Thoughts on Surveillance and Narcissism

If you have been reading my fiction, you know that surveillance often figures into it. I would count it as having a central or plot-determining role in more than half of the stories I have published to date, a good 11 out of 17, in fact. More than the mere fact of surveillance, though, each such story poses the implicit question of why the characters would invite surveillance into their lives? I do not claim that the answers implied by the stories are all good, that is, convincing answers. The advantage, though, of writing fiction rather than non-fiction is that a single can offer or suggest multiple answers to any one question: If you don't like the first answer I seem to have given, try your best to uncover another through interpretation!

There are many situations, though, where the potential answers are so obvious, so trite, that the questions they pose are not interesting enough to support a story, but none the less they occur in life, with depressing frequency. Consider, for example, the matter of texting while driving. As of now, in the United States at least, it seems as though the only ways for someone engaging in the practice to be caught are direct observation by a police officer, or to have it uncovered through an insurance investigation subsequent to a resulting accident. With such sporadic enforcement, it appears to have become as rampant a practice as speeding, and far more dangerous. Today, I observed, through my rear view mirror, someone in the car immediately behind me with his iPhone propped against the top of his steering wheel for a distance of more than four miles, including at speeds approaching 60 miles an hour.

Technologically, it would not be much of a challenge for the phones, with existing capabilities and installed apps, to begin telling on us. GPS can tell whether the vehicle is in motion or not. If the car is at all internet enabled, as a growing number are, then it's just a matter of a few nested IF statements determining whether the phone is at a distance and in a direction from the car's own receiver or transmitter corresponding to active use by the driver, at a time that the car is in motion. All one needs is for that possibility condition to trigger an automatic notification to someone. This is so easy, that one need not be overly paranoid to suspect that it already exists, awaiting only the legal or market conditions for it to be activated.

What would those legal and market conditions be? It is easy to anticipate China imposing it as a requirement on all smartphone providers in a top-down manner. The media outcry calling for it is already in place. In the U.S. it seems more likely that it would come about through a combined rollout of varied approaches. A luxury surveillance item marketed to the parents of driving teenagers first--that already exists. Then a requirement imposed on commercial drivers by their employers, or on drivers with a history of violations as a condition of retaining their licenses. Then insurance companies start offering discounts to every customer who downloads their proprietary snitch apps. Then the undiscounted cost of insurance is allowed by state insurance commissioners to rise so high that it becomes prohibitively expensive for most people not to download the snitch apps. After all, if you don't install it, then clearly you must have something to hide. It might never attain 100% penetration, but 90% is good enough for most practical purposes.

And then, since the same "sniffing" technology could be used, e.g. to identify every cell phone within a certain radius of a police body camera and oriented in such a way as to suggest that the phone might be used to record the actions of the officer wearing that camera, and install a little virus that temporarily makes it impossible to record or livestream video. Of course, I could just be imaginatively paranoid, as near-future science fiction writers so often are.

"But, Joseph! You just gave away a potential story idea! Don't waste it on a blog post!" I am getting bored with writing that sort of story, however. Everyone recognizes someone they know in it, but never recognizes themselves. The characters are so foolish, so implausible, right?

I am not convinced of that. What the characters in the baroque surveillance regimes I have postulated in various stories have in common with the people who balance their cell phones on their steering wheels within our present, mundane surveillance regime is psychological narcissism, the inability to imagine that their own actions could be wrong or that they could be responsible for any harms to others that result from them. The obverse of the common unwisdom, "if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide," is not that the people who say that believe they have never done anything wrong, but that they are unable to recognize the wrongness of their own wrongdoing.

One can certainly tell stories about characters like that. I have. I do not think, though, that I need to tell many more. To tell such stories in a fiction register might even be a distraction from the non-fictional damage being done, not by characters, but by living caricatures.