I still get to write op-eds. They are nowhere near as much fun, and, of course, I have no polar bears.
Those Kossacks who have been following my attempts to imitate Will Rogers may be interested to know that polar bear this week was a bigger click magnet than any human celebrity.
Anyway, the op-ed teased below the fleur-de-kos is about the NSA fandango and what government needs to do if they want us to feel more comfortable with the ubiquity of Big Brother.
A dominant metaphor in colonial political science of this generation has come from the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham by way of the French post-modernist, Michel Foucault: the Panopticon, a prison design where the architecture allow constant surveillance by guards, who are unseen by the inmates.
The newest use of the Panopticon metaphor comes from another Brit, Emile Simpson, in an essay about the NSA surveillance controversy. Simpson states the paradox of the NSA as follows: “When an enemy may be anywhere, the state looks everywhere. So how can it infringe on privacy nowhere?”
I’ve written before about how those of us born in Indian country grow up without much personal privacy, but the Panopticon metaphor is not apt because the surveillance is not a line of superior to inferior but rather a web. Everybody knows everybody else’s business, or thinks they do.
It seems to me, observing from my roots rather than European academia, that being watched may be something we could get used to if the government would take watching in the other direction seriously.
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/...