Participation in our own surveillance was the price of entry into heaven

December 28, 2015 12:32 AM

Under Watchful Eyes: The medieval origins of mass surveillance. [Via]

... Around 1159 John of Salisbury, discussing governance in his Policraticus, observed that even tyrants of the worst kind were “ministers of God, who by His just judgment has willed them to be preeminent over both soul and body. By means of tyrants, the evil are punished and the good are corrected and trained.” All this, he believed, was a result of humans reaching a “rash and reckless hand toward the forbidden tree of knowledge,” and thereby plunging themselves into misery and death. The only remedy lay in submission to God; the only comfort in hard times was His watchful eye. So useful a tool did the idea of God prove to be—to ruler and ruled alike—that it has been carried, through the teeth of the so-called Enlightenment, into the social imagination of many republics and democracies. And it would not be surprising if these ideas, reiterated so consistently over the centuries, informed our attitudes toward the sort of surveillance we now experience as a novel aspect of modern life.

For it seems to be such a contemporary issue: the mass surveillance of the global population by corporations and government bureaucracies that has transcended all pretense of democratic accountability. The technologies that enable it are sophisticated, sleek, and silent. A sort of cyborg omniscience is obtained by those who control the information. If we have drifted into the dystopia of which George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned, then surely, we are inclined to think, we have entered a terrifying new world.

But those who see in all this something eerily futuristic may have it backward. In our modern surveillance state, it’s possible we have in some perverse and unexpected fashion actually regained something of the comforts of being known by a higher authority—something that the modern West had largely lost, and for which we have perhaps unconsciously longed.

posted by homunculus (11 comments total)

From the latest issue of Laphams Quarterly: Spies.
posted by homunculus at 12:33 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

No, I don't long to be watched over by a cluster of slightly less than evil 3 letter agencies, and their megacorporate kin... my own self conscience, self doubt, and inkling that there is kharma in the universe is sufficient to keep me in line, thanks.

Now, if it could keep THEM in line, and/or brought to face justice... it would be nice.
posted by MikeWarot at 12:43 AM on December 28, 2015

What if I do want to be known by God, in the full-blown medieval sense, but have no interest at all in being known by the dubious "higher authority" of state surveillance bodies? The idea that authority-claims - the right to know a person's soul - may clash is simply missing from the article's story of Western intellectual history, whereas I would have thought it's one of the dominant themes of the whole period from medieval times to the French Revolution. Where is Henry II and Beckett (state v church)? Where is the entire Protestant Reformation (church v God alone)? Where is even the French Revolution (God v the individual alone)? The article seems to suggest that European societies made a smooth transition from Catholic theocracy to modern secular democracies without ever having a conversation about authority and privacy, and the possibility of making windows into men's souls, whereas that conversation fundamentally shaped Europe's current norms.

I'm also fascinated to lean that societies that have no interest in the Fall of Man are, for this reason, innoculated against a surveillance state. Do the Chinese Communist Party know?
posted by Aravis76 at 2:02 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

JC DENTON
I don’t see anything amusing about spying on people.

MORPHEUS
Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.

JC DENTON
Some people just don’t understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.

MORPHEUS
The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

JC DENTON
Electronic surveillance hardly inspired reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.

MORPHEUS
God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary.

JC DENTON
No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.

MORPHEUS
The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

JC DENTON
You underestimate humankind’s love of freedom.

MORPHEUS
The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.

The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government.

You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands. I was made to assist you. I am a prototype of a much larger system.

posted by Pope Guilty at 4:34 AM on December 28, 2015 [9 favorites]

This thinkpiece reminds of this FPP made almost a month ago. Both cherry pick distant history to support the thesis that, just as we've always been at war with Eastasia, we've never really, actually had privacy/solitude/anonymity or whatever. This seems to me, an emerging propaganda meme.
posted by klarck at 7:56 AM on December 28, 2015 [10 favorites]

klarck: This piece doesn't seem to be talking about how surveillance is a good thing that we should submit to.

We seem not able or willing to grasp the implications, and we have shown a weary cynicism that evidently masks a deeper indifference. Many have shown an eager complicity, free of defensiveness. If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear, we insist, forgetting the innocence of millions interned and murdered by Western governments within living memory. Surveillance will keep us safe from our enemies, we say, obediently accepting the pronouncements of our governments on the identities of our enemies and the proper sources of our terror.

Instead it seems to show a frustration with our attitudes towards it, and certainly shows the risks (countless deaths) of allowing ourselves to submit to fear and authority in the name of security.

The examples from the past are chilling ones, lessons we should heed.

Propaganda pieces on the subject certainly exist, but they are on the television networks, in the mainstream media, they are the shit spoken by serious pundits and national security assholes who assure us that Snowden is a traitor that should be put to death.

This piece is in an obscure journal (no offense meant); is somber in tone, and chilling in content. We can learn from our past, can't we?
posted by el io at 9:47 AM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

The surveillance state, last I checked, does not offer afterlife services. I often take comfort in being free of it, and I am reminded of a Vonnegut quote:

The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us ... He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically _constantly_ ... Contentedly adrift in the cosmos, were you? That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while.

posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:06 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Klarck, I tend to agree with you broadly (there's a lot of writing trying to minimize or wave away surveillance) though I wonder if the way this piece reads depends on one's disposition toward Christianity/Catholicism. I read this piece as hardly an endorsement or justification, but rather laying a foundation to compare one historically oppressive institution with a contemporary and more potent institution of surveillance (and to introduce a theory of why outrage is seemingly unevenly distributed).

To wit: for those of us who have eschewed the traditional institutional omniscient Church we ought to also eschew the growing analagous State structure too (maybe that's just the little Bakunin on my shoulder, indispensable really). That "restoring" a more universal surveillance is a regressive trend.

Somewhat interesting to me, although I'm only a casual observer in the realm of Christian history and philosophy, is that while Canon 21 from the Fourth Lateran Council institutionalizes confession it also specifies the requirements of confidentiality for confessors:

Let him take the utmost care, however, not to betray the sinner at all by word or sign or in any other way. If the priest needs wise advice, let him seek it cautiously without any mention of the person concerned. For if anyone presumes to reveal a sin disclosed to him in confession, we decree that he is not only to be deposed from his priestly office but also to be confined to a strict monastery to do perpetual penance.

This seems to be quite a lot more of a public promise than most of our surveillance-state confessors today (public or private) make. The firms collecting our technological confessions -- more akin to a comprehensive log of life -- are rather careless, rarely forthcoming and more than happy to monetize user behavior data while industry leaders are happy to fight in court for the righteousness of their attempted end-runs around user consent.

Meanwhile, as an professional observer of this realm I think there is plenty of cause to question the extent to which the software assurance practices in place in industry today are capable of protecting user data (notwithstanding recent mistakes). And although folks in the DOJ say there is no principled reason to treat an email which is 180 days old as less confidential than one sent yesterday, a subpoena is still the only requirement for many digital records but reform efforts are slowly moving forward.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 11:01 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

In our modern surveillance state, it’s possible we have in some perverse and unexpected fashion actually regained something of the comforts of being known by a higher authority—something that the modern West had largely lost, and for which we have perhaps unconsciously longed.

Gack
posted by bukvich at 12:47 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

This to me is the key part:


Perhaps the most curious thing about the response to revelations concerning the extent of modern mass surveillance is that most people in the West have not seemed to mind; we have not perceptibly altered our online behavior or demanded a response from our governments.
posted by fewnix at 11:43 PM on December 28, 2015

My parents had an unassuming painting of an ivy-covered English country church in the house when I was young. A 3/4 view of the bell tower and the front door. During a visit later on I noticed it had an eye painted into the ivy, intended to be watching the viewer. It's shocking that the church would do something so manipulative. And it's a reminder of how pervasive this Medieval nonsense was, and probably still is in some places.
posted by sneebler at 7:16 AM on December 30, 2015