Harvest Moon

The invention of the camera and then, in the last century, the advent of audio and video recording gave rise to some of our classic tales of total surveillance, the dystopian vision of a society in which everyone's every act was observed and recorded. And as these technologies have improved and miniaturized, as our electronic brains have grown in capability and sophistication, it sometimes seems, when standing in front of an ATM's electronic eye or being photo'd by a traffic camera at a red light or, say, living in London, that to a degree the nightmare is no dream at all. By the same token, though, the very ubiquity of such surveillance, the sheer volume of information, has made the process of scooping up pebbles into the more difficult task of squeezing handfuls of sand. Every children's toy now records DV, and though it seemed inordinately creepy when premiered, a program like the unlamented Total Information Awareness project of our darling DARPA now seem less hubristically totalitarian than merely foolish. As the familiar illustrative example reminds us: to make a completely accurate map of a coastline, one must in fact recreate the whole coastline. To miniaturize is to lose resolution, information. To be totally aware of the information on the Internet is to be the Internet. And we all know what happens then.

As the volume of information in our non-possession has come to resemble an ocean ecology far more than a filing cabinet, full of rich zones and dead ones, bright shallows and abysmal depths, the clear reality is that there is no clear reality. We can cast nets, but nets are more hole than rope. When we go bonkers about this or that threat slipping through the cracks and demand to know why we didn't know more, know it sooner, know it better, and know it faster, we ignore the plain diagnosis: the problem isn't too little information, but too much. The problem isn't that we can't collect it. We can. We do. We have. The problem is that we can't make sense of it. It can no longer be organized, sorted, collated, cross-referenced, and made to cohere. There is a certain universal principle at work here, an inexorable fact of uncertainty. You just can't know everything. The desire for total awareness and the attendant desire for absolute control that are the twin pillars of our relentless, also futile, push for total security are, to reuse a metaphor, built on sand. It keeps slipping and shifting. Our "intelligence" points us in one direction, and suddenly we are forced to wheel in another. We have no perspective. A minor and utterly failed plot ignites a reaction as if to a catastrophe. Our attempted cure for the perceived ill of too little knowledge inadvertently feeds the actual syndrome of too much.