Maybe someone local could explain to me why “living inside the panopticon” has been so widely accepted?
Is this historically derived from loyal trust in the monarch?
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Likely the same reason folks in China and Singapore accept a panopticon. It's a safe, comfortable environment. I feel dramatically safer at 2am in Shanghai than I do in any US city. It's not the trade-off I want for myself, but it's understandable - and were I born there, I might even endorse it.
To the extent that the economy is doing well and folks feel like the country is headed in a positive direction they're generally willing to accept an awful lot from the state.
When that inevitably changes though (due to cyclicality), things tend to get spicy.
Don't suspect this has much to do with the King.
> I feel dramatically safer at 2am in Shanghai than I do in any US city.
To be fair, the US is a poor example. I’d feel safer in any European city at 2am then in a US city in the middle of the day. At least I don’t have to worry about being shot for no reason.¹ In the US I was reminded of that possibility every time I walked into a museum.
¹ https://text.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170593395/kaylin-gillis-new...
Panopticon!?
Why do Americans routinely still believe the UK is an exceptional, universal surveillance state?
There were two studies done (in Kings Lynn in Norfolk and in a section of Putney) that are full of mistakes, that US media has picked up as some kind of indication that the UK is down some dark path the same as China.
People believe every residential street has police cameras (not even close to true) or that the _government_ operates "millions" of cameras (not true), or that there's nowhere you can go in the UK where you can't be immediately followed on camera.
Most of the "millions" of cameras in the studies are, like most of the millions of cameras in the USA, pointing from the back of shop out through the glass at the front. If the police want those they have to ask, on foot, to the manager of the store, and the store manager may require them to have a warrant.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
And then ask yourself: how different is it in the USA?
(Throwaway because I am really done with commenting here, but this CCTV misunderstanding always makes me laugh. Here's a tip: the USA is not really very different. (Except that our police aren't armed to the teeth, you don't get nearly shot to death for going to the wrong house while black, and our politicians don't plan to put prisons next to theme parks to score points)
This always fascinates me too. America has been repeatedly shown to be systematically spying on their citizens via the NSA, make no apologies for it and continue to do so.
But then any mention of the UK and americans are like "how do you live in a surveillance state?!"
Because there's a material difference between the NSA snooping on your metadata, and your local constabulary having video feeds of every corner of your village. Abuses by the NSA are bigger picture things that mostly aren't seen to affect everyday Americans. Abuses by the local constabulary are much more real to the community, like domestic abuse.
Of course, I think a large number of Americans don't have direct exposure to the UK system, and have only seen it misused in popular media, eg Hot Fuzz.
Your comment is basically just whataboutism. Bringing up racism in the US for no reason (in a way that subtlety denies the massive racism problem in the UK/europe) just to deflect from the debate of surveillance powers in the UK is quite the take. Especially when the comment you are replying to seems to be written by an austrian not the american boogeyman.
It's weird that you only focus on the issue of CCTV cameras, when the debate is about much more than that. British authorities are allowed by law to engage in massive surveillance that does not happen even in the US (or at least, not overly and not fully allowed by the law). You might be ok with that, but it's weird to downplay it.
>but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. [..] >Police officers will then be able to access a central search engine known as the "request filter" to retrieve this information. [..] >The key point about this power, though, is that it has no judicial oversight. Access to citizens’ web history will be solely at the discretion of the police, with a specially trained supervising officer approving or denying requests
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13718768/uk-surveillance...
But I guess CCTVs are not as bad as internet discourse says they are, so whatever.
It is historically derived from trust in the government, police and security services. High profile failures aside, that trust has mostly been earned and respected for a long time. It doesn't change the principles or deeper dangers of course but it does affect public perception. Most people simply have bigger things to worry about when they believe these tools are usually being employed with good intentions.
Yes, it’s understandable that most don’t (have the time/energy) to worry.
I’m Austrian though and hence have a deep distrust of any bureaucracy that records “everything” and generally works too well.
I think it’s a fallacy that these systems can’t / won’t ever be exploited on a larger scale (pretty large already telling from the article..)
I think your distrust is probably wise. Even if things are trustworthy today there is always a chance of that changing with a new government tomorrow and history provides too many examples where that didn't end well.
Unfortunately part of the problem is that different types of people experience these systems very differently. I'm unremarkable and unlikely to attract the interest of the authorities by association either so most of the ongoing problems you do see in the news don't tend to affect me or those close to me. I remember how one similarly unremarkable person I know was shocked and quite upset when they were challenged by a huge scary-looking guy to show some kind of ticket while travelling in London even though they had one and hadn't done anything wrong. And then I wonder how often a mid-teens black kid living on the estate 25 metres overhead has been "profiled" by the Met and what their experience of being challenged by authority must feel like.
Until we fix the glaring inequalities in our society there will always be big problems lurking underneath sadly.
The US has a very different intellectual tradition arising from a deliberate act of rebellion and a fairly static constitution. Many European countries have a history of fascist dictatorship. Britain has neither, so in my view is somewhat lackadaisical about the risks of state power. We’re rightly proud that we didn’t succumb as Italy or Germany did, but of course that means that dictatorship is something that happens to other people or comes from Brussels. It’s true that our electoral democracy is relatively safe (redrawing of constituencies is normal, new ID card requirements are dubiously motivated) but that leaves a lot of scope for far more intrusion with far less constitutional oversight than many other Western liberal states. Notably, there is less scepticism about state power in other democracies where there is a similar lack of scepticism for historical reasons—e.g., France, where the legacy of Vichy is often downplayed relative to the resistance, or Japan, which never really confronted its past.
Look up 'collective action problem'.