ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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Remember, Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was never actually built – it was designed by Bentham as a utopian, super-efficient prison in 1785, where the imprisoned would be unable to tell when and if they are being watched, thus creating the illusion of constant surveillance – yet it has become synonymous with surveillance, a model for the way we are overlooked and compromised, subconsciously altering our behaviour accordingly. The figures are terrifying: there is said to be one camera for every fourteen people in the United Kingdom, and an individual might expect to be caught on camera 300 times during an active day in a busy urban setting.
Over the past decade, though, there has been a change in the way we might think of the panopticon. Traditionally, the flow of information was always in favour of the powerful, an Orwellian observing and controlling by a few privileged individuals of less privileged multitudes. But surveillance happens in so many other ways as well now, to serve so many different purposes, whether those are focus groups being observed by market researchers or real-life police-chase shows, consumption or titillation, military campaigns or domestic deterrence. And the process increasingly seems to cut both ways. For example, the powerful can now routinely find themselves scrutinised and observed in ways unimaginable a generation ago, and the markers and conditions for privacy have shifted.
We begin to consider the edgopticon. It already exists, in parts. Webcams posted on weather stations, updating images of masts and sunshine recorders through a rain-freckled lens every few minutes; a security camera overlooking the glassy expanse of a conference centre car park at night; the fringes of retail parks and power station checkpoints and fences surrounding storage depots, the aprons of petrol station forecourts, all monitored around the clock; braking distances of hard shoulder and grass verge picked up by speed cameras. But the edgopticon still has many more blind spots, places to be invisible.
Now we have a complicated relationship with our street lights. The future equivalents of those French revolutionaries smashing street lights might be militant wings (yet to emerge, but imaginable) of anti-pollution protesters, punishing the authorities who have lined the streets with light-polluting devices – too tall, too ill-directed. According to the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, light pollution in the United Kingdom increased by 24 per cent in the last seven years of the twentieth century.
But equally, our street lights have become nostalgic objects, even symbols of childhood (like the lamp post in Narnia), and some will go to great lengths to keep them. A pensioner in St Andrews, Bristol, chained himself to one of his local 1920s lamp posts to save them, when Bristol City Council came to replace them with new tall steel posts. The council said the old cast-iron lights were too low, too dim, and that the significant levels of car crime in the area could be countered by brighter lighting. While some councils look to brighten their streets at night, others want the power to dim them. Surrey County Council has decided to replace its 89,000 orange street lights with brighter white lights, but then put them all on a dimmer switch in Guildford, so they can adjust the level of light according to need in different parts of the county.
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