far up his nostril he’s in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form–worse form that picking your nose, even.

I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that’s only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank–to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing.

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Amnesty asked me to write an editorial about the threats to Internet freedom for the Guardian in honor of its conference, “Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace,” held today in London. I wrote a piece on Internet filtering that the Guardian called “See no evil?”

People say bad things online. They write vile lies about blameless worthies. They pen disgusting racist jeremiads, post gut-churning photos of sex acts committed against children, and more sexist and homophobic tripe than you could read – or stomach – in a lifetime. They post fraudulent offers, alarmist conspiracy theories, and dangerous web pages containing malicious, computer-hijacking code.

It’s not hard to understand why companies, government, schools and parents would want to filter this kind of thing. Most of us don’t want to see this stuff. Most of us don’t want our kids to see this stuff – indeed, most of us don’t want anyone to see this stuff.

But every filtering enterprise to date is a failure and a disaster, and it’s my belief that every filtering effort we will ever field will be no less a failure and a disaster. These systems are failures because they continue to allow the bad stuff through. They’re disasters because they block mountains of good stuff. Their proponents acknowledge both these facts, but treat them as secondary to the importance of trying to do something, or being seen to be trying to do something. Secondary to the theatrical and PR value of pretending to be solving the problem.

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Midnight.Haulkerton, the band that recorded a song based on my collection Overclocked, have just released the song elements themselves under a CC license for your remixing pleasure. Joel Falconer from Midnight.Haulkerton sez,

Today, we released the remix pack for the Overclocked song. Now listeners can remix, re-sing or do whatever they want with it. All the individual tracks that make up the song have had all their effects stripped and are now stuffed in a zip.

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