original publishing on nomad-tv
text by Geert Lovink

Surveillance and control are limitless, there is never enough of it. Continuously new techniques and fields of intrusion immerse that have not yet been covered. Against this ‘modernistic’ growth scenario we could put the ‘kynical’ view which states that control is always limited and cannot move beyond its own technocratic horizon. There are no systems without blind spots. It’s just a matter of time before the bug is found. Software can only read what the programmer of that software instructs the software to detect. There is not more to know once you have found out everything there is to record and watch for. Once a location or behavior has become transparent, there is little chance to detect deviance. One can go into detail and focus on tiny aspects of the classified information, but that does not increase the control over the subjects.

So far activists have protested against new control and surveillance methods through legal means, setting up campaigns to pressure politicians to change the law. Instead of curbing the power over controlling bodies, the most common strategy of concerned citizens, there is another mentality of relative freedom on the rise that ignores the power of control and its do-good activists that fight in the name of people’s privacy. The question that I pose here is the following: Is it possible for tactical media makers, activists and artists to move beyond the critical enlightenment paradigm, to take an amoral position and see control as an environment one can navigate through instead of merely condemn it as a tool in the hands of authorities?

full text here.