Mood:
surprisedNow Playing: cautiously...
Topic: Surveillance Society
It gets lonely in the dark...
It's 10pm at time of writing. The weekend is on the way out — what a relief. Weekends are the low points of all my weeks. My drug consumption hits a low, as does the mood. I count myself fortunate to have my sanity back as I speak. In times past my head has been like a radio set with frequencies bleeding into my own thoughts. I sometimes couldn't tell what was really going on — in the objective world out there — and what was just illusion. Lost in a hall of mirrors reality reflected itself so far over and back again I lost touch with where I myself stood. I will explain what I mean at some future time. As I say I'm simply grateful to be sane(r!) these days.
A v. good friend did cook the most gorgeous Sunday lunch. Roast chicken. Roast potatoes. Sugar snap peas from the garden. Brussels sprouts. Swede. Lovely thick gravy — yummy! Thank you. I do appreciate my friends nowdays (I haven't always done so I'm ashamed to say — another of the follies of my youth.)
Chaos is around me. People drunk and crying. Peole deranged. I get so sued to such madness; it's only in rare moments of clarity that I see the utter insanity going on. It's so unhealthy. I'm not giving details for I don't want to go into other people's misery right now. Save it to say, I'm not in a happy house. I'm really not.
Britain is thee most CCTVd country on earth. We had 4,000,000 security cameras+++ at the last count. That is more than the USA with its four-and-a-half times greater population. The average Brit is captured on camera — however many hundred times a day I honestly don't recall. I believe it's 300+. Our roads bristle with thousands of speed cameras raking in millions in fixed-penalty fines. In US$ the top earning cameras are millionaires — outstripping some premier daytime soap stars in their Hollywood incomes.
New cameras are already in action that automatically scan every numberplate as it whizzes past, crosschecking every licence number against a central database that will send old bill scurrying to apprehend you if you're even an alleged suspect of a crime.
Hear the latest! Now, for the 2012 Olympics — wahey!! Cameras are proposed that will pick up conversations from as far away as one hundred metres, scanning them for fearful or threatening tones of voice and automatically scuttling security to any dodgy-sounding verbal exchanges.
When I was at school, we did a short-story in English classes about a nightmare world where nobody was ever able to be alone because everyone was in 24-7 contact by mobile telephone.
(This was several years before mobile phones were ever a part of daily life.) I don't believe anyone in my class took seriously the idea that the telephone would become the ball-&-chain of the 21st century.
Add to this George Orwell's 1984 — it's truly frightening how much of that book is dawning true.I always thought Poitically Correct Speak echoed "Newspeak" — loudly — though my politically correct friends of a decade ago mostly disagreed with me then.
All this is known as boiled frog syndrome. Put a frog in a pan of tepid water. He swims around happily. Put pan on hob. Frog continues to bathe contentedly as temperature rises... Obviously it's most probably an urban myth:— but,as legend has it, the frog will continue bobbing blithely about, not noticing the gradual but inexorable rise in temperature until it is too late: he is literally boiling to death. And that is what is happening to us...
