The Divine Canon

Everyone is being watched at all times.

There are over four million CCTV cameras operating in Britain at this time, our preferences, our shopping and watching habits, our likes and dislikes, are logged by websites where we shop and socialize and communicate. Every single day, every human being in the United Kingdom leaves the digital fingerprints of their existence fluttering through the fabric of the universe. Hours upon hours of video footage and bank transactions building the unseen palimpsest of life under constant surveillance. We film ourselves. Check ourselves in and out. Mark our winding paths down onto a digital map through the world.

I’m not trying to shock you with any of this. This has been going on so openly, and has been so widely acknowledged that I’d be amazed if it was even possible to shock you with it. I’m not interested in waking you up to all the terrible insidious things that you’re already perfectly conscious of going on around you, no, what I want to talk about is omniscience.

in 1785, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed The Panopticon. An architectural design for a prison in which all cells are arranged around a central guard tower the interior of which would be obscured, so all prisoners could be observed simultaneously by a single guard, while at the same time, they could never be certain if they were actually being watched or not.

Bentham described the power held by this central guard tower as the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience." The ever present knowledge that their actions would be monitored, that nothing the prisoners could have done was ever truly safe from scrutiny, coupled with having no indicator of when the watchmen were or were not attentive, was a setup designed to be psychologically paralyzing.

If a prisoner could see his keeper, then he could plot, and plan, and time his acts of defiance. If he could not, then every small rebellion rode the whims of chance, of pure, blind luck, and the hope that the higher power wasn’t watching.

There are over four million CCTV cameras recording in Britain every single day, millions, of billions of hours and seconds and minutes of footage, capturing our every move for every moment of our lives, that no one will ever see. Invisible fingerprints so prolific as to be almost obsolete in their function. Over four million eyes perpetually watching while we all stand, paralyzed, in the land of the blind.

The surveillance in our country is omniscient in the same way that a hard drive is intelligent, the constant stream of endless data as loud and significant as the sound made by a tree falling alone in a forest. Everyone is being watched at all times. But not by anything that thinks, or feels, or knows well enough to act on it’s knowledge. Disappearing might be very close to impossible, but going unnoticed could be an awful lot harder.

In Britain today God is a camera, and he is strictly non-interventional.

Everyone is being watched at all times, but not as closely as they’d like you to believe.

Image credit - Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/en/camera-spy-pigeon-surveillance-712122/