By Myles Ludwig
Your life is just a click away, just a click away: “Every breath you take/Every move you make/Every bond you break/Every step you take/I’ll be watching you/Every word you say/Every single day … I’ll be watching you.”
Sting was prophetic. Even Paul McCartney knew what was going on: “She came in through the bathroom window … Didn’t anybody tell her? / Didn’t anybody see? / Sunday’s on the phone to Monday / Tuesday’s on the phone to me.”
A few thank-you notes: Thank you, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, American Express, I.B.M., E-ZPass, et al. for giving the government an E-ZPass of its own. Thank you for making us one of the 3 percent of us here in the U.S. who are dropping pearls of wisdom every day.
Turns out we are living in the United States of Snoopery after all. Try to imagine the digital mountain of metacat videos our government has collected and stored in their country-wide redoubts for a giggle? Imagine some middle-age CIA analyst practicing his Gangnam Style step in an ATT secret room in San Francisco, one of the 1.5 billion who YouTubed it back in April?
Are there metapieces of you along with all those dancing puppies and drunken Spring Break Instagram girls gone wild who will definitely never get a job … even in a good economy? Consider the skyscrapers of tweets stored in the National Archives. Think of the Himalayas worth of “unread” emails digitally shelved in the vault piled up like the gold bars in Fort Knox.
Call me, maybe. You can hear me now that Verizon has a direct fiber-optic line from New Jersey to a “military base” in Quantico, Va.
Facial recognition software, CCTV cameras, traffic light cameras, drones, wiretapping seems quaint now, privacy a legacy of old media. Even charming. The warning phase of “keeping your ear to the ground” is an antique. I remember covering part of the Sami al-Arian trial when the FBI had amassed some 400 hours of telephone tap tape, most of it in Arabic, but had no one who could listen to it all or interpret it. I remember Animal Farm, 1984, Fahrenheit 451.
What about Words with Friends? Did we think the NSA’s giant Mickey Mouse ears were listening to hip-hop? Is someone collecting rapper’s finger shorthand or American Sign Language or the fictional finger-tapping conversation between the Israeli soldiers on Prisoners of War? Isn’t that what Carey was checking out in the early episodes of Homeland? Now we have Jeopardy-proven tools in the world of digital conflict, a world in which hacking is done with a keystroke rather than a machete.
Now we all know the government has beamed up where you had breakfast (dive-in or diner), what you ate (hard-boiled or scrambled, lightly buttered toast or a gluten-free Whole Foods pumpkin-apple muffin) and what you bought at Amazon and eBay, not to mention who you Liked or hoped for a shot at on an online dating services.
Is someone looking over my shoulder at every Hulu video I watch? I shudder to think which of my other of my secret favorite sites they may be cherry picking … and enjoying right along with me. Oi gevalt.
The Listener-in-Chief said we can’t have 100 percent privacy and 100 percent security. Sounds like something Dick Cheney might snarl while antelope hunting. Where’s the outrage, as Kelsey Grammer laments in his greatest role as Boss of Chicago. It’s not as if we didn’t know Wikileaks exposed the existence of the software months before Glen Greenwald at The Guardian squeezed it out on a postmodern blog
So, we have been as willfully blind to the fact that we are all living under the Big Gaze just as Jeffrey Skilling was to the shenanigans that brought down Enron and put him behind bars. Foucault described it well. We are all living in the panopticonopolis:
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
The worldwide TV success of Big Brother ought to be evidence enough that we like it, that we like being Peeping Toms privy to every whisper and blink. But, protests the Listener-In-Chief, we ignored the content. Yeah. Metadata joins the dictionary of plausible deniability.
Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, didn’t know the half of it when he said Twitter and social media were a menace to society.
Big data is collecting you.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.