How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance

When a man rang our doorbell late at night and claimed that his teenage daughter was in our house, but she wasn't, my husband and I considered getting a doorbell cam. With camera surveillance and facial recognition becoming more commonplace, we wanted a privileged view of our surroundings, and a sense of control over what was happening on our doorstep. But, while we wanted the doorbell cam to see our late-night visitor if he ever came back, we knew it would also see us coming and going, and living our lives. We put the thought of a camera aside, but a few weeks later another uninvited guest knocked on our door. The coronavirus arrived in the US with a vengeance, and suddenly everybody we saw was a possible carrier of contagion. My husband and I, the people who had rejected a little doorbell cam as being too invasive of our privacy, started daydreaming about living in a country like Korea where our privacy and independence would be tested, but where our interdependence as humans would be understood. Where knowledge of everyone's comings and goings was a matter of life and death, and where we would know enough about the public health crisis around us to do something useful about it

Art · Art history · Aside · Happening · Independence (probability theory · Internet privacy · Literature · Media studies · Performance art · Political science · Sociology · Visitor pattern · Computer Science · COVID-19 and Mental Health · History · Law · Psychology