RANT: A HAWK IS A HAWK IS A HAWK

 

THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

THE OTHER DAY, I WAS WATCHING CBC NEWS  when the Federal Privacy commissioner came on expressing his concern that a large real estate holding company had used “facial recognition” surveillance technology to capture images of shoppers in several Canadian malls, “for no apparent purpose and with no justification.” His office is making an official complaint. Today, in Canada, CCTV cameras are increasingly becoming a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape in our cities. From traffic lights to liquor stores to malls and private homes, cameras (and now drones) are increasingly everywhere, and we are being watched, it seems, for much of our waking lives. Neighbourhood stores and streetlamps, crosswalk intersections, home alarms, library foyers, all the new “Cannabis” stores popping up everywhere, body cams and web cams—you get the picture. Thank God for the Coronavirus! At least we can wear masks and have some privacy when we step outside. 

China, often called the “surveillance state”, not surprisingly leads the world with over two hundred million CCTV cameras operating in their country! The United States is a distant second with only 50 million surveillance cameras, and then there is a precipitous drop in the stats to around five million for third-place Germany. I’m happy to report, however, that on a per capita basis, the United States is number one with 15.28 cameras per one hundred individuals versus 14.36 for China. England ranks third with 7.7 cameras. A final bit of eye-glazing statistics estimates that 8 out of the world’s top 10 cities with the greatest number of cameras installed are in China, several containing over one million “eyes”. London makes the list at number nine with over 800,000 CCTV cameras throughout the city. New Delhi ranks tenth.

And then there are cell phone cameras, social media, photo sharing apps countless internet web pages, on-line streaming, and blogs. We are the most photographed and examined generation in history. We truly are homo imago sapien!  Today, we watch ourselves—incessantly, it seems—but what are we really seeing?

 

One of the earliest examples of closed-circuit television in a surveillance application was used during WWII by early, German “missileers”^* to monitor launches of V-2 rockets against England. Until the development of videotape and VCR technology in the 1950s and 60s, along with multiplexing techniques (viewing multiple screens simultaneously), live-viewing was all that CCTV systems could offer. In 1952, British security services used surveillance cameras to monitor visiting Thai royalty to ensure their safety. Gradually, police services in Britain and other countries began using cameras for traffic control, as well as in high-crime areas. In 1985, following an IRA bombing that targeted British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, her protection teams installed the first “large-scale public space surveillance system” (Surveillance) in the seaside town of Bournemouth where the Conservative Party convention was held. Businesses and industry expanded the use of cameras to combat theft and vandalism. Increased demand for CCTV cameras in Britain came in 1993 after the brutal murder of toddler Jamie Bulger, whose kidnapping was captured on fuzzy CCTV images as he was led away by his killers (who, disturbingly, turned out to be two 10-year-old boys.) This footage was repeatedly shown on British television, searing the event in the mind of the public, and prompting demands for more public-space surveillance systems.

In the United States, several major city police force adopted CCTV systems, but like in England, they were used mainly for traffic control. Then, with the rise of digital technologies in the late 1990s, there was a rapid growth in the number of public space cameras worldwide. And after 9/11, police, municipalities, state, and federal governments in the United States and elsewhere installed surveillance systems throughout major cities and public facilities. Today, cameras are everywhere, from cellphones, nanny-cams and body-cams to helicopter gunships, commercial jets, spy planes, drones and satellites. While China has been called a “surveillance state”, Britain, and particularly America, are not far behind. I’ll include here the growth of the intelligence ‘community’ and its proclivity (as evidenced in the Snowden revelations) for wide-spread (and sometimes illegal) surveillance of the public’s digital activities. While not concerned exclusively with images like CCTV cameras are, they nevertheless are part and parcel of the monitoring and viewing of great swaths of people and their lives. And, again, the question must be asked: just what are we seeing with all our electronic “eyes”? What do these images and collected digital data reveal about us and about those who monitor and view us?^**

Say you’re on a windswept dune not far from the cave where you and your clan have been living. Say you’ve just finished digging clams for tonight’s supper. Say you’ve gathered up your tools and thatch-bag of tasty mollusks, and you’re heading home down the well-worn path when you see something strange ahead of you. There’s a man. Or it looks like a man. He’s wearing skins and leggings like you. He’s tall and broad-shouldered. He has two arms and legs and his head has a thick mop of black hair. His long beard stirs crazily in the late afternoon winds. As you get closer, you begin to see details of his face—his round, dark eyes, wide mouth and thick lips. You stop a few paces from him and you look into his face, and he into yours. What do you see? What does he see?

Having watched perhaps too many docummentaries on pre-history, I hope the reader will forgive my little thought experiment. My point is: I think our caveman from times past saw the world and others whom he met differently than we do, today. How so? 

 

I finished John Crowley’s fantasy novel, Beasts, the other day, and I was taken with the imagery he uses around faces and eyes and our human gaze—how we look at the world and are seen—and it’s fascinating when he describes encounters between humans and intelligent beings who are not human, and what happens when they come face-to-face. 

JOHN CROWLEY

I’ll try not to bang-on too much about Crowley’s wonderful second novel, but a couple of excerpts might help to clarify what I’m getting at around seeing and being seen: 

Caddie, a bonded servant, has been bought by “Painter”, a “leo” fleeing agents from the dystopianly-named Union for Social Engineering (“USE”). Painter is a product of genetic engineering—a human-lion hybrid (hence "leo") that has become its own species, in that he and his fellow leos are capable of reproducing, unlike the products of all the other genetic experiments conducted by USE scientists. Painter and his people, who, incidentally, walk upright with mostly human features and without tails ("It's better for sitting.", 23), have been allowed to enter the wider world in a kind of sociological experiment, whereby they are monitored and assessed as to their abilities and the types of interactions they have with humans.

Though calling them “people” is inaccurate according to the scientific dogma of USE. They are a subspecies and a “parasociety”, as USE agent Barron terms them--beings who are neither fully lion nor fully human, but something else, something not yet defined and understood, but nevertheless inferior. And the world the leos now live in, as they travel about in small groups—“prides”, as some might call them—eking out meager livings on the outskirts of human society, that world is an increasingly fractured and broken one.

 

Crowley’s story takes place in the near future, in the “Northern Autonomy”, a mostly autonomous region, one of several in a United States whose federal government now vies to restore central control over powerful regional governments that have arisen in the wake of the collapsing American state. USE is a scientific movement that has become a political force in the federal region whose 'foot soldiers' the ethnologist Loren Casaubon, an acolyte of Painter, characterizes as “Jesuits: militant, dedicated, selfless, expert propagandists, righteous proponents of ends that justified their means.” And the power-hungry federal government he terms a new “Holy Roman Empire.” (14) Crowley depicts Painter as a Christ-like figure, persecuted (and nearly martyred) by USE agents in service of their broader political agenda. Another character, “Reynard”, the fox-human cross-breed⁺ and chief advisor to the Northern Autonomy’s Director, Dr. Jarrell Gregorius, describes Painter as the “King of Beasts”, in contrast to men who tout themselves, Reynard says mockingly, as “the lords of creation.” Reynard goes on to profess fealty to Painter, the highly intelligent and charismatic leo, saying: “‘Of course he has always been my king. No matter how often I have failed him.’ A small cry of pain. ‘Or fooled him.’” (35-6)

Reynard plays the role Judas in the story, and we watch as he struggles against his own explicitly self-interested nature to act for good or ill in the service of a cause greater than himself. (As a singular creature, neither fox nor human, like leos he is something else, and since he is also sterile, he is most like a eunuch in service to a sultan, who acts without the divided loyalties that come with having family and progeny. Reynard is assumed to act rationally in the service of the Northern Authority and its chief political leader. And he does so, as the power behind the throne, until he meets Painter and becomes a disciple.)

There is much story that Crowley carves out around Painter and the humans he comes to influence, and it’s a complex tale of politics, religion, racism and bigotry, truth and deception, and an exploration of what it means to be human. To meet an explicitly non-human, sentient being, like a leo, would certainly be a unique experience, and one we humans have yet to encounter. Parts of Crowley’s story illustrate what I was getting at earlier with my thought experiment about a meeting between two cavemen. I asked: what do the cavemen see? Are they the same type of being? Is the other human? How do they find out? [As a footnote: We should all ask ourselves, with respect to another meeting of an 'other' from centuries past, what did Christopher Columbus see when he set foot on the island of Guanahani that he renamed San Salavador ("Holy Saviour") in 1492? Did he see beings like himself? A different species? Or things of a lesser breed? Ed.]

As Caddie journeys with Painter (we learn he is seeking to rescue Reynard from USE agents when the fox-man’s role in the plot to assassinate Director Gregorius is uncovered), she slowly begins to understand more about the leo, to understand what he sees when he looks at her (and yes, shortly there will be a hot, if awkward, mating between the two), and to discover what she means to him and he to her:

 

“It would be many days before she understood that his direct, fierce stare more often than not looked at nothing; many days till in a fit of rage at being so intently regarded she stuck out her tongue at that gaze, and saw it drifted closed without acknowledging the insult. He wasn’t a man: he meant nothing by it.” (25)          

            

And since we are the only sentient creatures we know of on (or beyond) our earth, we have only each other to meet as equals in order to try and understand who and what we are (though whales, dolphins, elephants and several other animal species, including my cat who watches me closely as I type this, might disagree). For now, we remain lords of our creations.

And today, when we look through our cameras and digitalized networks and computer arrays, what do we see of our world and in all our selves? 

For me, Crowley's use of scenes dedicated to falconry, that occur at the beginning and end of his novel, helps to answer this question. Falconry is the ancient art of “training hawks to hunt in cooperation with a person” (Mirriam-Webster) and Crowley describes, in rich detail, Loren Causabon and Sten, his beloved pupil, as they train their peregrine falcons together. And it is obvious, as the humans train the birds, the birds in turn, are ‘training’ the falconers. The hawks' indivisible ‘hawkness’ demands that the humans make adaptations to their needs. There is an interesting symbiosis occurring between bird and man, a harmony of sorts, a give and take, and the two humans, in order to make the partnership work between themselves and the raptors, must accept that a hawk will always be a hawk. While there can be cooperation between the two species, in the end the hawk’s integral being as a bird of prey must be accepted not just respected. You can train a hawk to accept the “hood”, for example, and to attack upon command, but its basic needs—to fly, to moult, to isolate, to breed and feed, etc., must be on its own terms or you destroy its otherness, what makes it distinct from some clever human artifact or anthropomorphized construction. (Don’t we all feel the basic wrongness when we see dolphins playing in aquariums, bears dancing in rings and lions in cages. Even Tweedy-Bird gotsta fly.)

And to conclude, I only want to say that when we see others—specifically other human beings—again, what are we seeing? Like Crowley’s fractured America, cameras and facial recognition technologies and the various techniques, both old and new, that gather and collate data about increasingly every bit of our lives, our identities, our personhood and our bodies, and then pile them onto what seem like great heaps of broken glass and mirrors, all beg the question: What overlays or distortions do these technologies (and that includes our own internal biases and prejudices through which we 'filter' the world and others we share it with) place upon those gathered images or those understandings data-farmers think they glean? How can they possibly put all the disparate pieces back together in a coherent order? (Short answer: they can’t; they only think they can). Cameras ‘distort’ time and space, for example. As well, only some of our senses are activated when we use them. Can data-‘hooverings’ really inform us  about other people when they are increasingly at remove from the person, and act only to further fragment and distort? At least our two cavemen can club each other over the head when they meet and size each other up, having made up their minds that the other is not human.

 

To put it another way, when we see someone, mediated via facial recognition software or not, do we see a whole, complete individual, powerful and mysterious in their own right, having agency, a being whose humanness demands our respect and acceptance, or do we see just another “consumer” in the making, some 'thing' to be cornered and conned at the local mall? 

Sorry for the long ramble but that's how I roll.

 

Cheers, Jake.   

  

 

 

*The word, “missileers”, was coined during the Cold War to designate military personnel who operate and maintain missile launch batteries. It sounds almost comic; it reminds me of “mouseketeers,” but without the ears. 

 **I miss those innocent days before selfies and TikTok, when it was just a fat, security guard sitting in a room behind the mall, eating doughnuts and staring at a bank of tv screens, watching for shoplifters and purse-snatchers. AI sucks.

 ⁺Reynard is unique, in that he is sterile and cannot breed; he is one-of-a-kind. He is also a trickster figure, brilliant and unpredictable.     

 

 

 

 

“Surveillance & Society CCTV Special”, Eds. Norris, McCahill and Wood: 110-135 http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/cctv.htm © 2004 Surveillance & Society.

 

John Crowley, Beasts. Futura Publication Ltd., 1978. Victor Gollance Ltd. London, 1987.