If you want your opinion to change things, I recommend not going into the intend.
I work in the public sector of Denmark, and we’ve increased our surveillance as much as everyone else. Often it happens after someone commits a crime. When a citizen assaulted on of our desk clerks, surveillance was stepped up to increase employee comfort. At no point during any of the pro-con discussions did anyone intentionally discuss or express any intent in terms of wanting to make our visiting citizens self-regulate. In fact the very opposite happened as it was brought up as a major concern, that we would deal with by hiding a of the additional cameras from view.
I’ve been around the top decision makers for long enough to know exactly what would happen if they happened to read something along your thoughts. They would easily dismiss it, because they in fact had the exact opposite intend.
If you want to make them listen, you need to focus much more on the result, which is exactly as you outline it. People start to self-regulate, and the negative consequences of this psychological response to being watched. Because that is the only way you’ll get your message out without people dismissing you as a conspiracy theorist or fear monger.
Are you sure about that? I’m sure nobody said it out loud, but I have a hard time believing these people rather wanted to endure another assault just as long as the perpetrator was caught on camera. It seems more logical that the intention was to prevent another assault.
> In fact the very opposite happened as it was brought up as a major concern, that we would deal with by hiding a of the additional cameras from view.
Which is a core principle of the panopticon. If you normalise the practice of hidden surveillance cameras people will have no choice but to self-regulate all the time, not just when they can see the actual camera.
You have to consider how these decisions are made in a large political organisation.
In my specific example the people making the decision never actually spoke to the employees on the floor, they just assumed more surveillance would signify that they were reactive and took the issue of safety serious. Along with cameras they improved alert procedures so that now all our janitors are summoned when the alarm is pressed. (This may sound odd in countries where citizens have guns, but it’s not that weird here).
I can’t claim that no one wants to impact citizen behaviour through things like surveillance, but I’ve never experienced any sort of evil motivation in any top level decisions even when the results turned out to be evil.
Most people genuinely aren’t evil, especially not people who have been successful enough to reach positions of actual power. They make bad decisions, but they tend to do so while they are trying to do good. Sometimes money is involved making the area a little more grey, but you’re really not going to find a lot of Hollywood CIA bosses gone rogue or super villains in the real world.
If you want to make people listen, it’s important to understand that. If it’s easier for you to still think of these people as evil, then there is an old punk quote that goes: “the guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to.” and I don’t say this jokingly. If you don’t take the fact that the pro-surveillance people actually mean well, even if they are very wrong, you’re just never going to get through to them, but what is worse, you’re not going to get through to anyone else who isn’t already on your side either. Because your points will be dismissed the moment you claim that someone is installing cameras to intentionally alter psychological behaviour.
You have to keep in mind that decision makers work together, and while they may appear to be very much opposed to one-another in public, they’ll also be spending long hours working together to come up with compromises behind doors. So even the anti-surveillance decision makers know that that pro-surveillance decisions makers mean well, because they’ve spend hours upon hours discussing it in private.
But the material reality is still that the mechanism of action of a surveillance camera is to induce self policing. Without it it becomes worthless whether your intentions for putting it up are good or not.
Or maybe they were shopping for force field projectors and ordered cameras by mistake.
Imo, it is scary because the state always knows where you are and what you do. Which is fine most of the time, but if they decide you owe them a favour or need to disappear, that's it, can't hide.
It might be if the only self-regulation centered around harmful criminal acts. Who doesn't want people to think twice before stabbing or stealing? Unfortunately what it actually means is self-regulation of any and all activity that someone in power might disapprove of.
That might mean something totally innocent like showing affection for someone who is the "wrong" sex, race, or caste. It might mean being overhead speaking out against the people in power, or against whatever gods they worship. And just because you might not need to worry about those things landing you in trouble today, who can say who will be in power tomorrow or what they will hold against you? The record is permanent and can be mined for evidence against anyone at any time.
Who wants to live their life feeling like everything and anything they do in public (and increasingly in private) could be used against them now or in the future? Because you can never know what actions will be an offense, the smartest thing to do is to be as totally non-offensive as humanly possible. To never do or say anything unless you absolutely have to. To never speak your mind.
That is the chilling effect of constant surveillance and while few people will actually live their entire lives by that extreme (few at least until increasing examples of punishment are publicly known), in the back of everyone's mind they'll be forced to consider and weigh the risks simply living their lives freely will bring them.
I've found the only compelling argument is to point out that enemies will invariably use the system against us; e.g. you have nothing to hide? You want to hide your children from predators, you location from burglars, your identity from identity thieves, your blood type from gangsters with kidney problems. In short you have everything to hide from someone and a lot of someones are watching you through the surveillance system.
A panopticon is fine if all the prisoners are unified, not ideologically, but in terms of acceptance.
Ultimately, it boils down to a perceived notion of "us vs them" which is entirely contrived.
I can only hope that individuals might resolve their philosophical disputes along a long enough timeline that the primitive notion of individuality permeates the collective and that personal fears of "the other" are dissolved into a unified something... I don't have the words for it.
People have been policing themselves since the invention of religion.
Can we make a distinction between religious self-policing and China’s surveillance-based social credit system?
Maybe not all people are equally religious - maybe some practice non-panopticon faiths.
But surveillance is an external factor influencing everyone (possibly apart from the oppressors / party officials).
Can we agree that there is a difference?
All of which miss the point. The point of surveillance is the same as Bentham's original panopticon, that is to say discipline people by making them discipline themselves.
surveillance isn't scary because of the literal cameras, it's scary because it makes people aware that they're being watched and thus it forces them to police themselves, internally.
People would be better off to recognize and argue this very fundamental point about the psychological intent of surveillance, rather than having obscure discussions about the legality of consent or whether the system is 97% or 98% accurate or whatever.