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cory doctorow
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 than 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 ger-
mophobes? 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 ex-
pression. To make it possible to see without seeing.
There is one city dweller that doesn’t respect this delicate
social contract: the closed-circuit television camera. Ubiquitous
and demanding, CCTVs don’t have any visible owners. They...
occur. They exist in the passive voice, the “mistakes were made”
voice: “The camera recorded you.”
They are like an emergent property of the system, of being
afraid and looking for cheap answers. And they are everywhere:
In London, residents are photographed more than 300 times a
day.
The irony of security cameras is that they watch, but nobody
cares that they’re looking. Junkies don’t worry about CCTVs.
Crazed rapists and other purveyors of sudden, senseless vio-
lence aren’t deterred. I was mugged twice on my old block in San
Francisco by the crack dealers on my corner, within sight of two
CCTVs and a police station. My rental car was robbed by a junkie
in a Gastown garage in Vancouver in sight of a CCTV.
Three mad kids followed my friend out of the Tube in London
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