Panopticon

A couple of days ago I watched a really excellent Dutch documentary, Panopticon (hopefully it comes with English subtitles). The title really caught my attention (not just because it's also one album from one of my all times favourite bands, and a record from another band that I used to listen quite a lot), but because year after year the notion that our current "Big Brother society" is more and more like a Panopticon turns quite realistic. Well, indeed, in the Prison-Panopticon, the prisoner couldn't know if he was being observed at a given moment, but he knew for sure that there were no means to having him observed all the time, however, now we can have the certainty that our traces in Internet, or int the public transport and streets of many cities, are being stored forever... as they say in the documentary, if storage space has become so cheap that you no longer need to empty your mailbox, the same applies to all those other digital traces.

There are many interesting points in the documentary, but I won't touch on them, just watch it! but the point I'd like to note cause sounds so stupid to me, is the fact that many people don't seem to be concerned with all this "being observed/loss of privacy" thing, because they just "have nothing to hide". Seriously, that's such a poor reasoning... it's not whether you have things to hide because you've done something "bad" or punishable, the whole point is that some people (like me) feel like our life belongs to us, and don't want other people (specially strangers) to know what we feel/love/hate, what our normal activities are, we don't want others to be able to reconstruct what we'll be doing tomorrow based on our previous days. It's something purely subjective, some people can tell all their lives to others they've just met, while others are pretty more reserved and don't feel like talking about feelings/health whatever... Some people love small villages because of the feeling of community that maybe you can get there, others love big cities for the anonymity that they used to provide. In the end it's a bit like the right to private property, we all should have the right to own our basic stuff, but nobody should be allowed to own 10 million "basic stuffs". Same for privacy, we all should have the right to our "inner world", but admittedly there are spaces that should be allowed to be monitored for security reasons. It should not be that difficult to draw the line...

Privacy, yeah, repeat with me, privacy, privacy, privacy... yes, it used to be quite an important part of our understanding of freedom, but now it's something irrelevant to too many people, I guess some consider it old fashioned. Well, I've never been a cool guy, so probably not being willing to share parts of my life with strangers is a normal step in this path that has always kept me away from the funny, shiny, attractive people... It's not that I'm not such a loner as I usually try to pretend, but life is a theatre and sometimes we tend to overdo our characters, or put some make up on it...

Humans are social creatures, actually, our capacity to collaborate, to share, to create societies has determined that we're allegedly on top of the animal kingdom (though puking over it all the venom that will eventually poison us) but the kind of fake sociability that has developed in the last years is an evolutionary penalty for most of the population, cause it benefits only a few. Putting up in facebook (or other platforms for exhibitionism) information about what you drink, smoke, vote... When you join as friend to someone that others would consider "uncomfortable", that ends up putting you in that same group of "uncomfortables" for them. That "them" could be an employer, someone you do business with, the government..., so, why the hell do it public to everyone?...