A Thousand Points of View
You may have heard about the LA Times'
discovery that one of its war photographers had photoshopped a couple of
images together "to
improve the composition." The Times summarily
fired him and several
bloggers
have been wondering how much of the rest of what we see is fake. (Login name
and password = "useless")
Tim Bray writes,
"This really raises a deeper issue: are photographs,
in this digital day, useful evidence in establishing the truth? I think
they remain
useful, here's why.
Just a few days before the war started, there was a
demonstration in San Francisco that got ugly and the police ended up
arresting a lot of people.
There wasn't much news coverage, and I was poking around a bit to figure
what had happened. It turns out that Lisa
Rein had posted a whole bunch
of video of the event, which I watched, but can no longer find on her
site,
although she's got lots of other demonstration footage.
What really impressed
me about the video, aside from how unhappy the cops looked, was the
incredible profusion of recording devices in the crowd.
It seems like every second person had a digicam or videocam or something;
a
thousand little bright silver flashes of digital memory.
Now suppose
that one of the demonstrators or one of the cops or a passing motorist
had had a psychotic episode and someone had ended up dead. The
evidence from any one of those digital devices, turned in the next
day by an attendee,
would be essentially useless. But if the crucial events were captured
independently by two or three (and it's pretty obvious that they would
have been), then
if someone was trying to doctor the evidence you'd know, and it's easy
to believe that the digital record could be a major help in establishing
the
truth.
That is to say, at the same time as the advances in
digital manipulation technology make any one instance less trustworthy,
the increasing
ubiquity
of digital recording technology more than compensates."
It looks like Tim is describing the proliferation of ubiquitous
PFRs–Personal
Flight Recorders, unobtrusively streaming our captured video
to our
private repository and sharing them at will:
If you can spell S-O-N-Y, you know what's around the
corner:
- Picture Phones will become Video Phones.
- Video Phones
will be connected into the wireless mesh.
- Audio/Video capture will
be unobtrusive, separated from the phone as the microphone
is today. (We'll be stealthy
without being sneaky)
- Copyright holders won't like it, but we will
have the right to capture anything we witness.
(another of the many things they don't like about the future)
- We will replay and share
any part of our personal history we choose to.
- Within n years, more
people will have PFRs than not.
On the same theme, Ming blogged
yesterday about a Salon
article by Sheldon Pacotti. Pacotti is properly concerned about the
surveillence society enabled by Constitution-bashers like the little bible
thumper Ashcroft, enabling an industry of people whose job is to watch us:
"The computer-networked, digital world poses
enormous threats to humanity that no government, no matter how totalitarian,
can stop. A fully open society is our best chance for survival."
Ming concurs:
"Yeah, I agree. There's really no way of stopping it,
so we need to expand our collective ability to solve problems, our collective
intelligence, at least as fast as the speed that new technologies are
developed at. The author talks about various sectors of society where
governments might think they ought to hold on to all the knowledge. Like,
surveillance. If there are cameras everywhere, do we trust government
agencies with deciding what to do with what they see? No, of course not.
If there has to be surveillance, the only safe thing is if it easily
available to all of us.
"
If we must submit to a surveillance society, I think it is clear that an
open network, in which no group, agency, or individual is privileged
over any other, would lead to a society with a superior character
than one in
which the citizens remain separate from and observed by the government.
Better for us all to be able to watch one another than for the "authorities" to
monopolize this power and leave us with only the fear." (Pacotti)
Although Flemming goes on to follow Pacotti's concerns about
the spread of "dangerous ideas" like nanotech and nukes and gasses,
but I'm most interested in the vision of a surveillance industry so overwhelmed
and
outclassed by the collective record that it has no useful
product to sell. Sorta like a guy on the street corner peddling an 80/20
nitrogen/oxygen mix.
Peer Brother is Watching You (from 2/15/03)
That inevitable future may
seem bleak, but perhaps only because we haven't got our head around
the effect of decentralized peer-based surveillance.
Intermediaries always act contrary to the interests of those for whom
they intermediate, so we assume that a video-archived future is through
corporate
and government surveillance serving the interests of those powerful
enough to control the "public" record. That is not what Peer Surveillance
will be like.
We cannot predict what shape the Peer Surveillance culture
will take, but there's ample precedent. It will probably be
like a small village where everyone knows everyone else's business
and gossips
about what's most aberrant.
Historically, the intrusiveness of busybodies varied inversely with
the population of the village. With the whole world capturing the
activities
of, well, the
whole world, maybe we'll become more tolerant of our peccadilloes as
they become so common that they'll be uninteresting, like chair-throwing
on
Jerry Springer or hot-tubbing on reality TV.
Perhaps the most chilling
effect of the Peer Surveillance culture will be on guilt and whining.
We may find that the sins and guilt we carry
with us
are simply not that rare, outrageous or, worst of all, interesting.
Perhaps then we'll learn to be of real use to each other, and productivity
will
be the norm rather than the burden of the overtaxed few.
Take Away:
The PFR is a HUGE watershed change. We will all be visible, obvious and
accountable, not to Big Brother, but to each other. Digital
accountability
trumps anonymity and is likely to impose small-town values on urban
communities. The accountability meme will seep into our thinking and may
inspire us to be
civilized without having to be religious. As real-life cause and effect
becomes as
common as reality TV, we'll discover together that things actually
do make sense and don't require superstitious thinking.
10:34:20 PM 
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