The Banality of Surveillance

> It’s who’s looking at your profile; it’s the profiles that you’re looking at. That was the holy grail

Facebook actually implemented this as a user facing feature.

I think it was very early days, but I used it, it was fucking creepy, and everyone hated it. I think Facebook probably removed it because it drove people away. It made you feel like a creep for checking on your friends page.

Because of this I am finding the internet more and more useless. I cannot tell you how much reading this freaks me out. I mean, is anyone else here as freaked out as I am?

The only way out is to unplug. Something I am realizing is very hard to do mainly because of my conditioning. My goal it to become the next Jesus (in the human sense), or the next St. Francis.

Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to make these useless comments. What does it really do for me?

The capitalists (and you cannot tel me this is not because of capitalism) have ruined everything about the internet.

My goal: A flip phone (with a faraday bag) and a laptop with no connection to me at all, just to use to look up things, like a library.

It will be worse, they'll hire a "third party" to analyze it for then and return a yes/no or risk score. No information will be available about the third party and local laws won't apply because the score was calculated in the cloud.

> People overestimate the power of digital surveillance enormously

For the average person it's the exact opposite. They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Back in around 2012 or so, some friends and I decided to book a canal house in Amsterdam to all pitch in together and live there for about 2 months. Celebrating a few coinciding life achievements before moving onto the next phase of adult life sort of thing.

I worked remotely, so planned to simply do work for half the time I was there. As such, I brought a proper monitor, keyboard, etc. with me.

As I have my 20" boxed up LCD panel in my arms in the immigration/customs line at Schipol, a Dutch immigration officer comes up and asks me what the monitor is for. I of course like an idiot said "staying here for a couple months for a vacation, but I plan to work some while I'm here!". I got infinitely lucky with the officer in question - she very quickly told me I was incorrect and that the monitor was to play video games and that's what I was going to tell the immigration officer at the passport desk.

One of those early lessons learned that I'm sure looking young, naive, and stupid helped me in a way that I could not get away with in my mid-40's these days.