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3100 MTA Eyes and 2000 NYPD Requests to Watch

We know we are being watched.  We accept we are being recorded.  We’ve even learned to recognize the multiplicity of cameras that bludgeon our every move now and forevermore.  There are cameras in the lampposts.  There are recording devices in the coffee cups.  The eyes of a peacock’s tail — as it struts along fallow land in the wilds of the Bronx and the niches of Central Park — have become a thousand, Panopticonic, eyes perceiving our every move.

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The Panopticonic Panasonic BL-C230A Watches More than Babies

Keep an eye out for the BL-C230A from Panasonic. If you see one, smile! You’ve just been captured for posterity and somewhere else, perhaps somewhere hundreds of miles away, someone has footage of you. It could be that your image has been instantly e-mailed to the owner of the BL-C230A. It could even be that the owner is watching you as you stare at it, dumbfounded.

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The Uninvited Camera as Art

Last weekend, my mother held a reception in honor of my having gotten married. A little before the reception actually started, a good friend of my mother took what seemed like a thousand pictures of my wife and me with various other people who were there: My parents, my stepparents, my second cousin, and of course just the two of us — in countless configurations. Everything was posed as he told us where to stand and where to look and, in some cases, what to do with our arms. In contrast, the Tate Modern is now featuring an exhibit called Exposed, which is entirely filled with photographs that were taken without the subjects being aware of it at the time.

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Poking the Red Eye

In a great civilian uprising against — the Panopticonic Red Light Camera — those unblinking red eyes are being closed in the polling place by voter fury.

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The Whiteness of Technology

We are a nation of masks — we repress our true feelings and protect our basic being. On the surface, we claim we are all equal and that skin color doesn’t matter and that technology is agnostic, non-atavistic, non-discriminatory and non-evangelistic. Today, we have been forced to know better by peeking out from behind our masks to divine the reality before us.

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