They are like an emergent property of the system, of being afraid and looking for cheap answers. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you." Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. There is one city dweller that doesn't respect this delicate social contract: the closed-circuit television camera. To make it possible to see without seeing. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank-to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Or even if you do, you make sure that it's as fleeting as it can be.Ĭhecking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so far up his nostril he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad form-worse form than picking your nose, even. But you don't make eye contact and exchange a nod. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of her most excellent handbag.
The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not seeing. But the truth is that ubiquitous cameras only serve to violate the social contract that makes cities work. In the brave new world of doorbell cams, wi-fi sniffers, RFID passes, bag searches at the subway and photo lookups at office security desks, universal surveillance is seen as the universal solution to all urban ills. This seems to have escaped the operators of the digital surveillance technologies that are taking over our cities. When you watch everyone, you watch no one. They knew who was telling subversive jokes-but missed the fact that the Wall was about to come down. The East German Stasi also engaged in rampant surveillance, using a network of snitches to assemble secret files on every resident of East Berlin.
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