Via Steve Portigal’s All this ChittahChattah, a short but succinct article by John King, from the San Francisco Chronicle noting just how quietly certain features have started to become embedded in our environment, most notably (from this blog’s point of view), anti-skateboarding measures, traffic calming and security barriers:
“…woven into the urban fabric so subtly we don’t even notice what they say about our society… The common thread? You didn’t see them much a decade ago, but now they’re part of the landscape.”
Creeping changes will always happen, but we should be especially vigilant as architectures of control increase in prevalence. Will tomorrow’s children find it natural to buy eBooks all over again every time they want to re-read them? At what point will the norm change? When will the inflexion occur? We already have a society where not too many people are interested to lift the bonnet (hood) of their car and see what’s underneath; will it seem such a radical change when that bonnet’s permanently welded shut? (Thanks for the analogy, Cory).
I’m reminded of a line in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana: “It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”
Certainly the character in whose mouth Greene put the words did not mean it in the same sense as I mean it here, but still, I think it’s applicable.
[...] Regardless of actual party politics, it is the creeping erosion of norms which scares the hell out of me. Once a generation believes it’s normal to have every movement, every journey, every transaction tracked and monitored and used against them – thanks to effective propaganda that it’s necessary to ‘preserve our freedoms’* – then there is going to be no source of reaction, no possible legitimate way to criticise. If making a technical point about the effectiveness of a metal detector can already get you arrested, then the wedge is already well and truly inserted. [...]
[...] This kind of ‘creeping erosion of norms‘ is something that’s concerned me a lot on this blog, as it seems to be a feature of so many dystopian visions, both real and fictional. From the more trivial—Japanese kids growing up believing it’s perfectly normal to have to buy music again every time they change their phone—to society blindly walking into 1984 due to a “generational failure of memory about individual rights” (Simon Davies, LSE), it’s the “you won’t even know the [options|rights|abilities|technology|information|words to express dissent] ever existed” bit that scares me the most. [...]
[...] Setright wrote it in reference to car design, and the lack of progress thereof, but I think we can all see how applicable it is to many fields of endeavour, not just in technology but in society also. We should be very wary when fashions become conventions – or at least we should think them through before they become norms. And we should always leave ourselves a way out. (I’ve mentioned this in a few contexts before, perhaps with a little hyperbole.) [...]