1.
We are living in an era of ever-increasing proliferation in terms of surveillance, in which growing demands for information collection are equally paced by the development of new forms of surveillance technologies and strategies. Why have we become so obsessed with infinitesimal documentation?
2.
Since 9/11, when the image of two icons of hegemonic imperviousness being destroyed was broadcasted on national television and repeated ad infinitum, the master narrative about surveillance has been “security”. This is not a new concept – the safety of the people has always been the justification for watching.
3.
When Nietzsche made public society’s realization that “God is dead,” surely our rulers must have known true fear. Without the omnipresent gaze of the Almighty carried about in the heart of humanity, anarchy might be expected. This is why we were taught that God is in all of us; the natural technologies of observation and judgment are brought into focus every time we look in the mirror. Since God is no longer watching, than we might be more God-like by the application of our gaze.
4.
Our intention is not to simply paint a broad stroke about the oppressive and repressive functions of surveillance. That would offer only a limited view, a radical stance that only pushes society from one polarity to another. If it would do anything at all that is. Surely we all enjoy the pleasures of the security surveillance provides every day. We recognize that our systems of technology are not quite so advanced (or at least publicly or economically viable enough) so as to catch only the acts we wish to while they are in progress. Totality of documentation is the compromise necessary to ensure that which we would collectively wish to punish be recorded. Moreover, surveillance has so long been ingrained as a central function of societal control that it seems inextricable now.
5.
In Kitchener-Waterloo, surveillance is fairly non-obtrusive, thus making it more effective and more appealing. We live in a community generally pervaded by feelings of safety, allowing our friends, family, women, children and elderly the opportunity to explore our geographic and cultural space with generally little worry about serious crime, and with the knowledge that crime committed is often crime recorded and subsequently crime punished.
6.
As such, we do not seek to reject the larger claims made by society about the importance of surveillance. Our aim rather is to better understand surveillance’s effects, at a local and global level. While a master narrative of security might be applied to and even accurate of the current functions of surveillance, it cannot account for all the effects that surveillance produces. Surveillance is a productive power – it creates data, wealths of knowledge about people and their activities, and that knowledge is employed for an unending variety of purposes. Surveillance also changes us by its mere presence – when it is not hidden, it highlights the presence of a gaze that can only remain objective until what is sees is interpreted through the lens of chain of watching that is only potentially limited by the current population of the world.
7.
We believe that the most important means of resisting autocratic surveillance is becoming aware of it. As such, our primary means of accessing a dialogue about surveillance, and the practice to which we invite all likeminded peers to become practitioners of with us, is engaging in counter-surveillance. Counter-surveillance (or inverse surveillance) is the process of seeking out all the surveillance to which we willingly and unwillingly subject ourselves to in our lives in Kitchener-Waterloo, recording it and making that knowledge public. This should have the effect of reducing surveillance culture’s ability to mask itself, to hide in the shadows so as to see all the better, and to cloak itself in an image of absolute necessity and inevitability.
8.
We might also engage in sousveillance, a term coined by Steve Mann to denote the surveillance of oneself, a sort of recording of the internal experience of watching, of occupying the role of the surveiller instead of the surveilled in the activities one engages in. This should illuminate watching from the other side, thus further complicating our understanding of this power. Link.
9.
Foucault told us that “visibility is a trap” (Discipline & Punish 200), so we will make a map of those pitfalls for everyone to see. WATERLOO WATCHMEN is a counter-surveillance initiative with a number of goals. Our primary goal is the documentation of all forms of surveillance in Kitchener-Waterloo, with a specific focus (resulting from a sort of selfish self-interest) of starting with the Waterloo campus and thus spiraling outwards. Ideally, such spirals would continue until the whole of the world’s surveillance eye had been drawn.
10.
Achieving this will require both vigilance and an open-mind. We must begin by broadening and complicating the terms that the general public uses to think about the nature of surveillance. Surveillance technologies such as CCTV cameras stand as the most obvious, practical, symbolic and multifaceted example of surveillance being performed. And as such, we will gladly take as many pictures and descriptions of them that are offered. But we would also ask that we all start to look beyond – that we look at how spatial arrangement, architecture, testing, personal interactions, semiotics, language, and all other sorts of objects and practices of human creation embody and perform notions of surveillance. David Harvey says that “Foucault evidently believed that it was only through such a multifaceted and pluralistic attack upon localized practices of repression that any global challenge to capitalism might be mounted without replicating all the multiple repressions of capitalism in a new form” (The Codition of Postmodernity 46). Taking up this challenge, we will seek to use Situationist tactics of detournement to repurpose surveillance space in Kitchener-Waterloo. This is not about reclaiming space, it is a means of transforming that space so that it does not only perform the functions of institutional and local surveillance, but also further becomes an educative site for the contemplation, complication and resistance of the totality of surveillance society.
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