Eavesdropping, Ian Potter Museum: why we’re all spies now
In the new age of digital devices, there are no spooks with headphones. Now computer algorithms are watching us.
George Orwell’s prescience in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four — published in 1948 — often strikes us today in a world in which the integrity of language is under constant attack from the deliberate manipulation of advertising and the mendacity of political ideology. These problems are exacerbated in a world where popular speech is becoming less articulate: the chronic abuse of the word “like’’, for example, is a kind of cancer that destroys the syntactic and logical links between thoughts, reducing speech to the level of childish babble.
Orwell was horribly accurate in foreseeing the corruption of Newspeak, the tyranny of the Ministry of Truth and the ubiquitous suspicion of thoughtcrime. We can see all around us today attempts to limit freedom of expression, to suppress ideas considered dangerous, and to prescribe or even legislate for the way that language should be used. Recent discussion about gender terms and titles, for example, shows how quickly a discourse of liberation can turn into fascistic repression in the hands of groups inherently inclined to totalitarianism.
But Orwell was also uncannily prescient in the way he imagined that new forms of audiovisual communication would be used to control our lives, both through the dissemination of propaganda and surveillance of the population:
Behind Winston’s back the voice of the telescreen was still babbling away … The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often … the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork … You had to live … in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard …
Orwell wrote this at a time when television was still in its infancy. Very soon it would become addictive, and for the next couple of generations most people in developed countries would turn it on as soon as they got home in the evening. Reading, conversation, playing music, even cooking properly and eating together as a family were all replaced by a tepid bath of non-stop distraction, the true opiate of the masses, lulling the populace into unconsciousness.
Yet today television in the old sense is almost obsolete. I haven’t had one for more than 20 years. The computer and the internet are far more efficient ways to obtain information, and any particularly interesting television broadcasts can be watched on a computer screen; but you make the choice deliberately, instead of having a device, as in Winston’s flat, constantly droning in the background and soliciting your attention with the relentless appeal of information that you don’t need to know.
It is only today that we can look back on this passage by Orwell and realise with a kind of shock that he foresaw something else as well: the very term “telescreen’’, rather than television, turns out to have anticipated our recent adoption of the term screen to refer to the multitude of digital devices we now use, from desk computers to laptops, tablets and smartphones.
What Orwell could not foresee, however, was the extent to which we would voluntarily adopt the dystopian world he evoked. He imagined the ubiquity of screens as the imposition of a tyrannical government; but we are now more addicted to digital devices than we were to television. The smartphone is little more than a decade old, yet it is ubiquitous. People can no more resist looking at them than they can stop themselves from scratching an itch.
The other thing that Orwell could not predict was the advances in technology. He still imagined secret service operatives listening in to conversations and looking at images on the telescreen. They can’t watch everyone at once, although they can plug in to any of us when they choose, so we have to live as though we were being watched even if this is not in fact always the case. But in the new age of digital devices, there are no more spooks with headphones: there are computer algorithms gathering our data, and they are always watching us and listening to everything we say.
Electronic tags can be attached to certain kinds of criminals to monitor their activities, but the great majority of the population has voluntarily, if unwittingly — and just in the past few years — attached the same sort of devices to themselves. Their physical movements and location can be followed, as well as their communications on social media and other applications.
Even more remarkably, social media has accustomed people — especially the young, who have grown up with this new technology — to giving away information about themselves of their own free will. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that all people have three lives: public, private and secret. But as we can see from Facebook, and perhaps even more from Instagram, users now feel a kind of compulsion to share intimate details about themselves.
It is ultimately the siren call of narcissism, and Instagram is a purpose-built vehicle for amplifying the ego. Because the system is based on collecting followers, it is also a kind of ecology of micro-celebrity in which those who post feel validated by the appreciation of their followers, and the followers feel validated by sharing in the mawkish confidences of their micro-celebrities. But the result of all these new media is that if anyone wants to find out about us, they no longer need to pry; a new generation is all too willing to divulge.
Social media users don’t care who is listening because the dopamine rush of illusory connectedness is too strong; but nor do they really understand the power of the algorithms that are feeding on the data generated by indulgence and indiscretion. This is partly the subject of an intriguing exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne.
Starting with the legal definition of eavesdropping, which used to be — but rather ironically is no longer — a misdemeanour, the exhibition includes a number of different installations dealing with broader aspects of listening to and spying on people, whether in society at large or in specific settings such as prisons.
One work — the least troubling, though poignant in its own way — is a collection of recordings from old phone message machines found in secondhand and charity shops. We know these machines can sometimes preserve — as well as the outgoing message of a deceased person, sometimes the only recording of their voice — the incoming messages of callers of all kinds, from strangers to people dear to us.
Here, of course, all the voices are those of strangers. The messages record the flotsam and jetsam of meaningless business and ephemeral concerns: meetings, appointments, reminders, all long forgotten, along with their speakers.
Another dimension of recording comes from the Watergate hearings. More than 3700 hours of tapes were examined in 1973-74 to determine whether the US president was guilty of a criminal conspiracy, but it turned out an 18½ minute section had been erased — accidentally, according to Richard Nixon’s loyal secretary. Others suspected that a particularly incriminating section had been deliberately wiped. Here, amid an installation of press photos of the time, we can listen to the erased tape and ponder over the sound textures, not true silence at all, that have been left behind like scars.
The most overtly disturbing section deals with the Sednaya prison, in which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad detains his political opponents, and where many thousands have been murdered and their bodies cremated. The prison is a terrifying place of random beatings, sometimes to death, which can be provoked by making any noise at all, but especially by being overheard speaking audibly to other prisoners.
Prisoners do not even dare to cough, and speak to each other in whispers. Since it is impossible to get into the prison, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan interviewed former inmates and asked them to reproduce the volume at which they talked to their fellow prisoners. It turns out that, although they always had to speak extremely quietly, prisoners had to lower their voices much further again after Sednaya was reassigned in 2011 to hold political prisoners only. There was a 19-decibel difference, a drop demonstrated audibly in the installation, and one that directly reflects the increased brutality of the system.
Also by Abu Hamdan is a piece that demonstrates the power of new computer algorithms in the analysis of data: it is now possible to match an individual’s voice, with some degree of accuracy, with the patterns typical of the speech community in which they grew up and acquired habits of pronunciation, phrasing, rhythm, and so on. As we learn from this work, such analysis can be used to determine whether individuals claiming to be refugees from a particular place are really from that region.
Although the results do not appear to be always reliable, it is a glimpse into a future in which we are told we will walk through airports without needing to show our papers because video scanners have already recognised our features and matched us to a vast security data bank, confirming our identity and the fact that we do indeed have a booking for the flight we are trying to board.
As always, the dream of technological progress offers us ostensible convenience and even safety, but at the cost of control and surveillance. The first work we encounter in this exhibition is thus perhaps the most worrying of all in the long run. It is a kind of conversation between versions of the new devices called “personal assistants”, which at the moment mainly seem to answer questions about the news but will one day, in the coming age of 5G, run digitally networked houses.
Google, we are told, is currently processing more than two million samples of language taken from YouTube, as it tries to produce algorithms capable of processing more information, no doubt as well as the more intangible connotations of language, such as tone and mood. All this will eventually allow these machines not only to talk to us, but also to listen to us and to process everything we say in their hearing. The new machines are far more ubiquitous and inescapable than the telescreen but, as in Orwell’s world, surveillance is for our own good, and this time we are rushing to submit of our own volition.
Eavesdropping
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. To October 28.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout