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last year and murdered him on his doorstep.
Crazy, desperate, violent people don’t make rational calculus in
regards to their lives. Anyone who becomes a junkie, crack dealer,
or cellphone-stealing stickup artist is obviously bad at making life
decisions. They’re not deterred by surveillance.
Yet the cameras proliferate, and replace human eyes. The cops
on my block in San Francisco stayed in their cars and let the cam-
eras do the watching. The Tube station didn’t have any human
guards after dark, just a CCTV to record the fare evaders.
Now London city councils are installing new CCTVs with loud-
speakers, operated by remote coppers who can lean in and make
a speaker bark at you, “Citizen, pick up your litter.” “Stop leering
at that woman.” “Move along.”
Yeah, that’ll work.
Every day the glass-domed cameras proliferate, and the gate-
guarded mentality of the deep suburbs threatens to invade our
cities. More doorbell webcams, more mailbox cams, more cams
in our cars.
The city of the future is shaping up to be a neighborly Pan-
opticon, leeched of the cosmopolitan ability to see, and not be
seen, where every nosepick is noted and logged and uploaded to
the Internet. You don’t have anything to hide, sure, but there’s
a reason we close the door to the bathroom before we drop our
drawers. Everyone poops, but it takes a special kind of person to
want to do it in public.
The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law.
When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual sur-
veillance—what’s the difference between the cops watching your
every move, or the mall owners watching you, or you doing it to
the guy next door?
I’m an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than
our technology. They’re the strongest bonds we have. We don’t
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