Living in "Snitchtown"
Forbes has a cool package this week on 21st century cities. It talks about slums, defends sprawl, a whole bunch of stuff. But the piece I really found interesting is titled "Snitchtown" by Cory Doctorow. For those of you who don't know, he's one of those really smart, prolific guys that you almost want to hate because of it. He's the co-editor of BoingBoing, writes science fiction books, teaches college courses, is active in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, etc.
His piece in Forbes argues that there is a basic social contract to living in cities:
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 than picking your nose, even.
That makes sense to me. I was riding the subway this morning and sat next to a large man. The seats were small enough that we were pressed up against each other, leg to leg, which in almost any other circumstance would have been uncomfortably intimate. But we successfully ignored each other's presence: I with my newspaper, he with his Spanish Bible. We were in separate realities, a shared social convention that lets us ride the train each day.
But I disagree with Doctorow when he argues that closed-circuit television cameras violate this agreed-upon social contract:
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."
Doctorow goes on to point out that these cameras are anything but effective: everyone ignores them, criminals go uncaught and the cameras only serve to violate our privacy. While I also think the cameras accomplish very little, I guess I see the nature of privacy itself changing. With recording equipment and storage getting cheaper and cheaper, it's inevitable that basically just about everything you do will be caught by some recording device and be available on the Web. Some folks are even trying to do it themselves, a trend that some are calling "Life Caching" -- storing everything you do, see and listen to.
Privacy, in my mind, will soon be protected not because it's not being recorded, but because everything is being recorded by everyone, including you. Your privacy will exist in plain sight, along with everyone else's, and be just as lost in the morass of information. Call it the "Purloined Letter" theory of privacy.
- JJ Sutherland
12:33 PM ET | 06-13-2007 | permalink
