American Samizdat

Sunday, February 19, 2006. *
On the heels of Tim's fine post below, on how "HPD may add video cameras to its ranks citizens homes..."

As I write this here in Chicago, most stores, restaurants, and other places of business have surveillance cameras. The city offers every business three options.

Option 1: Hook up a camera and have it connected to the Police Department, so every time a customer walks in, the Police can see what they are doing. In what is probably the World's largest reality TV program, right now Mayor Daley and members of the Chicago Police Department come to command headquarters and watch on the monitors as thousands maybe more Chicagoans shop while under surveillance.

Option 2: If a business doesn't want to participate in hooking a camera up to police headquarters they can hook the camera up to the back of the store. The store's security people watch a tape of everyone who comes in and if a crime is committed the tape is forwarded to the Police

Option 3: If for Civil Liberties reasons or because they feel it creates an impersonal atmosphere a business owner doesn't want to hook up a surveillance camera, they can choose not to since it's there property.

So while every store near my home in Chicago has surveillance cameras, some places in other parts of the city chose not to and some of the cameras don't go directly to Police headquarters. The Chicago Police Department also has set up hidden cameras throughout the city, so citizens walking on sidewalks or driving at intersections can be routinely watched. So we are a pretty well protected city.

Despite that fact, an aldermen proposed and Mayor Daley has voiced his strong support of a new law mandating that every business in the city install a camera and hook it up to command headquarters. If any business would prefer not to have a camera or have a camera that goes to the back of the store instead,if this law passes they could have their business shut down by the city for failure to comply.


Consequences of the Panopticon

as Foucault puts it:

the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it


Of course, this is what they have always wanted, the kind of power todays technology affords them. The Grim Meathook Future is they want:

the metaphorical illustration of a police officer hailing a man in the street-yelling out “You, there!” into the crowd of pedestrians. The man who turns - who recognizes the hail as meant for him - immediately admits his guilt and takes on himself the identity of the criminal (note that it is not necessary for the police officer to know anything about the hailed man’s guilt - it is the act of recognition which makes him guilty, rather than any previous knowledge on the part of the officer). In this sense he becomes subject to the domination of the legal apparatus.*

from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” by Marxist philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser. Althusser is concerned with the way a State (in his conception, Western States, despite the fact that he describes Stalinist Communism almost to the letter…) creates appropriate subjects. On the one hand, he notes, there are Repressive State Apparatuses, such as the military, the police, mental institutions, and so on, which serve to impose certain behaviours and exclude others. The use of such apparatuses is costly, however, both in resources and in the potential threat of resistance. Ideally, then, domination is achieved through the creation of self-regulated subjects, accomplished though the Ideological Apparatuses of education, vocation, religion, and so on. The goal is the production of subjects who “recognize” themselves in terms of the state ideology.


Also see:
The Panopticon Singularity
posted by Uncle $cam at 3:30 AM
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