When the State Reaches for Harder Tools

I was paying for my shopping last week at the supermarket by the station. The machine beeped and then asked me to look at it. A small camera above the screen. It wanted my face. I do not remember agreeing to this. It may be that I did, somewhere, in some small print years ago. It may be that nobody asked. I do not know. I looked, and the machine let me pay.

On the way out of the station that morning, the gates had not opened for the woman in front of me. She held her phone to the reader a second time, and a third, and the gates stayed shut. An attendant in a high-visibility jacket was standing a few yards away. She looked at the woman, but only for a moment. Then she looked back at the screen in her hand, which was telling her something about the woman that the woman could not see. She did not look up again until the woman had turned and walked back the way she came.

Neither of these things, on its own, is a crisis. Together they are a small glimpse of something larger.

The same week as the supermarket, I was walking past Jean's house — Jean has lived on my road for thirty years, longer than I have — and she had a new light above her door. A camera inside the light. She saw me notice it and came out to explain, not embarrassed but quick, the way people explain things they have thought about carefully. She said two parcels had gone missing. She said the girl across the way had had someone try her door in the afternoon. She said the camera sent a notification to her phone whenever anything moved on her path. I said that was clever. She said yes.

I have known Jean for twenty years. She used to leave her back door unlocked during the day because the postman had her parcels if she was out and she did not want to make him stand there. She and the postman have both retired. The postmen change too often now to know. The parcels are brought by different companies, in different vans, every week. Nobody walks the same route twice. It is not unreasonable, what Jean has done. It is a small thing she would not have needed to do thirty years ago. She has made it because what used to be carried between her and the people on her street, quietly, has to be carried now by a device she paid sixty pounds for.

What the state is beginning to do, on its scale, is what Jean has already done on hers.

When the pressures have released, and the sorting has deepened, and the money and the people have begun to move, the state finds itself in trouble. Its old tools — shared stories, trust, broadly accepted laws — depended on a shared substrate that is no longer there. It reaches for newer tools, which do not depend on shared trust at all.

Surveillance of what people write to each other. Monitoring of what money moves where. Identity systems tied to your daily activities. Automatic enforcement of rules that used to require a human to notice the breach.

No government chose these tools because it preferred them. They chose them because they were what was available. I suspect most governments facing this, of any political colour, would reach for the same tools, because the tools are what the moment offers.

When the voluntary cooperation of a society has faded, the state has one remaining way to keep things together, and that way is force. Force, in our time, looks like digital control.

Each expansion of the tools is explained by a specific event. Each would have been unacceptable ten years earlier. In time, the ordinary citizen lives inside a monitoring structure their grandparents would have named with the names they used for their enemies.

The loudest voices against the surveillance state are often people who thought the old voluntary cooperation would last forever without anyone maintaining it. The loudest voices in favour are often people who think the surveillance will be used only on their enemies. It will be used on them eventually. The state does not care whose tribe it is watching.

A state using these tools cannot easily put them down. The tools outlast any particular government. They become part of how the country is run.

This, I think, is the kind of state we are quietly becoming. On many sides, in many countries. The details differ. The shape, as far as I can see it, is broadly the same.