Saturday 19 July 2008

Camera Camera


I was caught behind a white van last night while travelling to my local Oddbins, for my regular Friday night bottle of claret.His bumper screamed at me 'WELL DRIVEN IF NOT RING THIS NUMBER' Of course it wasn't being well driven.But would anybody seriously bother their arse to ring up and have him sacked.As if it's not bad enough having a tracker fitted just in case you can't be picked up by a CCTV or traffic camera; your boss now wants to enlist the help of any other driver you might encounter to judge your performance.Are any other professions persecuted like this I wonder? Does your average whore have "WELL BATTERED" tattooed on her backside?Does your local gigolo have" WELL HUNG" on his lower abs? Is your pole-dancer obliged to be "WELL SLITHERED"? I guess not.
You may not realise it, but all this layered persecution does take it's toll.It was only when I was in Venice for a Christmas weekend a few years back that I realised that something was amiss.I actually became aware that I wasn't being watched or directed at every possible juncture.It felt really liberating as it should.There where no traffic lights(obviously) and only three signs in the whole of Venice!St Marks Square and the Rialto Bridge being two of them and third I can't recall,probably because I never came across it! And yet nobody gets lost.Well not forever anyway....A miracle!
Now Big Brown and co wan't to gather every e-mail and text and phonecall and, and, and....Why the fascination,they've never insisted on reading and storing every snail mail ever sent.Why?... as an old old friend of mine once said..."Because they can!" Arthur C Clark and the waller who invented the binary system have got a lot to answer for! I wonder what this gargantuan computer might be called.BIG BROWN maybe.From trilobites to kilobytes... did we really come all this way just to be spied upon?

1 comment:

Thud said...

The abscence of scrutiny from the govt is as you say liberating..hence us all trying to leave.