ce-paper/source/sections/newperspective.tex

\section{A New Perspective On Surveillance}
I think that we can go beyond the setting exposed by \textit{Rachels}, and in doing this I'll base my discussion on the presentation given by Charleyne \textit{Biondi} at the \textit{33rd Chaos Communication Congress}\cite{cccvideo}, which I attended in the last December.\\
The title \textbf{The High Priests of the Digital Age} is itself suggestive. \textit{Biondi} tries to make a comparison between the campaign established in the 18th century against onanism and the current digital global surveillance state.
She starts by identifying the three main actors that concurred in the campaign against masturbation.\\
The first actor is the category of \textbf{doctors} from which all the crusade started. Indeed all started from a study that tried to demonstrate what devastating effects onanism has on the body of a person.\\
The second actor is represented by the \textbf{priests} or more in general by the clergy members that took this studies and contributed in enhancing the campaign, by enlightening all the moral corruption that those sinful behaviors brought. It is thanks to the support of this actor that the campaign against onanism has been possible, thanks to the power that the clergy organizations had on the society.\\
The third and last actor is composed by the \textbf{family} members that should prevent such behaviors, in particular by \textbf{supervisioning} the kids that were the category more likely to indulge in such acts.\\
The next step is to map the three main actors involved in global surveillance on the previous three, and to try to find the similarities between the two phenomena.\\
We can start from the \textbf{secret services} or in general government agencies, and we can notice that they have been the first to reclaim the right to enhances policies that permitted to invade the individual privacy in order to guarantee a greater good, the \textbf{security} of our society. The parallelism is made with the doctors of the previous settings, that as said were the first to initiate the crusade by invoking a greater good that in that case was the health of the population.\\
Then there are the privates companies, or in other words the big internet \textbf{corporations}, that make the surveillance possible by enacting the data surveillance over our communications and personal data. This category is of course mapped on the priests, thus the name of the presentation itself. What links them is the power that both have on the society and the access to informations.\\
The last actor is identified with the \textbf{social networks} and ultimately \textbf{society} itself, that is naturally mapped with the family in the previous case. It is thanks to this last actor, that is possible to realize and to impose the surveillance culture, thanks to which the systems sustains itself, being feed with all the data provided by ourself.\\
This concludes the mapping of actors between the two scenario. We can see that, even by not agreeing completely with the point of view and the passages made by \textit{Biondi}, the similarity between the two scenario have been well highlighted.\\
We can see how the surveillance culture is influencing in a deep way our society and the relationships that we have with each other. The comparison with the crusade is a way to make this more vivid, but I think that what \textit{Biondi} says about the fact that we as a society are a central part of the multi-polar surveillance mechanism is absolutely embraceable. The \textit{enemy} is no more something external, but it is becoming something of which we are part. In the surveillance culture we are becoming the supervisor of ourself.
The conclusions that the presenter draws are more radical, and I'll briefly talk about them since, even not being essential for the following of the analysis, can help in understanding the previous mapping.\\
\textit{Biondi} says that in some studies has been enlightened that the birth of capitalism brought with itself the concept of the body seen as a \textbf{tool of performance}, and this also provoked the crusade against onanism, since the possibility of behaviors that in some way could intact the abilities of the body to perform were seen much more in a negative way.\\
Capitalism also in some way brings the idea that private vice is transformed in \textbf{public good} or virtue only through commerce. And in the digital age we may withdraw the conclusion that opposing to the free circulation of our private informations can be destructive for the good of the society and stop this creation of public virtue, or, written in another way, public security. This ultimately brings us to the commodification of everything, even private and social aspects of our lives.\\
This last point of view seems to be based on a too huge leap. Personally, looking at our society I don't think that these conclusions are so unreasonable, but for sure they need another type of discussion, and they also touch other big and debated ethical issues, that can't be discussed here. As said before these last conclusions are not essentials to the following of the discussion, probably even \textit{Biondi} knows that these conclusions are too stretched, but she tried to sketch some possible discussion points for further analysis and discussions.\\
What really makes the two scenarios scarily similar is the fact that both the campaign have been demonstrated to be arbitrary and ineffective, and nevertheless they both managed to grow and thrive.\\
What I think is important to keep from this section is the problem that in a situation of surveillance culture we are giving up some rights over our privacy, and the comparison with the crusade against onanism particularly highlights that in a so configured society we are dangerously tempted to accept everything, even that our rights become a good that we can trade in order to pursue some superior objective, and the fact that we are in some way pushed to control each other.\\
In the next section I'll try to go further and try to sketch some other implications and issues of this type of surveillance culture.