Queer Surveillance. Bauer. GScene Magazine. August 2013

Queer Surveillance.


So the truth is finally out - we’re all being watched. Some time ago I covered online identities including shagsites like Grindr, but the very notion of this most recent internet profiling is making me feel a bit queezy. Either way, I can’t help thinking that all this Ed Snowden stuff is really just the tip of the slippery iceberg.

All this surveillance makes me wonder how they are ever going to get us to behave ourselves. We’re all free and well out of our closets and we all know our rights. And we’re not doing anything illegal, are we? What we do in bed is (now) our own business as long as it doesn’t constitute any form of involuntary force over another. Correct? And we can also perve away across the internet - because we see this as free information- and delude ourselves that we are still operating within the law.  Even if we don’t know what the law is.

Most people I talk to about my concerns tell me they have nothing to hide, ‘Whoever they are, they can’t spy on everything we get up to online. Can they?’

There are also those of us who say ‘they can look at whatever they want – I’m not hiding anything or breaking any laws…’ This is where we come unstuck.

It was Michel Foucault who came up with the idea of surveillance which he based on old fashioned prisons called Panopticons. In the centre of these prisons was an observation tower with slit windows where the guards would sit. In a circle around these were the prison cells with railings on both sides so the guards could see through each cell at every prisoner. But here was the trick - the prisoners couldn’t tell if they were being observed or not because they couldn’t see through the slits in the tower at the guards. What the prisoners did, because they didn’t know if they were being watched, was regulate their own behavior. In other words, they started to ‘behave’ themselves.

This meant the job was done – and cheaply too because sometimes the central turrets had no guards inside but the prisoners didn’t know that and so they behaved themselves.

This is becoming the same way with the internet but they can’t afford to police us anymore so they profile us instead – building up a contrived image of who we are via every activity we make on the internet, text, phone, Facebook, Grindr…

So do we have to ‘Behave’ ourselves because they may be looking? It’s actually gone beyond that. We have to regulate our behavior now because Ed Snowden informed us that they can go back at any point and put together a case based on hearsay from our own digital history. And we will not be able to defend this because they will carry all the so-called ‘evidence’.

Whenever you complain about a politician shafting the economy or Murdoch using wealth to cover everything up, just remember that information is also designed to make you lose all faith in any system of order. So that if it were all to break down, in that good old colonial way, the powers that be will stomp in with a new moral treaty in hand in order to ‘protect’ us from ourselves. 

Profiling is not only about ‘Targeting’ advertising at you via your online searches. They now know your all your sexual peccadillos by what porn you view – even how long it take for you to orgasm as a result - Is that personal enough for you?

As for ‘having nothing to hide’, your personal information may seem innocuous now, but think about some idiot invested with power at GCHQ compiling their tailored choice of profile based on carefully selected ‘real events’ from your online life. What about that time you and a mate stumbled on the ‘How to make a nail bomb’ website when you were drunk or having a disagreement. Or that time when you typed ‘Sexy boys’ into Google search when you really should have tapped in ‘Sexy men’.

All of this - as well as what you bought at the Tesco Metro yesterday - and your most recent STD information, is currently on a chip the size of your little toenail at a storage facility in Fuckhampton, Pennsylvania.  And it’s not what you are doing now in your temporarily emancipated lives but what can be held against you from your digital past if someone decides you’ve suddenly stepped out of line. And they wont be favorable either. Even if you believe yourself to have a moral compass, they can shift the polarity of your identity to make you appear to be Josef Fritzl if they so desire.

What will happen is that we will enter a closet far colder than the one we’ve just broken out of. Of course we’ll all be equal - but we’ll all be stuck in there together.

Relax - none of this is actually real. It’s only a profile of you that does not exist yet and will only ever really be a fragmented case in a virtual court of law. 

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Queer surveillance. Bauer. Gscene Magazine.August 2013