Today a Digression, or Maybe Even a Tangent
Today I digress into a moment of Thoreau-esque social commentary. A recent Banksy graffiti installation in London puts a fine point on its status as the most surveilled city on earth.
I can't help but remember reading historian Fredrick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" (framed in a 1893 speech to the American Historical Association) at university, particularly his notion that the American frontier was rapidly closing in the 1890's and that the country would lose a vital "safety valve" with its end. To Turner, the safety valve meant that the frontier, as a place of opportunity and, notably, of escape, defused social discontent in America. With continuous mass surveillance there are fewer and fewer places to escape for even a short time. [Note: For a counter-point view on the benefits of surveillance, see this from Aeon Magazine.]