The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

I Am a Videocam
THE GLAMOUR OF SURVEILLANCE
Surveillance, the process by which the few monitor the many and keep
records of them, is as old as agriculture and taxation. The growth since the
Renaissance of bureaucratic surveillance accompanied the emergence of the
nation-state, welfare state, suffrage, total war, and total law. Bureaucratic
surveillance, formerly a near-monopoly of the state, has been adopted privately—since
the industrial revolution to control production, and since the
advertising revolution to control consumption.
The social benefits of surveillance are many and everyday. We have
accustomed ourselves to sharing daily life with its apparently innocuous apparatus:
forms, questionnaires, school transcripts, licenses, passport photos,
countersignatures. Equally clear, though not so immediate, is its potential
to inflict irreversible evil—probably with benign intent. The recent combining
of electronic sensors, computers, and high-bandwidth telecoms has
greatly reinforced the ability to monitor and oversee.
It is tempting to argue that social phenomena such as surveillance
are driven forward by a simple coincidence of rational self-interest and technological
innovation. Were this so, they could be resisted or reversed by
forms of Luddism—by countering systems or by sabotaging hardware. But,
as I have tried to show, systematic surveillance as a social institution also survives
and flourishes on its irrational allure. The very idea of surveillance
evokes curiosity, desire, aggression, guilt, and, above all, fear—emotions that
interact in daydream dramas of seeing and being seen, concealment and selfexposure,
attack and defense, seduction and enticement. The intensity and
attraction of these dramas helps to explain the glamour and malevolence with
which the apparatus of surveillance is invested, and our acceptance of it.
“I am an eye,” wrote Flaubert. “I am a camera,” wrote Isherwood. 35
I am a videocam.