Recording Everything That Ever Happens?

January 12, 2009

This blog is going to really weird you out — not just because of the subject, which is plenty weird, but because I’m going to dispense with my usual meandering presentation and get right to the point.

What if we had a way to record on video everything that ever happens? I’m talking about every single moment of our lives, captured and continually uploaded to the Internet for viewing by ourselves and others. Imagine a world where we wouldn’t need witnesses to testify in court cases, because an accurate, unimpeachable record of every event would be easily retrievable. Politicians wouldn’t dare to prevaricate, since they would inevitably be confronted with evidence of their truth-twisting. Nobody would have to worry about missing a child’s little league game or piano recital, because it all would be commemorated for all time on some planetary-scale personal version of TiVo. And you wouldn’t even have to search anymore for your keys, because you could just replay that moment when you walked into the house and inadvertently dropped them into the goldfish bowl instead of the key basket.

As always, there’s a gigantic potential downside. Read more

Our societal concept of personal privacy would go the way of the 3.5 inch diskette.  We wouldn’t be able to forget anything, no matter how painful or embarrassing, even if we wanted to. Life might be something akin to Jim Carrey’s existence in The Truman Show.  Or maybe the memory capability of our brains would wither, since we would become accustomed to having the Internet do our remembering for us. Maybe we’d become totally, self-destructively narcissistic creatures, compulsively watching our sixth birthday parties over and over and over.

I’m guessing that you may have one of two reactions to this idea. One is that you think I’ve watched “my pug imitating a blender” a few thousand too many times, and as a result have gone completely mental. As a matter of fact, however, I didn’t even dream up this idea myself. It happens to be No. 1 on the 2009 list of predictions by the eminent World Futurist Society, which envisions that we’ll be recording everything we say or do will  by 2030. (More details in a bit.)

Second, you may be saying to yourself that we already are recording just about everything. According to this Popular Mechanics article, the U.S. already has 30 million security cameras. They’re mounted on traffic lights, atop ATM machines, next to toll booths, in every corner of big-box stores and even inside cute, cuddly stuffed animals, and are shooting upward of 4 billion hours of video each week. The average American is caught on surveillance video 200 times each day.

There may have been a time, pre-Sept. 11, when the idea of being under near-continuous scrutiny freaked people out, but that’s over. Recent polling shows that 71 percent of the public actually favors more video surveillance. Besides, as it turns out, we actually like being watched on video so much that we’re increasingly shooting it ourselves and posting it to the Internet. Witness the seemingly geometric growth of YouTube, whose video library, by some estimates, is growing by 100,000 or so uploads per day — most of which seems to be user-generated videos of ordinary people using hand-cams, video-enabled cellphones  and webcams to document everything from their extreme devotion to Britney Spears to boneheaded stunts like this. 

But we could take it even further. Futurist Jamais Cascio — the guys best known for calculating the carbon footprint of cheeseburgers — envisions the development of something he calls the Participatory Panopticon, a user-generated riff on 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a circular prison in which inmates could be watched at all times. Here’s how he describes it:

Soon -- probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two -- we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.

And we will be doing it to ourselves.

This won't simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. Such monitoring may well exist, probably will, in fact, but it will be overwhelmed by the millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters. We will carry with us the tools of our own transparency, and many, perhaps most, will do so willingly, even happily.

Cascio envisions that people will record everything around them and upload it using devices such as miniaturized video cameras attached to their eyeglasses and equally tiny wearable computers with WiFi connections. Another futurist, Gene Stephens, foresees the use of nanotechnology to expand the Panopticon to an even more extreme level:

For instance, every square meter of atmosphere hugging the earth may be filled with unseen nanodevices designed to provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people in all places. Humans will have nanoimplants, facilitating interaction in an omnipresent network. Everyone will have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Since nano-storage capacity is almost limitless, all activity and utterances by people everywhere will be recorded and recoverable. Transparency will become increasingly ubiquitous as word and deed- whether spoken or acted out in anger, frustration, or as a joke-can be almost instantly compared to "the record."

So what do you think? Is recording everything that happens on video a brilliant innovation that would change our lives for the better, or would it be a curse? Express your opinion below. And while you’re at it, suggest an idea or three for future blogs, just in case my neural nanoimplant goes on the fritz.

Comments

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

You finally have gone off the deep end. Sigh.

[Carroll]

What a horrifying idea.

[Manny]

Remember that when the motion picture was first invented, people would line up and pay money to watch movies of someone doing everyday activities, just because of the novelty. And look at the incredible popularity of "reality shows." I think this technology will have a similar effect. A sizable portion of the population will become completely addicted to watching themselves and/or other people on the Internet all day and night. The rest will become compulsive exhibitionists, doing everything with an eye to how it will look on the computer screen. Human civilization will be reduced to a cheesy nonstop reality show, and any sort of productive or meaningful activity will eventually grind to a halt.

[Natural Man]

This idea is the most unnatural thing that I could possibly imagine.

[Spacew00t]

I suggest you read up on privacy laws, it doesn't matter what technological advances come, it is illegal to invade someones privacy to the degree that you are suggesting (in american law at least). Yes smaller cameras will be great, they could make amateur film making and journalism easier and cheaper, but just because you can use something to break the law doesn't make it right to do so. I can assure you the law is not going to change.

On the technological end of the issue, it would be easy enough to blast your workspace with enough high energy electromagnetic radiation to fry any nanobugs from the air. Just as easily you could jam their signals with a transmitter so they would become, in effect, just expensive dust.

[Geek Squad]

Actually, the privacy protections in U.S. and state law aren't very strong at all. It's perfectly legal, for example, for your employer to keep you under continuous video surveillance. Anytime you walk onto someone else's property, whether it's a a shopping mall or whereever, without realizing it you're consenting to be recorded on video. Anyone can shoot video of you in the street or on the sidewalk, and they can also shoot you in any location that's visible from public spaces, so long as you're not in a spot where you would have a reasonable expectation of privacy (i.e., your bedroom with the drapes drawn, the bathroom, etc.)
The point of the blog, though, is that people increasingly are willingly putting themselves under self-surveillance. They're shooting video of just about everything they do, and
posting it on the Internet. We are our own Big Brothers! Some lunkheads even shoot and post videos of themselves committing crimes (and then get arrested for them). Given the escalating narcissism of the human species, it's inevitable that eventually we'll record everything and watch it all the time.

As for disabling camera nanobots in the way that you describe, the problem would be that you'd also kill all the nanobots in your vicinity, including ones that you may need to perform useful or necessary functions. That'd be like demagnetizing every electronic device in your house, just to make sure nobody is bugging your phone.

[Isabel]

People love reality shows. In fact, most people would do anything to be in one. Now they'll have the chance...

[Neo-Luddite (I still use Windows 2000!)]

This is totally sick, but it's probably the way that the world is heading. If it happens, those of us who don't want to participate should wear bags over our heads, the way that New Orleans Saints fans used to.

[josh]

this would be the most horrific event. to sit and watch ourselves would make our brains to mush having the advantage of just rewinding something to remember or just watch a surgary as your science class

[Chauncey]

It sounds like more fun than GTA4 to me! You could actually go out and steal a real car and then watch yourself on video doing it.

[Wylie]

Obviously this has positive and negative aspects, but I think that certain parts of this prediction are inevitable. As it has been said, a lot of this we are already doing to ourselves. I actually think increased controlled surveillance is mostly a very positively thing. Where the line should be drawn in my opinion is the point where we can no longer achieve privacy when we want to. If I am in a mall or on a public street, than I should be behaving like a person in public and should therefore not be very worried about my actions being recorded to a data file that will probably never be accessed again with the intent of viewing me. It is when we can no longer achieve privacy in our own homes that we've really come across something terrible and extremely negative to our sanity and way of life.

[Patrick Kiger]

Wylie, I agree with you that ubiquitous video recording probably is inevitable, but I'm not as confident that nobody will ever view most of it, as you suggest. It's already possible to use speech recognition software to generate metadata from the soundtrack of video clips, rendering them searchable by Google or Yahoo. (For more on this, check out http://www.everyzing.com/solutions/video-seo) And eventually, scientists are going to develop a way to search video content itself, visually. (Here's an article from the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics blog on that subject http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/2007/12/improved-image-search-algorithm.html). Thus, someday it'll be possible for someone to sift through an incredible amount of video and pull up that 10-second clip of you slipping on a banana peel, if that's what they're into.

with search

[Astroboy!]

SEARCHING VIDEO WOULD BE AWESOME

[Joey]

If everybody is watching video of themselves all the time, they'll stop doing anything worth watching. Life will become incredibly boring!

[Dr. Duh]

this is a foolish idea that will collapse on itself with the only benifit being to the gov.s besides don't we have more important things to worry about than watching oursleves like idk curing cancer or something

[Christian]

Security Cameras here for those who wish to start watching themselves http://www.cu1.com lol