Ebay helped me sell my beloved Remington Steele car to a man who lived many hours away in a town named Swastika. The swastika originally comes from ancient India but of course that’s not the first thing that came to my mind. I immediately Twittered and Twitpic’d the event and my feelings about it.

After reading “The Spy Who Blogged Me”, I’d think Hal Niedzviecki might call me a surveillance slut as I go blindly putting my private life out into the world.

The thing is, I grew up with paranoid hippie parents who taught me that the whole world was watching us. Blinds closed, lights off, lips sealed. Binoculars, labyrinthian privacy fences and mustard yellow warning signs:

This house guarded by shotgun three nights per week, you guess which three!

Television wasn’t my idiot box, it was my window to a world that was unimaginable from my tiny iceberg lettuce and pretend wood-paneled home. I read through my town library by the time I was 11 and had to settle for my mother’s redundant spy novels or—television.

The television world was one of revelation and display. If it wasn’t shown it didn’t happen. My reality could be parsed into segments combining detective shows, gym-class humiliations and Barbie fashion shows. Leaving my rural microcosm meant a change without a difference: the programs changed but the feeling that to record, to show, to share is to wrest control of reality away from others’ and take off with it. Gathering together my life-bits and scattering them out loud was my route to freedom.

So I twitter. I join in every lifestream aggregation. I make movies and videos of my history and my future. I write blogs where my daily life merges with episodes in my new favourite detective show: social networking news. And my failures become my own jokes. My wedding next winter will even be—you guessed it—streamed and twittered. Stay tuned as more of my life unfolds. Or for me, becomes real.

I’d like to commiserate with those who disdain surveillance and mourn the loss of another world. It’s just that I cannot miss a world I’ve never known. I suggest that if you work hard, perhaps you can live a life too dull and disconnected for anyone to notice you’re even there.

Oh, and by the way it isn’t the Air Miles that’s interesting—it’s the passport. The real system of control? It’s nothing new.

We’ve lived in it for centuries. You can collapse state and capital control into online popular cultural productions. Or, you can blog hard with others who passionately believe in profound cultural shifts, instead of longing for days of yore that exist only in nostalgic romances.

Surveillance Camera Art Gallery by B. Fidler:

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Posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 9:35 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.