Big Brother, as portrayed in popular fiction, is often a blatantly adversarial opponent, strong-arming the exhausted proles into their veal cages. It’s a romantic image, to be sure, but everyone knows that you catch more flies with honey, and absolute authority is not nearly as seductive as convenience. Make something more convenient, expedite it, make it more comfortable, and people will climb over each other to get it. And thus are Americans, all too vulnerable to the siren song of convenience, often the willing participants in their own subjugation.
Take the commonly-cited Safeway Club Card, which purports to offer shopping patrons lower prices, instantly! The cost? Only the time it takes to fill out the registration form, of course–and this is true as long as the participant is willing to forego some privacy in the process. At the same time, the marketers never pass a chance to foster brand loyalty. It’s a symbiotic relationship:
The result is a changing consumer universe in which customers increasingly are asked to make an Information Age trade-off: In exchange for discounts and other blandishments, they must share data with corporations about who they are and what they buy. This bargain can open individuals up to unprecedented scrutiny. (via Washington Post)
This image of convenience with no strings attached is carefully-managed by public relations firms working in tandem with such marketing corporations as the Catalina Marketing Company (“Influencing attitudes with incentives…”), one of the largest data warehousers collecting data from supermarkets across the country.
But how far does this go? Can the practices used to compromise basic consumer privacy also be used to erode civil liberties? Certainly, if it translates to additional comfort. And convenience is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s opiate of choice for its latest ploy to foil the nasty terrorists.
New “fast-pass” traffic lanes between California and Mexico promise to speed processing of the 55,000 vehicles that enter the U.S., provided they’re willing to be tagged with background check information encoded into their SENTRI PortPass, which features Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) transponder technology.
That’s not too much of a sacrifice to ensure safety for all, is it? Especially if it means you can fast-pass it! Can we afford such frivolous (and increasingly obsolete) luxuries as privacy when unprovoked terror threatens us from every corner? After all, the innocent should have nothing to hide, isn’t that right? And if there’s one good thing about living in the Panopticon: at least you know you’re safe from each other.
“To be incessantly under the eyes of the inspector is to lose in effect the power to do evil and almost the thought of wanting to do it.” – Jeremy Bentham, 1791
Very comforting indeed.