Surveillance as Norm

Abstract

With the advent of sophisticated technology, there is a huge debate on the role of surveillance and its interference in ‘private’ life of people. The debate generally goes in a moralistic direction into the surveillance mechanisms intruding the life of people on one side and how surveillance can help prevent ‘terrorist’ activities and regulate conduct of people on the other. With the advent of computers and Internet, this anxiety over surveillance, which was limited to the panoptic gaze of humans and later onto cameras, has been extended into the realm of written exchanges of people. There are people in favour and others against surveillance as far as content on the Internet is concerned. This paper would go on to argue that such moralistic views, may it be in the case of cameras or Internet, are not possible. The reason for it is that surveillance is a widespread virus and therefore a norm. The spread of surveillance on Internet is such that more of less every alphabet and space buttons pressed by the user are being recorded and viewed. Thus, if we try to debate whether or not to control the limits of surveillance, we would be at a loss politically, as that is what the capitalist system wants the public to do: be caught up in trying to understand the means and ends of surveillance. This paper would go on to argue that we have to take surveillance as norm and thus its products as simulations. Such a view would be politically productive in combating capitalism as after using these surveillance mechanisms what the system would be left with would be heavy loads of data which cannot be classified or used. The desire of the system is to create a fear of surveillance, and thus, it is necessary for us to understand this as norm and not as an exception.