Who Cares If You Listen?

In 1984, George Orwell imagined a future society in which surveillance is a totalitarian tool to control and subject populations. In Orwell’s scenario, a centralized power structure is surveilling subjects, and the hand of the government has transcended the public space to be present in every home. This turned out to be true. Yet, what Orwell failed to predict, is that this would happen with the consent of a population who willingly submit themselves to being constantly recorded.

The Snowden revelations of 2013 revealed the NSA’s activities and the extent of mass surveillance. Yet neither private nor federal surveillance have elicited much concern from the public. Several polls have concluded that the majority of Americans find the NSA’s activities acceptable. That is not to say the Snowden revelations had no impact: an average 30% of people have changed their online behavior in response to surveillance and taken some steps to protect themselves from invasion of privacy. Yet, those numbers are startlingly low compared to the threat of privacy invasion and its consequences on individual freedom. In this essay, I will investigate the question: why does the general public not care about being recorded? When Snowden leaked the NSA documents, he didn’t do so with an intent to forge a public opinion, but to start a conversation. Ultimately, it is up to the people to decide whether or not they care about their privacy. This paper aims at describing and problematizing the irresistible desire that both consumers and data gatherers feel: I will argue that the behavior collection network is both derived from and exploiting desire: the desire to listen, and the desire to be heard. To ask how we can create public policies to change how surveillance operates in our society, to protect privacy is first and foremost to ask the people to care.

The technological tools we use today are essentially the same spy stations that are described in 1984, except that now, we put ourselves on the screen. This is particularly the case for young people, they have less of a worry because this is the world they were born into, the world as they know it.

There are some practical justifications for this behavior. We expose ourselves partly because the technological tools at our disposal are effective means of communication. However, there are other ways to communicate that don’t invade our privacy, but these means are perceived as less accessible, due to technological illiteracy.

Furthermore, the absence of obvious physical means of surveillance in virtual surveillance make it look harmless, because the virtual has been associated with opportunity, freedom, and the advent of a more democratic age, through the utopian discourses and marketing strategies of tech companies. Techs have provided sophisticated entertainment wrapped up in a constant reference to freedom. Thus, both the illusion of freedom and the illusion that technology is their domain, and not the domain of the people, is purposefully perpetuated by techs.

The strategy in 1984 is to crush desires, not to enhance them, as Silicon Valley does. The political apparatus of Airstrip One is built around anti-sex leagues, hate weeks or hate songs. Social media is the opposite. Access to sex is much easier (Facebook, Tinder…), access to culture is much easier (Spotify, Youtube…) and social media plays on the need to be desired and desire in others. This is particularly apparent with Facebook, which creates an alternative social circle, giving the illusion of control over one’s image, and through this, their identity. We post and receive forms of gratification through “likes” or comments, and we have the ability to delete those that we don’t wish to see.

The service that techs provide, the bait, gives us the impression of being “the center of the world.” These new technologies are ones of personification and extreme individualization, allowing for a continuous life-assistant. The collection of big data allows them to offer all sorts of tailored services letting the consumer satisfy his narcissistic desires. Social media satisfies an old fantasy of both observing (the common Facebook “stalking”) and being observed, while Facebook satisfies the same desire: it observes us observing others.Similarly, we buy Iphones, or Google Homes to inspire jealousy and desire in others. These are expensive tools that “make life easier” and pretend to inscribe themselves with modernity and progress. They are seductive tools to seduce.

But data gathering does not only play on people’s desire, it is derived from it. Talking about big data, Jeff Jonas, an engineer with IBM said: “It will change our existing notions of privacy. A surveillance society is not only inevitable, it's worse. It's irresistible.” For centuries, many authors, philosophers and politicians have imagined, theorized and instated surveillance. Today’s society is the achievement of an old fantasy: the desire to hear everything. This has been successful because it was done without the totalitarian connotation, the imposition of surveillance. As federal surveillance has played on the desire to be safe, private surveillance has played on the desire to be heard. The question then becomes why this desire to be heard is more powerful that privacy, and why isn’t secrecy a desire, when there is nothing that creates more desire than secrecy

Anthropologist Joseph Masco described spies as intending to “understand and create a representation of someone else’s reality.” But what happens when techs are shaping realities, telling us what to read, what to listen to and how. The temptation here is to interpret techs as an all-controlling force, thereby removing agency from the people, describing them as submissive to the enthralling force of the capitalist and totalitarian agenda. But a clearer picture might be to understand people as not being solely subjected to their rulers’ desires, but being subjected to their own desires. This might be what the paradox reveals. Towards the end of 1984, a thought police officer tells Winston: “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”