“No totalitarian government has ever created a better tool for monitoring than the selfie.”
This observation, which is so stunningly obvious that you wonder why you never thought of it, is made by Tim Sutcliffe, host of the BBC’s Start the Week podcast, during an episode that can be loosely described as maintaining privacy in the digital age. Yes, it’s a clichéd topic, but this is the BBC so the discussion is made fresh by Sutcliffe’s expert guests, who include Oxford Institute director Helen Margetts, co-author of Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action and financial journalist Gillian Tett, author of The Silo Effect: Why Putting Everything in its Place Isn’t Such a Bright Idea. Also in the mix are two artists: filmmaker Tacita Dean, who talks about what is lost by using digital over film and Jonathan Franzen, who talks about Purity, his latest novel which “touches on the fall of the Berlin Wall, stolen Stasi files and a missing thermonuclear warhead in Texas.”
During an interesting segment about Stasi, Sutcliffe makes his point about the selfie. His observation echoes the warning by Wolfgang Schmidt, the former head of Stasi, in Marc Goodman’s hair raising Future Crimes, that when he ran Stasi, they “could tap only forty telephones nationwide at a time, but clearly now technology had made it possible to monitor all calls and Internet data at all times.”
The horror, of course, which is addressed in the Start the Week discussion and succinctly summarized by Goodman, is that this is not simply a case of government monitoring, but that we are doing this to ourselves with our posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. As Goodman writes:
Though Orwell clearly would have foreseen the NSA debacle, it’s less clear he might have predicted Acxiom [a data broker that has created profiles of more than 700 million consumers worldwide], Facebook, and Google. To that point, in those cases it wasn’t Big Brother government that “did something to us,” but rather we who did something to ourselves. We allowed ourselves to become monetized and productized on the cheap, giving away billions of dollars of our personal data to new classes of elite who saw an opportunity and seized it.”