CCTV surveillance will make us inhuman
"Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men." - Theodore Adorno
One of the manifesto items of AAP that is being discussed most critically is their promise to install CCTV cameras at every nook and corner of the city to ensure women’s safety. While the ordinary discussion in public mostly centres on its financial cost, there seems to be utter disregard for its social implications and the underlining message. This disregard however, it seems, comes from our larger surrender to the idea of technology as a panacea of all ills.
The philosophy of violence seeks technology for its redemption and rationale. The teachers and the students of the school in Peshawar in Pakistan, where more than hundred children were butchered by the terrorists in a recent incident, are now being trained in the use of guns and weaponry. A recent image of the gun wielding teachers from that school captures the irony of our time. Technology that kills also emerges as the solution, as an antidote. What is most frightening is the rapid expansion of the idea of technology as solution to all kinds of human failings. Technology rules when human elements are made slave to the machine. This process of excessive technological interference in human life ultimately yields a new human who, bereft of all his human qualities, gets controlled by impersonal and dehumanised security guidelines and apparatus. Human thus becomes machine.
CCTV camera brand of security perhaps temporarily works in countries like the US with more resources and less demographic pressure. But even here we witness a progressive paralysis of human instincts. Increasingly, natural human propensities to protect, empathise with and understand each other become redundant and ultimately dysfunctional because of almost complete dependence on machine and technology. The recent brutal handling of an old Indian parent by the US police where the old man had just wandered off in the neighbourhood is a case in point. In a culture with very little or no sense of neighbourhood in any human sense the old man who was visiting his son in the US became victim of human machines. The rising cases of freak violence and pistol culture in the US are a grim reminder of the consequences of excessive dependence on the idea of technology-centric security.
Our society in contrast regales in moments of disorder. Too much order is considered clinical. Our urban spaces are essentially "enmeshment" of multiple socio-cultural territories and not an assemblage of water tight compartments. Any urban planning for security has to factor in these cultural nuances. It is in this context that it is important to realise the old virtues of a thriving neighbourhood and the role of all kinds of people who constitute the space irrespective of its class or gender or ethnicity. In other words a "press wala" or a "mochi" in the vicinity becomes as important and as critical. These spaces sadly have been systematically eliminated from our idea of urban planning, for the technology-centric security measure seeks to "sanitise" the spaces by weeding out what is so organically linked to the traditional idea of neighbourhood.
We need to revive our neighbourhood and humanise our public spaces like parks, public library and Mohalla samitis. A country of more than a billion cannot be made to feel safe under CCTV camera. Prevention of crime against women, for instance, requires the right kind of gender training and a compulsory curriculum on peace and non violence in schools and colleges. Buy as many cameras and increase RAF as much possible but to counter communalism in our society, for instance, we will have to teach history and sociology creatively, engagingly and in the spirit of inclusion and coexistence to our kids. The same goes for women’s security also.
The story of Shail Devi, a poor Hindu widow in her 50s, from Azizpur village in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar recently made headlines. Shail Devi risking her own life gave shelter to her Muslim neighbours when a mob of more than 5,000 people attacked the village after a 20-year-old Hindu boy's dead body was found. The boy was allegedly abducted and killed over his love affair with a Muslim girl. We need more Shail Devi. Invest in the spirit of Shail Devi. CCTV cameras will not do.
And finally, the prospect of a society living under a constant web of CCTV surveillance also carries a profound but tragic symbolic message - it represents the ultimate defeat and surrender of human to the machine. Tomorrow, when the headline reads: The crime graph against women in Delhi decreases because of the CCTV camera, as a citizen I will be relieved but as a human being I will be sad with a deep sense of loss. For it will be another stamp of triumph of machine over human.