British Surveillance Game is Prelude to Orwellian Future
Today, Britain’s Daily Mail Online gave us a glimpse of a possible future distopian solution to unemployment.
Internet Eyes is “a worldwide online instant event notification system utilizing video feed to notify the owner of the feed (customer) that an event is occurring.”
In other words, anonymous internet viewers will be conscripted to sit at their computer and browse through hundreds of hours of surveillance video, in the hope that they can spot some unseemly activities going on, and instantly report it to a Game Warden for a cash reward.
So far, Internet Eyes is stopping short of fully employing online participants in the search for shoplifters, petty thieves, and other Dangerous Sub-Societal Malcontents. But offering monthly cash prizes for viewers who excel at catching Undesirables is a tentative first step down that path.
This new “game” seems to have a huge demographic to take advantage of. There are tens of millions of users out there, patiently waiting to find opportunities to work on the internet. And once it’s determined how lucrative searching for Bad Guys is (as compared to farming for gold on World of Warcraft, for instance), the users and gamers and unemployable masses will flock to see who can earn the most Vigilance Points.
And once this program is underway, do not count on your fellow internet users to abstain from World of Surveillance out of some moral or ethical compunction. Do you really think that the Korean factory workers who earn pennies an hour by farming items in an online video game will be any less likely to take a slight pay raise to search for Altoids tin filchers at the 7-11?
If you need any more proof that this is the direction we’re headed, look to Neal Stephenson’s prophetic work, Snow Crash,
“They [Gargoyles] serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society… The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.”
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