“Big brother’s watching me — and I don’t really mind”
Further to Rachel’s post on ID cards, are Girls Aloud not on the money yet again? If I’m remembering Discipline and punish correctly, Foucault argues that the idea of ‘privacy’ is a creation, and an integral part, of the disciplinary society built around the control of information. The idea that there _is_ some private self that could be separated from public surveillence and control at least provides a cover for that control, and may actually be the mechanism through which control is internalised. Michael Hardt says that when he was teaching Foucault to prisoners:
> They had this resistance to the idea of the production of subjectivity. It seemed to them like a threat, a
> personal threat. That was their last line of defense.
All of which is to say, I think it might be a mistake to formulate an anti-ID cards position in terms of concerns about privacy, because for any given piece of information, it’s plausible for someone to respond, “why would you care if the government knows your address/marital status/job/whatever,” (or to say — “if they want to find it out, they can already”). It’s not the government _knowing_ this that’s the problem (the information they get from surveillence), it’s the surveillence itself, the organisation of various social practices around finding out and confirming this information, which is dangerous.
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Good article on Bristol Indymedia about Blunkett’s measures.
Comment by rachel @ 12/24/2004 10:39 pm
Yeah, that is good, thanks. Particularly on the money:
Comment by Tim @ 12/24/2004 11:04 pm
I agree that the argument should not be in terms of privacy - i guess what the problem is is not that the government ca know this stuff, but that they can act on it and lock us up. I think the database is maybe a bad thing beacuse it makes it easy for the government to act on this information.
We should make the point that as laws become incresingly draconian, and the state increasingly controlling (under blunkett and now under clarke)it becomes easier and easier to break the law. A homeless person drinking alcohol in open air, an asylum seeker, an person on benefits doing cash in hand jobs. travellers on sites they have been allowed to stay on for generations are all are all breaking the law. ID cards are an attempt (by the government) to stop them from “breaking the law” - they mean they can be harrassed more.
Do you think that we should talk about neoliberalism? We could say that the breaking up of communities has been due to neoliberal, and repressive state policies which seek to break up communities (I think this may have been the bristol argument).
I’m not sure what you are saying here: “it’s the surveillence itself, the organisation of various social practices around finding out and confirming this information, which is dangerous.” Any chance you could phrase it more comprehensibly? - do you mean community police officers/ I guess they divide the communities and make people spy on each other.
What do you think? I will try to draft a leaflet, on boxing day ( I think the purpose of tomorrow (christmas day) is to watch my family get drunk. I’m going to focus on the way ID cards are part of all the other legislation that the government has used to repress communities on behalf of communities.
Have a great Christmas.
Comment by rachel @ 12/24/2004 11:59 pm
What I mean by “the organisation of various social practices around finding out and confirming this information,” being the problem is that it’s a mistake to think of surveillance as being passive. In order for the passive surveillance to work, it has to have already organised the thing that is going to be surveyed quite carefully. One example would be a prison organised around a central watchtower, so that the guards can see into every cell: the person sitting in the watchtower does not have to do anything, or even be their, to effect the prisoners’ behaviour; rather, the coercion takes place in the very way the prison is designed.
Similarly, whatever information the government’s ID database stores, it clearly won’t appear in it by magic, rather it will be collected in various ways, and it will be checked or referred to in various circumstances, and it’s not necessarily just the obvious possibilities (like getting nicked for having no ID) that are oppressive, but potentially knock-on effects, too (somebody at the No2ID meeting mentioned the idea of having to show your ID when you get a job, for example).
Comment by Tim @ 12/26/2004 11:21 pm