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owlectomyI also have the title as "The Sheriff's Secret Police Would Like You To Speak Up." I feel like this inconsistency illustrates something important about the Kafkaesque nature of authority in Night Vale, where you can be punished for breaking rules that are impossible to follow, or that you didn't know existed.
This was an impromptu panel dealing with the surveillance state especially in the context of Welcome to Night Vale, Agents of Shield, Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, and Person of Interest, (and also what Candra Gill called "cop-adjacent" genre shows that make use of the tools and techniques of surveillance.)
I am really interested in surveillance in Night Vale -- it's the thing in NV that is both really spooky and really reminiscent of the current state of things in the US. How you can have a surveillance state that's not a dystopia, that reflects the accomodations and acceptance that we all have to make in order to keep on living our lives, and sometimes it's horrifying and sometimes it seems so normal that you forget how horrifying it is. And I'm interested in the ambivalence/ambiguity/total moral incoherency of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in regards to surveillance. And this was my favorite panel this WisCon!
(Note: lots of people in the audience were people I know, but in my notes I've left them as just 'audience' mostly because I was typing really fast trying to get everybody's words in, also because I feel making a long-term and identifiable record of your words is kind of sketchy if you're not one of the people who volunteered for the panel. Because this panel is the kind of panel that makes you nervous about surveillance.)
Candra Gill, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Megan (ThingsWithWings)
You are being watched
The government spies on you every day
Inspired by Captain America, Agents of Shield, Welcome to Night Vale, Person of Interest -- how do these texts deal with surveillance? What are the pleasures of watching them watching us?
CG: I'm a huge Person of Interest [PoI] fan, watch Agents of Shield -- suddenly it clicked and I'm a fan -- my fave thing about Night Vale is it has replaced the This American Life slot in my media consumption. Winter Soldier has a lot going on that I want to discuss. I want to talk about all these genre shows and how cop-adjacent they are... I'm really struggling with that. I'm interested in talking cross-genre, about a podcast, a movie, and TV shows.
BB: There was a surveillance panel last night, but it looked like they weren't going to talk about Captain America. The idea about the surveillance state and fictional problems with it - the show Elementary has issues with surveillance. Is it OK if they take advantage of it through the group Anonymous? Is surveillance OK if it's good people? Police procedurals always pit it as good surveillance vs. bad murderers.
M: You hear the voice-over on Person of Interest: You are being watched. The government has a secret system. But that's not the central injustice of the show. Don't worry about that. The problem is murderers. That's astonishing. It sounds so spooky, and then immediately it moves on to something else. The issue of it's OK if it's good people. Metadata defense -- it's OK if the government isn't actually looking at your data. If no humans will look at it. Deep anxiety of contemporary cultural productions, when is it OK to surveil this much, we need somebody to justify it.
Audience: Explain Person of Interest?
CG: There's a guy named Harold Finch, software tech giant, protective of his own privacy. Builds a machine (algorithm) (AI) that processes all surveillance data and looks for anomalies to indicate terror events. It can pick up on when someone's going to be murdered but there's no process for dealing with that. Harold becomes Batman to take on these people not being deal with the system.
Audience: Cap 2 has something v. similar to The Machine and it's... kinda bad maybe?
BB: It's good if it's used by Shield, it's bad if it used by Nazis?
Audience: I thought Cap 2's point was that it can't be used in a good way?
Audience: I'm really resistant to the idea that you can decide whether someone's good or bad from looking at their bank statements. Our actions are not predetermined. People can change.
M: Contemporary assumption that we can reduce people to their data. We can take a human being and turn them into raw numbers to be analyzed.
Audience: The surveillance into Cap 2 vs Night Vale... in NV the surveillance reduces you not to data, but to anecdotes and stories.
M: The secret police would really like you to talk about your contentious opinions.
CG: The handlers in Orphan Black. 1-on-1, you're being surveilled your whole life.
BB: Mass surveillance is similar across these properties... Night Vale is different. PoI came out before the Snowden revelations, Cap 2 is supposed to be commenting on that... PoI got Jossed a little bit, it's this science fictional premise that's not actually science fiction. We know that there are 6 guys and they've got a bomb and they've rented a truck, you should send in shock troops. In Cap 2, the "evil" Hydra surveillance is targeting revolutionary thinkers so everyone else can be happy... It and Agents of Shield are like happy people who do wetwork. I was worried about Cap 2's ambivalence re the surveillance state. The real movie was more negative, but also ambiguous. It didn't come right out and say that it would've been bad even if Fury had had non-hacked helicopters.
M: And Fury is one of the heroes of Cap 2, he's talking about preventing threats before they happen, but also talking about taking out 1000 hostiles a minute, as if that's great bc that's so efficient... Coulson's talking about how every camera is eyes and ears for Shield. It's horrifying that it's so prevalent that there's no need to justify or explain it.
Audience: It's freaky when Fury says that. But right after that, Captain America says, that's not freedom, that's fear. Fury is a good guy but you can't take those lines out of context as the opinion of Cap 2. Cap 2 is ambivalent and confused about the surveillance state, but we're not supposed to be agreeing with that.
M: It's super ambivalent. There are anti-surveillance and anti-drone moments and moments that are worrying in support of that. Fury is a redeemable character even after that moment. The characters are finding their place in corporate america and the CIA, which create this framework of violence and surveillance in the real world...
CG: A lot of our genre shows are cop shows. Or cop show adjacent. Cops are an important part of PoI. Elementary, Agents of Shield. Our genre shows are not problematizing the roles of police enough. It's corrupt cops, if there's corruption, not a corrupt system. I've got a love-hate relationship with PoI, it's missing a lot of opportunities. Based in NYC, the city of stop and frisk. There's ways of surveilling people that's not mass technology infrastructure. Character of Joss Carter is a black female detective and a veteran who was an interrogator. They could've explored so much with her, but they missed so many opportunities. To be a cop in NYC raising a young black male child, working with these two white guys... there's so much potential for a story there and they didn't touch it. Not just talking about big data. It's not just government -- there's that connection with Stark Industries too. It's also if you're going to get stopped and frisked just walking down the street.
Audience: It's a basic assumption of nonprofit fundraising that we do FOIA requests to try to determine who's going to give us money... it's really creepy stuff.
BB: With that corporate link, there's two different scales of surveillance. StrexCorp is surveilling you to sell you things. The Sheriff's Secret Police is your neighbor. In a lot of fandom it's assumed you kinda know who the secret police are. They might be really friendly. They're watching you all the time. The secret government helicopters that aren't very good at their jobs...
M: They've shifted their focus from early on. Early on you're supposed to be afraid of the government helicopters... they've kind of pulled away from that. As it goes on the secret police get a little cozier. It's hard to imagine what it's like to live in Night Vale, I struggle with this as a fanfiction writer. What's it like to have sex when you know someone is watching. Because it's a serial and they change what they're doing as time goes on it's hard to create a unified theory.
Aud: Night Vale: Cecil on getting rid of Strex Corp to go back to the evil they already know about.
M: That's recurring in Night Vale. The monsters you're used to dealing with.
CG: Night Vale started out as what if every conspiracy theory was true. That's why they started out talking about the space war... a lot of the secret police is connected with the ancient evil sleeping underneath the mountain.
[Debate on the existence of mountains]
CG: I'm interested in what's after Strex Corp, what would scare Strex Corp.
BB: I've been thinking about cop shows. As a result of the Revolutions vid playlist... There was a Continuum vid. Some characters are trying to change the past so we don't end up in a corporate future, the heroine is trying not to change the past because she wants to go home. I hope we get to a less ambivalent place about the revolution. The terrorists have really legitimate aims, they want to stop corporate ownership of future America. The show has this idea of omnipresent surveillance, which would be awesome for her as a police officer...
CG: Continuum and PoI, what you mentioned about freedom fighters/terrorists. The Vigilance story in PoI. The myth of the young white tech genius guy. Flashbacks to Harold Finch in his youth -- he is the garage hacker who creates the software. His name is not out there, and that's intentional. Continuum is the garage hacker who becomes a corporate overlord. The people who build tech and create surveillance society infrastructure are white guys with something sympathetic in their past and they just don't think. That's realistic... but there are other people in these fields who aren't part of the story, and the story gets centered around the needs and issues of these [young white tech] guys. In Continuum, there's this zero-sum game between corporate overlords and terrorists. Anon group of folks in PoI, Vigilance. They start out doxxing people, end up killing people. We're introduced to them bc they're running interference on Finch's operation to save people on the "irrelevant" list. They turn out to be a puppet group for a corporate group. They undermine the idea of legitimate resistance to the machine. It was one of the few times they could've dealt with race issues and surveillance. IN NEW YORK. The brother (of the Vigilance character) was falsely accused, in solitary confinement, ends up killing himself. They never push it quite far enough... I'd like to have seen Vigilance be a legitimate group.
M: To go back to your point about the white male genius hacker -- it's frustrating because they're focused on crime. This false idea that the problem with crime is that we don't know that it's going on. That's not the problem! It's not a big secret.
BB: There is violence against women, who knew!
M: The problem with crime (in these shows) is not poverty, it's not police corruption, we need a bigger gun. Eve Sedgwick has this amazing bit about paranoid reading vs reparative reading. Paranoid -- to have justice we just need to tell people about things. Social justice movements -- as soon as we reveal these secret terrible things we'll get justice. That's not true. We live with all these horrible things.
BB: A lot of ppl do not see the problem with the surveillance state or with, say, loyalty cards tracking your info. "I don't care who knows that I buy chocolate bars. I'm not doing anything wrong so why do I care that the govt is watching." The big data surveillance state that we all live in isn't something that you encounter. People are watching what you do in hidden ways. In NV, there's a person in that garbage can. They might interrupt your conversation and tell you you're boring. NV does a good job making it creepy, but... it's visible surveillance, so it makes it easier to oppose, and we don't always connect that with ppl reading your email. I'd like a show where Liberate or Vigilance is portrayed as, maybe problematic, but ... [good, legitimate.]
Audience: On TV it's fun to watch the mavericks and the ppl who break the rules, and I'm thinking of Shield... they do some horrifying shit and that's OK because they can drop some dude in another country without a passport because he was a dick that one time. If you do something bad to Skye we can do anything bad to you that we want.
BB: And Skye was all pro-anarchy but she's joined the machine...
Audience: We like stories about heroes who can get away with things, but media doesn't want to show us people who are ACTUALLY outside the system, ACTUALLY fighting the system.
BB: They're big into not thinking seriously about moral questions. I want them to say, these are our moral principles, we're not going to do that. There have been shows where the central characters were facing these moral questions, it would be awesome if we could torture this guy to get information from him but we can't do that because it would be wrong.
Audience: Scott and Bailey... she looks up a guy she used to date in a database. And they take it very seriously. She's still on the police force but very much with a conversation of "You can't do that, don't do it again," her partner says "You've betrayed my trust."
M: That's a cop show that features women and is serious about ethics.
Aud: And the rules of interrogation. She persuades people to tell her things. That's the way it's supposed to work. They hit the time limit of holding someone, and they let them go. Occasionally they fail, obviously...
BB: The Closer was interesting in that respect too. Somebody punched a suspect and that was really not okay. Oh, that's what interrogation actually should look like! OK!
Audience: I watch an enormous number of British cozy mysteries... Never have I seen the cops use surveillance camera footage. It's like it's not happening. Interlocks with this idea that you rarely see interrogation done correctly. This has an impact on not knowing what your rights are, not knowing you're being surveilled.
CG: Or an American show where using your right to have a lawyer is seen as something frowned upon, gets in the way of the cops doing their job.
Audience: Homicide: Life on the Street is also a good example.
M: That ep in the first season set in the interrogation room... that's incredibly violent, and unethical, but it's portrayed as unethical. It's a very powerful ep about the complexities of interrogation.
Aud: Agents of Shield is deeply hypocritical about lies. Coulson lying to his team is fine. Him being lied to is bad. Miles makes really good points about Shield's disregard for civil liberties, Skye says that Shield doesn't have time for civil liberties. Take a character who has a good point and find some way to undermine/invalidate them.
BB: I like to think about the Marvel Universe... the Marvel Universe is not built around SHIELD which black-bags people. But superheroes, that's a vigilante narrative to begin with.
Audience: Did any of the questions in Cap 2 about surveillance translate into Shield?
BB: Not really?
CG: I'm a big fan of the continuity of the Marvel Universe... the bad pacing of Shield is because they had to time it correctly with Winter Soldier. If they have this long plan to take Shield out, they should not have created a show called Agents of Shield.
BB: "Spies on a Plane."
Audience: In fact the problem is still AGENTS. Even without shield they're still going to have this official authority...
Aud: They're going to keep using that power no matter what's behind them.
CG: Agents of Strex Corp.
Aud: I'd felt so uncomfortable with the vigilante narrative, and probably the actual story I want to see is without the power structure, and then having Fury ask him to rebuild SHIELD...
M: Shield, but secreter!
BB: SHIELD is not supposed to be a state actor. Equivalence of international intelligence seeking with American govt intelligence seeking. Shield is international even though headquartered in DC and everybody speaks American-accented English.
CG: The H in SHIELD stands for Homeland...
BB: It's international? No, it's super American. It's who's watching you. Is the US govt everyone? There used to be agreements about NATO countries surveil each other's citizens so your govt wouldn't be spying on your own citizens but it's OK to spy on other countries.
M: The Sheriff's secret police would turn off your coffeemaker and close your garage door...
For a glowing moment I thought they were gonna restructure Agents of Shield, Skye calling Ward a Nazi... The middle of a TV show is more interesting than the ending because a lot of ambiguities can be up in the air. The ending ends up collapsing that into certainties. AoS should be about breaking the AoS premise, but they're going to bring it back to the original thing.
Aud: I wanted to come back to Maria Hill in Stark Industries... there's a moment in Matt Fraction's Iron Man, his team has been building a nano swarm of robots that they release all over the entire world. It's a physical manifestation of the cloud, it's going to keep all your data. There's an attack somewhere, Tony Stark as Iron Man swoops in and saves people. "What, you think I wasn't looking through those phones?"
Aud: "I'm like Santa Claus, it's great!"
Aud: It's astonishingly pro-surveillance! The hero going "Did you read the privacy policy before you bought my phone?"
CG: I finally broke down and got a smart phone. The cost of data plans is artificially inflated... and it's a constant surveillance machine in your pocket. The metadata from phone calls - researchers could infer ppl dealing with rare diseases, a woman who'd decided to have an abortion. That's the kind of information that your apps can gather about you. An app can't legally gather that kind of information, but if they can infer it...
Aud: In the context of the comic it was not freaky. It seemed like Matt Fraction was presenting that as a good thing.
BB: If you were going to read all the privacy policies you agree to on a regular basis, you'd spend your whole life reading...
Aud: And need a lot more expertise.
BB: Target's tracking of purchases is very sophisticated and they were able to tell women were pregnant before they knew.
Aud: Studying successes isn't as useful as studying failures -- it's the same kind of artificial focus. You miss the times when it silently just works.
Aud: Google Search algorithm found a carjacking ring. They don't even know how it does what it does! They can't even recreate the decision tree that found this. That's a thing that happens now. You can google it.
CG: There's no such thing as anonymized data. Even when they scrub the identities from data, it's still possible to figure them out. Surveillance cameras -- your gait is an unique identifier.
M: Ministry of Silly Walks as anti-surveillance...
BB: I would like to see non-cop shows that are about this stuff. I want the show where Liberate is the protag, and ideally would not blow things up. Orphan Black is awesome but we'll talk about that later.
M: Rachel Duncan as someone who has grown up with surveillance...
CG: Breaking up from that is a really huge and hard thing to do, she hasn't known anything else.
Aud: Does she have a legit concern for her health, too?
[Orphan Black conversation which I don't understand.]
Aud: What plot line would you like to see on these shows?
M: Elementary dealing with the group Everyone in a way that isn't just about Sherlock getting information from them. I'd like the cops to find out about their use of Everyone. Hard convos about the ethics and legality of it. Joan should be less sanguine about illegal hacking. But she's sanguine abt breaking into ppl's houses. I'd like a Sheriff's Secret Police character on Night Vale. I'd like to see them involved in the anti-Strex revolution.
BB: On PoI, I'd like the Machine to decide it's not OK with what it's doing. I'm not sure what the Machine can do as an intelligence... it would be cool, though. I think the Machine is conscious, despite what Harold says.
Aud: What if the Machine started constructing and enforcing its own reality?
CG: I'd like to see a show that centers anti-surveillance resistance not about terrorists or cops... PoI might be going there. I wanted a soft apocalypse. We're about to get one. There's a second machine that's online. It doesn't have the restrictions on Finch's. I want the machine to explore its identity, its own voice, a name. Self-actualization.
BB: Almost Human was a terrible show, so many missed opportunities.
M: If the Machine develops an identity and comes to believe that its identity is evil and becomes a suicidal robot...
Aud: If the Machine decides it's actually going to obey the law!
This was an impromptu panel dealing with the surveillance state especially in the context of Welcome to Night Vale, Agents of Shield, Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, and Person of Interest, (and also what Candra Gill called "cop-adjacent" genre shows that make use of the tools and techniques of surveillance.)
I am really interested in surveillance in Night Vale -- it's the thing in NV that is both really spooky and really reminiscent of the current state of things in the US. How you can have a surveillance state that's not a dystopia, that reflects the accomodations and acceptance that we all have to make in order to keep on living our lives, and sometimes it's horrifying and sometimes it seems so normal that you forget how horrifying it is. And I'm interested in the ambivalence/ambiguity/total moral incoherency of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in regards to surveillance. And this was my favorite panel this WisCon!
(Note: lots of people in the audience were people I know, but in my notes I've left them as just 'audience' mostly because I was typing really fast trying to get everybody's words in, also because I feel making a long-term and identifiable record of your words is kind of sketchy if you're not one of the people who volunteered for the panel. Because this panel is the kind of panel that makes you nervous about surveillance.)
Candra Gill, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Megan (ThingsWithWings)
You are being watched
The government spies on you every day
Inspired by Captain America, Agents of Shield, Welcome to Night Vale, Person of Interest -- how do these texts deal with surveillance? What are the pleasures of watching them watching us?
CG: I'm a huge Person of Interest [PoI] fan, watch Agents of Shield -- suddenly it clicked and I'm a fan -- my fave thing about Night Vale is it has replaced the This American Life slot in my media consumption. Winter Soldier has a lot going on that I want to discuss. I want to talk about all these genre shows and how cop-adjacent they are... I'm really struggling with that. I'm interested in talking cross-genre, about a podcast, a movie, and TV shows.
BB: There was a surveillance panel last night, but it looked like they weren't going to talk about Captain America. The idea about the surveillance state and fictional problems with it - the show Elementary has issues with surveillance. Is it OK if they take advantage of it through the group Anonymous? Is surveillance OK if it's good people? Police procedurals always pit it as good surveillance vs. bad murderers.
M: You hear the voice-over on Person of Interest: You are being watched. The government has a secret system. But that's not the central injustice of the show. Don't worry about that. The problem is murderers. That's astonishing. It sounds so spooky, and then immediately it moves on to something else. The issue of it's OK if it's good people. Metadata defense -- it's OK if the government isn't actually looking at your data. If no humans will look at it. Deep anxiety of contemporary cultural productions, when is it OK to surveil this much, we need somebody to justify it.
Audience: Explain Person of Interest?
CG: There's a guy named Harold Finch, software tech giant, protective of his own privacy. Builds a machine (algorithm) (AI) that processes all surveillance data and looks for anomalies to indicate terror events. It can pick up on when someone's going to be murdered but there's no process for dealing with that. Harold becomes Batman to take on these people not being deal with the system.
Audience: Cap 2 has something v. similar to The Machine and it's... kinda bad maybe?
BB: It's good if it's used by Shield, it's bad if it used by Nazis?
Audience: I thought Cap 2's point was that it can't be used in a good way?
Audience: I'm really resistant to the idea that you can decide whether someone's good or bad from looking at their bank statements. Our actions are not predetermined. People can change.
M: Contemporary assumption that we can reduce people to their data. We can take a human being and turn them into raw numbers to be analyzed.
Audience: The surveillance into Cap 2 vs Night Vale... in NV the surveillance reduces you not to data, but to anecdotes and stories.
M: The secret police would really like you to talk about your contentious opinions.
CG: The handlers in Orphan Black. 1-on-1, you're being surveilled your whole life.
BB: Mass surveillance is similar across these properties... Night Vale is different. PoI came out before the Snowden revelations, Cap 2 is supposed to be commenting on that... PoI got Jossed a little bit, it's this science fictional premise that's not actually science fiction. We know that there are 6 guys and they've got a bomb and they've rented a truck, you should send in shock troops. In Cap 2, the "evil" Hydra surveillance is targeting revolutionary thinkers so everyone else can be happy... It and Agents of Shield are like happy people who do wetwork. I was worried about Cap 2's ambivalence re the surveillance state. The real movie was more negative, but also ambiguous. It didn't come right out and say that it would've been bad even if Fury had had non-hacked helicopters.
M: And Fury is one of the heroes of Cap 2, he's talking about preventing threats before they happen, but also talking about taking out 1000 hostiles a minute, as if that's great bc that's so efficient... Coulson's talking about how every camera is eyes and ears for Shield. It's horrifying that it's so prevalent that there's no need to justify or explain it.
Audience: It's freaky when Fury says that. But right after that, Captain America says, that's not freedom, that's fear. Fury is a good guy but you can't take those lines out of context as the opinion of Cap 2. Cap 2 is ambivalent and confused about the surveillance state, but we're not supposed to be agreeing with that.
M: It's super ambivalent. There are anti-surveillance and anti-drone moments and moments that are worrying in support of that. Fury is a redeemable character even after that moment. The characters are finding their place in corporate america and the CIA, which create this framework of violence and surveillance in the real world...
CG: A lot of our genre shows are cop shows. Or cop show adjacent. Cops are an important part of PoI. Elementary, Agents of Shield. Our genre shows are not problematizing the roles of police enough. It's corrupt cops, if there's corruption, not a corrupt system. I've got a love-hate relationship with PoI, it's missing a lot of opportunities. Based in NYC, the city of stop and frisk. There's ways of surveilling people that's not mass technology infrastructure. Character of Joss Carter is a black female detective and a veteran who was an interrogator. They could've explored so much with her, but they missed so many opportunities. To be a cop in NYC raising a young black male child, working with these two white guys... there's so much potential for a story there and they didn't touch it. Not just talking about big data. It's not just government -- there's that connection with Stark Industries too. It's also if you're going to get stopped and frisked just walking down the street.
Audience: It's a basic assumption of nonprofit fundraising that we do FOIA requests to try to determine who's going to give us money... it's really creepy stuff.
BB: With that corporate link, there's two different scales of surveillance. StrexCorp is surveilling you to sell you things. The Sheriff's Secret Police is your neighbor. In a lot of fandom it's assumed you kinda know who the secret police are. They might be really friendly. They're watching you all the time. The secret government helicopters that aren't very good at their jobs...
M: They've shifted their focus from early on. Early on you're supposed to be afraid of the government helicopters... they've kind of pulled away from that. As it goes on the secret police get a little cozier. It's hard to imagine what it's like to live in Night Vale, I struggle with this as a fanfiction writer. What's it like to have sex when you know someone is watching. Because it's a serial and they change what they're doing as time goes on it's hard to create a unified theory.
Aud: Night Vale: Cecil on getting rid of Strex Corp to go back to the evil they already know about.
M: That's recurring in Night Vale. The monsters you're used to dealing with.
CG: Night Vale started out as what if every conspiracy theory was true. That's why they started out talking about the space war... a lot of the secret police is connected with the ancient evil sleeping underneath the mountain.
[Debate on the existence of mountains]
CG: I'm interested in what's after Strex Corp, what would scare Strex Corp.
BB: I've been thinking about cop shows. As a result of the Revolutions vid playlist... There was a Continuum vid. Some characters are trying to change the past so we don't end up in a corporate future, the heroine is trying not to change the past because she wants to go home. I hope we get to a less ambivalent place about the revolution. The terrorists have really legitimate aims, they want to stop corporate ownership of future America. The show has this idea of omnipresent surveillance, which would be awesome for her as a police officer...
CG: Continuum and PoI, what you mentioned about freedom fighters/terrorists. The Vigilance story in PoI. The myth of the young white tech genius guy. Flashbacks to Harold Finch in his youth -- he is the garage hacker who creates the software. His name is not out there, and that's intentional. Continuum is the garage hacker who becomes a corporate overlord. The people who build tech and create surveillance society infrastructure are white guys with something sympathetic in their past and they just don't think. That's realistic... but there are other people in these fields who aren't part of the story, and the story gets centered around the needs and issues of these [young white tech] guys. In Continuum, there's this zero-sum game between corporate overlords and terrorists. Anon group of folks in PoI, Vigilance. They start out doxxing people, end up killing people. We're introduced to them bc they're running interference on Finch's operation to save people on the "irrelevant" list. They turn out to be a puppet group for a corporate group. They undermine the idea of legitimate resistance to the machine. It was one of the few times they could've dealt with race issues and surveillance. IN NEW YORK. The brother (of the Vigilance character) was falsely accused, in solitary confinement, ends up killing himself. They never push it quite far enough... I'd like to have seen Vigilance be a legitimate group.
M: To go back to your point about the white male genius hacker -- it's frustrating because they're focused on crime. This false idea that the problem with crime is that we don't know that it's going on. That's not the problem! It's not a big secret.
BB: There is violence against women, who knew!
M: The problem with crime (in these shows) is not poverty, it's not police corruption, we need a bigger gun. Eve Sedgwick has this amazing bit about paranoid reading vs reparative reading. Paranoid -- to have justice we just need to tell people about things. Social justice movements -- as soon as we reveal these secret terrible things we'll get justice. That's not true. We live with all these horrible things.
BB: A lot of ppl do not see the problem with the surveillance state or with, say, loyalty cards tracking your info. "I don't care who knows that I buy chocolate bars. I'm not doing anything wrong so why do I care that the govt is watching." The big data surveillance state that we all live in isn't something that you encounter. People are watching what you do in hidden ways. In NV, there's a person in that garbage can. They might interrupt your conversation and tell you you're boring. NV does a good job making it creepy, but... it's visible surveillance, so it makes it easier to oppose, and we don't always connect that with ppl reading your email. I'd like a show where Liberate or Vigilance is portrayed as, maybe problematic, but ... [good, legitimate.]
Audience: On TV it's fun to watch the mavericks and the ppl who break the rules, and I'm thinking of Shield... they do some horrifying shit and that's OK because they can drop some dude in another country without a passport because he was a dick that one time. If you do something bad to Skye we can do anything bad to you that we want.
BB: And Skye was all pro-anarchy but she's joined the machine...
Audience: We like stories about heroes who can get away with things, but media doesn't want to show us people who are ACTUALLY outside the system, ACTUALLY fighting the system.
BB: They're big into not thinking seriously about moral questions. I want them to say, these are our moral principles, we're not going to do that. There have been shows where the central characters were facing these moral questions, it would be awesome if we could torture this guy to get information from him but we can't do that because it would be wrong.
Audience: Scott and Bailey... she looks up a guy she used to date in a database. And they take it very seriously. She's still on the police force but very much with a conversation of "You can't do that, don't do it again," her partner says "You've betrayed my trust."
M: That's a cop show that features women and is serious about ethics.
Aud: And the rules of interrogation. She persuades people to tell her things. That's the way it's supposed to work. They hit the time limit of holding someone, and they let them go. Occasionally they fail, obviously...
BB: The Closer was interesting in that respect too. Somebody punched a suspect and that was really not okay. Oh, that's what interrogation actually should look like! OK!
Audience: I watch an enormous number of British cozy mysteries... Never have I seen the cops use surveillance camera footage. It's like it's not happening. Interlocks with this idea that you rarely see interrogation done correctly. This has an impact on not knowing what your rights are, not knowing you're being surveilled.
CG: Or an American show where using your right to have a lawyer is seen as something frowned upon, gets in the way of the cops doing their job.
Audience: Homicide: Life on the Street is also a good example.
M: That ep in the first season set in the interrogation room... that's incredibly violent, and unethical, but it's portrayed as unethical. It's a very powerful ep about the complexities of interrogation.
Aud: Agents of Shield is deeply hypocritical about lies. Coulson lying to his team is fine. Him being lied to is bad. Miles makes really good points about Shield's disregard for civil liberties, Skye says that Shield doesn't have time for civil liberties. Take a character who has a good point and find some way to undermine/invalidate them.
BB: I like to think about the Marvel Universe... the Marvel Universe is not built around SHIELD which black-bags people. But superheroes, that's a vigilante narrative to begin with.
Audience: Did any of the questions in Cap 2 about surveillance translate into Shield?
BB: Not really?
CG: I'm a big fan of the continuity of the Marvel Universe... the bad pacing of Shield is because they had to time it correctly with Winter Soldier. If they have this long plan to take Shield out, they should not have created a show called Agents of Shield.
BB: "Spies on a Plane."
Audience: In fact the problem is still AGENTS. Even without shield they're still going to have this official authority...
Aud: They're going to keep using that power no matter what's behind them.
CG: Agents of Strex Corp.
Aud: I'd felt so uncomfortable with the vigilante narrative, and probably the actual story I want to see is without the power structure, and then having Fury ask him to rebuild SHIELD...
M: Shield, but secreter!
BB: SHIELD is not supposed to be a state actor. Equivalence of international intelligence seeking with American govt intelligence seeking. Shield is international even though headquartered in DC and everybody speaks American-accented English.
CG: The H in SHIELD stands for Homeland...
BB: It's international? No, it's super American. It's who's watching you. Is the US govt everyone? There used to be agreements about NATO countries surveil each other's citizens so your govt wouldn't be spying on your own citizens but it's OK to spy on other countries.
M: The Sheriff's secret police would turn off your coffeemaker and close your garage door...
For a glowing moment I thought they were gonna restructure Agents of Shield, Skye calling Ward a Nazi... The middle of a TV show is more interesting than the ending because a lot of ambiguities can be up in the air. The ending ends up collapsing that into certainties. AoS should be about breaking the AoS premise, but they're going to bring it back to the original thing.
Aud: I wanted to come back to Maria Hill in Stark Industries... there's a moment in Matt Fraction's Iron Man, his team has been building a nano swarm of robots that they release all over the entire world. It's a physical manifestation of the cloud, it's going to keep all your data. There's an attack somewhere, Tony Stark as Iron Man swoops in and saves people. "What, you think I wasn't looking through those phones?"
Aud: "I'm like Santa Claus, it's great!"
Aud: It's astonishingly pro-surveillance! The hero going "Did you read the privacy policy before you bought my phone?"
CG: I finally broke down and got a smart phone. The cost of data plans is artificially inflated... and it's a constant surveillance machine in your pocket. The metadata from phone calls - researchers could infer ppl dealing with rare diseases, a woman who'd decided to have an abortion. That's the kind of information that your apps can gather about you. An app can't legally gather that kind of information, but if they can infer it...
Aud: In the context of the comic it was not freaky. It seemed like Matt Fraction was presenting that as a good thing.
BB: If you were going to read all the privacy policies you agree to on a regular basis, you'd spend your whole life reading...
Aud: And need a lot more expertise.
BB: Target's tracking of purchases is very sophisticated and they were able to tell women were pregnant before they knew.
Aud: Studying successes isn't as useful as studying failures -- it's the same kind of artificial focus. You miss the times when it silently just works.
Aud: Google Search algorithm found a carjacking ring. They don't even know how it does what it does! They can't even recreate the decision tree that found this. That's a thing that happens now. You can google it.
CG: There's no such thing as anonymized data. Even when they scrub the identities from data, it's still possible to figure them out. Surveillance cameras -- your gait is an unique identifier.
M: Ministry of Silly Walks as anti-surveillance...
BB: I would like to see non-cop shows that are about this stuff. I want the show where Liberate is the protag, and ideally would not blow things up. Orphan Black is awesome but we'll talk about that later.
M: Rachel Duncan as someone who has grown up with surveillance...
CG: Breaking up from that is a really huge and hard thing to do, she hasn't known anything else.
Aud: Does she have a legit concern for her health, too?
[Orphan Black conversation which I don't understand.]
Aud: What plot line would you like to see on these shows?
M: Elementary dealing with the group Everyone in a way that isn't just about Sherlock getting information from them. I'd like the cops to find out about their use of Everyone. Hard convos about the ethics and legality of it. Joan should be less sanguine about illegal hacking. But she's sanguine abt breaking into ppl's houses. I'd like a Sheriff's Secret Police character on Night Vale. I'd like to see them involved in the anti-Strex revolution.
BB: On PoI, I'd like the Machine to decide it's not OK with what it's doing. I'm not sure what the Machine can do as an intelligence... it would be cool, though. I think the Machine is conscious, despite what Harold says.
Aud: What if the Machine started constructing and enforcing its own reality?
CG: I'd like to see a show that centers anti-surveillance resistance not about terrorists or cops... PoI might be going there. I wanted a soft apocalypse. We're about to get one. There's a second machine that's online. It doesn't have the restrictions on Finch's. I want the machine to explore its identity, its own voice, a name. Self-actualization.
BB: Almost Human was a terrible show, so many missed opportunities.
M: If the Machine develops an identity and comes to believe that its identity is evil and becomes a suicidal robot...
Aud: If the Machine decides it's actually going to obey the law!
(no subject)
2/6/14 16:46 (UTC)