The Open Rights Group have a community photocall for snaps of public surveillance, which was enough to get me wandering around town on my lunch-break snapping the ubiquitous cameras. Paranoia-heads can rest easy in the reassurance most of the cameras I found were badly set up, pointing in funny directions or overgrown; from experience most will be looping crummy compressed video of such low quality that it could never identify a person beyond their rough statistics; and that the operator probably doesn't know how to work it anyway. The Death of Privacy, though it marches on apace, is mostly not threatened by CCTV until it gets networked, and then we can turn it on the custodes and sousveille the bastards right back.So what's with the addiction to this modern Panopticon? Wandering around seeing more cameras in scummy and public places, I first thought it was a class thing: that somehow in an attempt to modify behaviour to get a polite society, the cameras had created a surveilled underclass: instead of the Federation, it's Morlocks and Eloi. On reflection though, that's not quite it. The sheer uselessness of most of the cameras makes them less technical and more superstitious - they're theatre, props: gargoyles. Watching, making sure nobody does anything naughty, because the Big Guy might be watching (though he probably isn't).It makes me think that some artist needs to fuse the medieval superstition and the modern one, and make gargoyle sculptures with CCTV heads, with lens eyes and infra-red lamp eyes and solar panels on their batwings, all watching and tracking movement from their epoxied clawholds in public space. Hell, they could even flock 'em, all wireless and internetty, around the halls of the watchers. They'd hate that: called out on the intimidation and pointlessness of the gear, and maybe watched as well. Probably not, but maybe.
