We are getting used to being watched. Indeed, it is held up as being desirable. Being famous for nothing but being constantly watched – and being constantly watched is all it means to be famous now – reached it high zenith this week as Jade Goody, possibly the greatest example of this, died, a strange hero. From the moment she wandered confusedly onto the screen in Big Brother to the point of death, without ever having a chance to fade into obscurity, she has summed up out obsession with recognition and fame. Plucked for no reason at all from the seething mass of us, her very limitations became her greatest assets, for if she could be revered, any of us could. A James Dean for the age of indiscriminate fame – ‘Club 27’s most puzzling, and most arbitrarily selected, member. My, my, hey, hey, etc. I hear there’s going to be film.
I’m not entirely sure that Jade enjoyed her fame, and I know that I would find that life unutterably intolerable. I fancy, in fact, that she sat uncomfortably beneath that lens, less a performer caught in a spotlight than an ant beneath a magnifying glass. It is those of us who recognise how awful Jades situation was that often blasted her cruelly. As usual, some are now hypocrites, praising her, others have fallen into silence, fearful to speak in the face of suffering and death. But death is inevitable, and we should recognise that always – speak about people only if you have the bravery to say those things as they die. Do not let death have that power. In both of these cases, the critics have been blinded to the point. Jade‘s situation was not of her own making. You can like or dislike someone without wishing death and suffering on them, and you can hate a situation, hate a symbol, without hating the person. Especially if, like Jade, you have little control over it.
I never liked Jade as a person, from what little I knew of her. It does not matter. Even if I had adored her, I would have hated the role she played. A role not so much chosen, as it was accidentally acquired, and then made purposefully difficult for her to give up. By turns revolting and fascinating, dull and then compelling, sanitised and manipulated, and then sometimes utterly raw. But like all cultural phenomena, Jade was part of something much bigger. The story of our everyday lives becoming entertainment for others. She was one more thing that made us feel that there was nothing unusual about being constantly watched. That, in fact, we should be.
Myspace smelled a little like nothing but a chance for self-aggrandisement, a web-page designed for nothing more than a 24-7 promotion for me, me, me. It was the kind of thing I rolled my eyes at. How could I possibly be interested in what you are listening to right now, and how much you like statues of gothic fairies and Marvel’s Phoenix Saga? Many of my friends refused to join in. They couldn’t see the point. Some people got careers out of it, and then they started to see. Myspace was more than just narcissism, it could also be a rolling CV of self. It still seemed a little too Lilly Allen for some though.
But with Facebook, it was all somehow more acceptable and less vulgar. Awfully this was because, in many cases, you had to be on Facebook for work reasons, or because you studied at a certain institution that used it for communication. Universal adaptation meant that it wasn’t just for chavs, narcissists, paedophiles, desperate social climbers and the trendy crowd. The horror I feel every time an image is tagged to me (internal narrative – ‘Oh god, how pissed was I? Who took this without my permission? What was I doing at the time? How long is going to take me to live this one down? Is this image going to haunt me forever?’) is thus massively overwhelmed by the fact that you are made to feel as if you are missing out if you don’t interact with it. If I’m honest, I think Facebook has actually cost me more in heartache than it’s brought me in joy. I am not the only one. Several of my friends have complained to me that Facebook is something they felt is forced upon them, and makes them horribly paranoid. You are not forced to interact with it, it is true, but it is damned difficult to avoid.
Then we have Twitter. Newer, less serious. Be ‘connected’ to people you actually have no connection with at all. Feel like you are part of their lives by monitoring their movements from moment to moment. I am so addicted to the News, believe it or not, that I can’t resist Twitter. It comes from constantly fretting about nuclear war as a child, I think. Most people realise, however, that the idea behind it is awful, it’s how it has been used and developed that makes it tolerable.
But it is stranger and deeper than we realise. Public displays of everyday life have changed and eroded our notions regarding privacy and personal growth. These networking sites (remember how much you hated the first person who told you they’d gone to university to ‘network’? At first I didn’t even know what they meant, then, when I found out, I wanted to mince them down to feed to people who would have valued the chance at a decent education for itself. What awful people. I still hate that term ‘networking’ – and it truly is the genealogical root of the thoughts that form Facebook, Myspace and Twitter), are not tools for us to use. They are the visible parts of a system that drives our actions for its own ends, a symptom of a malaise by which our existences are run by abstracted mechanisms. Mechanism that give us cause to do things in the way that religions or political and personal beliefs used to. At some point we stopped seeing travelling, partying and existing as ends in themselves, but as things to do to collect experiences, butterfly-like, and capture them in these giant electronic pinboards; as if life doesn’t happen, or even exist, unless it is recorded.
In this system, experiences are like exams, they exist only so that we can be seen to have done them. It is a system with universal available access points that you carry everywhere with you labelled ‘Blackberry’ or ‘Google’. Friends are hollow things, each merely a nexus for possible career development.
This system is the most awful existence you can imagine. It is a pauper‘s version of Jade Goody‘s life where we cannot each afford Max Clifford to organise it for us, but must do it ourselves, constantly terrified that we’re going to slip up and bring it all crashing down.
Also very much in the news this week – Google Street View. Remarkable to me not for it’s disregard for privacy, but for its utter, total, and all-consuming pointlessness. Incredibly expensive and wasteful of time, and degrading and invasive as far as millions of people are concerned and… erm.. what does it do? Why would you want to use it? It has long been the case that you could look at places of interest around the world through Google Maps for years. Why do you want to look at council houses in Swansea? I think that it ‘ s just to attain a sense of completeness. All of the world must be pictured and recorded, integrated into one hugely efficient, hyper-real mechanism. A meaning machine. A reality engine.
A few weeks ago we had Google Latitude. Opt in, for now. I’m sure, a few years ago, Google Street View would have had to be opt-in. I’m not sure that this will end until you can get a live camera giving you feed from any angle on any person at any time. Laugh and roll your eyes if you want to – then think about how easily we’ve come to accept photographs of us being distributed to all of our friends by others. Now the ownership of these can be contested by Facebook. Goggle Street View can already, I’m sure, be integrated with a GPS mapping service. I’m going to adopt the burkha.
But now this narcissistic information-vomiting festival has reached the start of it’s inevitable consequences. Now there are proposals to let the government use Facebook to monitor us for ‘suspicious behaviour’.
If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about, right? These are counter-terrorism measures, after all. A prison officer was sacked recently for having criminal friends on Facebook… surely a good thing? Not in my opinion, no.
Firstly, I have enjoyed the anonymity I was born into. I hate this new feeling I have that everyone is watching me all the time. It’s like living in a village, and I’d hoped we’d never have to revert to that’s state. Secondly, I value freedom of speech. More than almost anything, actually. And part of freedom of speech is the ability to call Christian’s fascists if I want to, or scream ‘death to the west’ at the top of my lungs if I like. Or protest. Or politically agitate. Or be a member of the horrid BNP if I like, and make speeches on their behalf if I want to. Unless you’ve actually hurt somebody, I don’t see any reason why you should be monitored. I’d like to live in a free country if I can (which means that fairly soon, I’m going to have to move), without being monitored for no good reason. All that information being stacked up can only have one possible use – to be made to topple onto your head the second you make a mistake.
I am proud to say that almost everything I do or say is potentially suspicious. Anything worth doing or saying is. If you do something, and it isn’t at least potentially suspicious from the perspective of society or government, you are wasting your time. Break out your pinstripe grey suit, umbrella and bowler hat. Buy a four-by-four, have six children, get your wife the twin-set and pearls and go skiing once a year, because you, sir, yes you, are yet another of middle England’s fascist footsoldiers. If you can’t see why your constant strangulation of this planet and it’s people to wring the last drop of resources and money into your greedy little mouth makes you a greater criminal than any teenage mugger; if you honestly think that you are moral simply because you blindly do as you are expected to; if you think that the protection of the wealth of the rich means that ever other person must be dehumanised to the point where we can bomb them for little more reason than to get us cheaper petrol; if you think that you know what is right for everybody, and that those that disagree or want to live differently should be punished; if you quietly shake your head with discomfort and disappointment whenever you see a man with long hair or a woman with a shaved head (just so long as they aren’t looking); and if you just want everyone to be nice – nice, and quiet… go ahead. If all of these things are true, then go ahead – in full and certain knowledge of what you are, tell me that only those who have something to hide fear this legislation.
Welcome to your future. It will be very quiet, and you will be afraid to say anything, thankful that your lives are so dull and uninspiring that nobody would ever want to watch you. Let’s hope the rest of them don’t find out about what happened that night you got really pissed, eh?
What we all did to Jade, and what we continue to do to ourselves voluntarily from moment to moment, is effecting us all in terms of what we are prepared to accept. Unfortunately for you, you can’t afford Max Clifford. People at large are only going to here about what you do when it’s awful. When you make that mistake. Already people are afraid to step ‘out of line’ where once they roamed freely and without worry. They are afraid to fight for their rights, to go on protests, even just to write or publish material like this. They are afraid, for god’s sake, to join already existing unions, fearing that they will be seen as ‘troublemakers’ by their employers. (these, lest we forget, being the institutions that got us holidays, fair pay and decent working conditions and a whole host of other things we now consider normal. I could write for hours on that one). People are (rightly or wrongly) afraid to publish and say what they think, afraid to protest, afraid to reveal anything real of themselves. They tortured innocent people in Guantalomo Bay. And most of us knew, and did nothing. Why? Is there part of us that knows that if it can happen to them, it might happen to us? This is not more freedom that these structures are providing. It is a symptom and a cause of isolation and paranoia.
You need to fear your government, because they are no longer afraid of us. If it told you that there was a small group of people who had the power to do anything at all they liked to you or anyone else, and that it was in their interest to convince you to agree with everything they said, you might rightly think that I was paranoid. Unless, of course, you already knew that I was describing the government. Of course you should be suspicious of them. It is your duty as a citizen to monitor and critique those who think they are fit to rule us. You wouldn’t let them read your mail, so why let them read you email? Yes, your address is a matter of record, as is your phone number, so anyone can, in theory, send a letter to you or telephone you. But you’d want the contents of those communications to be private, wouldn’t you? Would you if they said it was to prevent terrorism and organised crime? Who the hell do they think they are, and how stupid do they think we are?
ITS UP TO US. I think now that most Facebook users have heard of someone who has left their account. We all could. There’s a petition too, both on Facebook itself and on the ten downing street page. Go sign it. It is this quietness that we have that will take away our lives and nothing more.