(As published in Topia, 2009)
By Lieu Thi Pham
A vision of a dark and sinister future has been conveyed in a myriad of sci-fi films and novels. This projected future of a ‘straight’ society with a total loss of freedom is foreshadowed captivatingly in these fictitious accounts. There’s Orwell’s 1984, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Ridley’s Bladerunner, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451– all painting a bleak and dystopic future where ‘higher-ups’ control the masses in a world of complete homogeneity. But suspend your disbelief – sci-fi has a strange way of predicting the future – take for example William Gibson who wrote about the internet years before its ubiquity. The noir-prophet coined the phrase ‘cyberspace’ in his short story Burning Chrome and his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Orwell, Ridley and Kubrick’s vision of our imminent doom-and-gloom may be closer than we think.
Today, governments and world leaders are marketing social control as necessary for national security or for ‘the greater good’. Take for example China, which controls urban-rural migration through the use of the hukou (the household registry system). The hukou system has existed for decades and was an instrument of the command economy. Hukous are issued for all Chinese citizens and are inscribed to identify the carrier as a rural or non-rural (urban resident). Designed to maintain structural economic stability, the hukou prevents peasants from entering cities. Although said to serve an economic purpose, some argue that the hukou also drives a political agenda. Since the Cultural Revolution, the hukou has undergone several policy changes but it still limits internal mobility and as a result, is subject to continuous criticism. In today’s inane world of fear and paranoia, methods of social control such as the hukou, ID cards, surveillance cameras and other forms of bureaucracy flourish at an alarming rate.
Obviously not everyone is happy about these measures but recent world events has made this possible. Since September 11 attacks, the world is more fearful and we are becoming increasingly suspicious of our neighbours. Technology is reaching new levels and the depth to which we are being observed is increasing rapidly – particularly in the case of surveillance.
Any student of social theory will know that surveillance, as social control is not a new concept. The idea of surveillance was famously exemplified in Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ (the 18th century model of a prison) and later theorised by French philosopher Michel Foucault in his book Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Designed as a round-the-clock surveillance machine, the panopticon was an all-seeing method of controlling the inmates. The cells were formed in a circular set, with the guard high in a central tower. No prisoner could see the guard because of his high and central position over the prison cells, but the thought that they were being watched was enough to keep them paranoid, and more importantly – disciplined. Foucault describes the panopticon’s purpose as ‘…to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power…so to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action’. Today the panopticon exists in the form of Closed Caption Television (CCTV), modern society’s response to crime. This is gaining considerable interest in the United States but Britain’s government embraces this form of public security like no other – London is famed for being the world’s CCTV capital. The premise for CCTV is that crime rates are lowered because criminals are deterred by their increased surveillance and the threat of a watchful eye is enough to prevent criminal acts. Critics contend that crime incidents might actually increase because CCTV causes a false sense of security and in many instances; response to crime is too slow or too late.
Unfortunately, if the world continues on this current trajectory of paranoia then the government will be able to expand its Big Brother approach to something frightfully akin to Orwell’s dystopian future. As Orwell write in 1984, ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever’. But I would argue that the real danger doesn’t reside in government policies, bureaucracy or any oppressive regime – it’s actually our own very indifference and the mindset that there is no other alternative that brings this hyperbolic reality into a probable one. This current state of apathy, fear and suspicion gives me the sense that idiomatically speaking – we will eventually just be kicking ourselves.
