Download Me: A Hitchhiker’s Guide through the Dystopian Future
Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: “A considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance’, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure prompt obedience of the people...” Obedience is a pillar of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a building with a tower at the center from which it is possible to see each cell in which a prisoner is incarcerated. This structure induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power, however, the power is visible yet unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower but never knows from where he is being observed. In modern times, we might classify this gaze as a ‘synopticon’ where the ‘many are watching the few’ or even ‘polyopticon’ where individuals are being monitored, critiqued and managed by everyone through technology and media.
A recent discussion with a friend made me ponder what the future brings with this constant surveillance and the ubiquity of social media and technology. Apps are increasingly made with a key feature of having a rating system. Don’t like your Uber driver? Rate him with a smashingly bad review and they will get that master label for life. Did that perfect minimalistic Air BnB serve you well or did they not have the top of the line Temper-pedic mattress? Stamp them with that rotten review again. These ratings become automatic and subconscious as we are coerced into blindly doing them every single time we have an experience. But what profound implications will these ratings have in the future? Sure, there are benefits of constant monitoring, such as stopping you from having an unpleasant ride home from the bar or enhancing your night’s sleep on that week vacation you practically begged to get. What do you have to lose? Well, these ratings could become entrenched into your identity and potentially hinder your job opportunities, ostracize your social life and tarnish your reputation. Much like China’s proposed “Citizen Score” a “new universal reputation score, tied to every person in the country’s nation ID number and based on such factors as political compliance, hobbies, shopping and whether you play videogames.” If you didn’t read the article, check it out here. Essentially, a system in which every activity you do is rated and you are given a score, like a credit score from a bank but it does not stop at your financial endeavours but bleeds into every part of your life. Your score is calculated by your activities and the activities of the people in your social ‘graph’; you better not be fraternizing with the wrong crowd. It is these types of activities that people in society are engaged in that will, as I propose, inevitably lead to the ‘downloadable person’. Imagine a world where you no longer walk into a room full of strangers because everybody is identifiable by a click of a button through an app that connects all. You will never struggle with a conversation started because you could look up that select person’s activities, hobbies etc. You could walk into a restaurant and download every person in it and see every hobby, activity, thought and utterance that each individual in that venue had. As individuals in society are becoming increasingly connected to their mobile devices, this type of ‘downloadablity’ will be an interesting addition to an already (ironically) disconnected society.
