Voyeurism, Celebrity and Surveillance: A Straight Line

Many years ago, while sitting somewhat mournfully in a dentist’s office after I had returned from overseas, I chanced upon a magazine in the waiting room: People. I leafed through a few pages of the new publication, recently launched, and which I’d never heard about, before tossing it back, shaking my head and saying to myself ‘This won’t go anywhere.’

Many years after that episode, I had heard about the new website Facebook that had elbowed its way onto the online scene, and I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t think this will fly.’ I myself eventually joined Facebook for a total of five days before trying to delete my membership. I don’t believe it’s possible to delete a Facebook account, but I tried. In any case, when I read about posts discussing supermarket chips and breakfast choices, I had had enough.

My judgment about what appeals to the general public is obviously awful. People went on to become a juggernaut, and Facebook, well, Facebook is humming along quite dominantly.

People – real people, not the mag – seem endlessly curious about the lives of others, particularly those who have the advantages of wealth and notoriety. It’s not far different from how I imagine the ancient Greeks engaged with the intrigues of the Olympic gods and goddesses. Fair enough. But this is itself a reflection of the apparently endless human fascination with itself.

As I open up my browser and delve into YouTube, there are countless heads and faces, countless opinions, countless human images accorded varying degrees of importance and themselves a kind of magnet for our wandering attention.

Then too, with the advent of the internet, virtually everything is recorded – the ‘lifelog’ that became the precursor to Facebook doesn’t let any of us get away with anything, it seems. I was pulled over by the police a few years ago while making a home visit to a patient in a poorer part of the region. The officer was genial and I said something like, ‘I can’t remember the last time I had a traffic violation’. He replied, ‘You were given a speeding ticket in 2008’ (10 years before).

Oh, well.

I remember as a kid playing schoolyard basketball not far from where our basketball heroes, the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers played at the Spectrum, and fantasizing about having a camera to record our keen exploits on the court, with replays of course. Now, since everyone has a phone camera in hand, those dreams can be realized quite easily, though it’s the very last thing I’d desire.

It’s as if there is nothing we humans do that should not be recorded, preferably in images, for the delight (?) of everyone, or anyone, or ourselves ... that no calm and blissful, or beautifully pleasurable, or quietly nice moment – no meal, no stroll along a beach, no three-point shot, no hike in the woods, no curious new amalgamation of cooking spices devised on the spur of the moment – in short, it seems that nothing can not be recorded, displayed, posted and put about universally.

There is always and everywhere an audience, there’s always a little bird on our shoulders chirping to remind us to make a record of our every move. We are now all celebrities, I suppose, or all worthy of being noticed and marked down for notice in the stream of our glory.

We have cheerfully and voluntarily surrendered our privacies for the permanently fleeting taste of fame. To what end?

I think we know. It’s the very end the State, or the Governing Globalist Cabal, or whatever you wish to call the Establishment Authorities, want: an absolute and total record of all of our activities, movements and even thoughts.

Vax passes, health records, Google Map timelines, credit card transactions tagged at specific locations, bank records revealing every purchase – all augmented by our own personally crafted records of our incredibly fascinating daily lives. We’ve gotten what we, in our naive and splendid collective narcissism, deserve.

I like privacy. I like living in answer to nobody but myself. I like enjoying a beautiful moment without the itch to ‘preserve’ it by disturbing the field of experience. I don’t want to see blogs of every friend’s or relative’s outings, of every nook and cranny of their journey to the supermarket or the summit of Mount Everest. They can tell me about it when I meet up with them – if, that is, they are capable of a pleasant and articulate talk, in private.

And as for the Gods and Goddesses of Hollywood and the Stage of Political Theatre, I wish they’d go about their daily business without preening and shouting. Nobody’s all that beautiful or exciting or smart all day long.

We should be turning our heads and attentions away from exhibitionists and towards good works and good deeds, and towards the great godliness that transcends human pettiness and folly.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

August 2024