At the same time, to a computer your digital identity is more real than the physical one; indeed, if you don't have a computer identity, you don't exist at all. Hence the phenomenon of the invisible consumer and the unreachable company, separated by the impenetrable barrier of the computer.
When, as is the way of technological advance, the monitoring of information is taken away from humans in the name of rationality and given over to algorithms, the wrongness can become surreal. If computers decide who gets passports or is employed, we really are rattling the bars of sociologist Max Weber's bureaucratic "iron cage."
Surveillance is a substitute for trust. At work or as citizens, some people break trust, so surveillance is necessary. The dilemma is that by fostering suspicion and making people feel mistrusted, it increases the chances that they act in ways that seem to justify the surveillance. Lives of Others plays on this tension, before ending on a note of wry individual redemption, a small victory for humanity.
Yet in real life, the nightmare prospect of surveillance managing us rather than the opposite is apparent, and it will take more than fiction to reverse it.
RSS