Surveillance and Sensibility

Public life when everything can be seen (and altered) in real time.

Recently, New York City opened a portal to Dublin. Really, it's a giant, two way flatscreen display, designed to look like the gateway in Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever,” but you if you can’t jump through the thing and materialize in Ireland, it’s not a portal. It looks pretty cool, but is unremarkable in an age where typical office meetings are held this way. In a world besot with screens, we’re given a screen as public art.

The portal was created by Benediktas Gylys and is funded by a collaboration between Dublin's city council and a New York business association called the Flat Iron NoMad Partnership. It is intended, to paraphrase The Hudsucker Proxy, really bring people together, even if it keeps them apart, spatially.

Do not taunt happy fun portal...

It didn't take long for an OnlyFans model from New York to flash her chesticles at James Joyce's city of statues, declaring poetically that she wanted the Irish to see her "homegrown, New York potatoes." In our coarse society, people no longer know more evocative terms like “fried eggs” or “sweater puppies.”

The portal’s sponsors were publicly appalled and this, many pointed out, is why we can’t have nice things. In legal terms, it is entirely acceptable for women, men and nonbinary people to go topless in public. In Times Square, a guitar strumming man wears nothing but tights whiteys, cowboy boots, a hat and sunglasses. Since shirtless New Yorkers were here first, the pieties of portal purveyors seem a minor concern.

Also, public art should not turn public spaces into protected museum galleries. Tony Rosenthal’s big, rotating cube in the ground at Astor Place is there for the amusement of anybody who wants to spin it or just hang out in its shade. If you put a big raging bronze bull in the Financial District, you can't get mad when people take selfies with their heads under its Rocky Mountain oysters. If you write on a wall, you accept that somebody might write over it. Public art is for public use.

Accepting that there’s no expectation of privacy in public spaces and that most every inch of New York City is under public or private surveillance (or both), the portal actually intrudes on the public in ways that other public art, like the static sculptures on Broadway south of 42nd street, do not. If I bike by the portal, which I did when I took the photo above, my image is transmitted to Dublin without my consent.

The portal people don’t want New Yorkers to flash Dubliners, which is something they have no right to expect, and they also expect that passersby will be part of their art project, whether they want to or not. And, in 2024, the portaligencia can enforce their will, using artificial intelligence. They are now using an AI to detect and blur any potato play before the Dubliners can see it. People can be crass, but the portal will not abide.

This has implications that go well beyond the minor issue of portal-inspired exhibitionism, and we’ll get to that shortly. First, how did we get here? The idea that there’s no right to privacy in public spaces is old and fundamental to law in the United States. Your neighbor can tattle on you. Business owners can keep track of you. The police can film your public behavior.

This all took on new significance when portable video recorders became widely available and affordable. We tend to think about the Rodney King assault and the Lost Angeles Riots as an important moment in the development of surveillance culture. But there's another cultural touchstone worth considering and yes, it involves boobs.

A few years ago, a friend enlisted me to help research a documentary about the Girls Gone Wild video franchise. These were soft porn videos sold on late night television that mostly featured drunk, college-aged women flashing body parts. It's the forerunner of OnlyFans except now the performers can set their prices and collect the money. The girls in these videos were unpaid and the producers profited for years off of this footage, which they cut and re-cut for sales around the world.

At that point, the Girls Gone Wild people were doing the bare minimum of pretending to check IDs and to get people to sign releases. But they started out with "found" footage or footage taken in public. Rather than doing the work of talking to women and getting consent, they just went to New Orleans, where women take their tops off on Bourbon Street, shot the footage and took it back for editing.

Like the portalians, these sleazy video producers turned people’s public behavior into their own art and a lot of young women, thinking they were cutting loose in New Orleans in ways that would be forgotten or one day laughed about, were commoditized and even ridiculed. I interviewed many of them, decades later, and even those without regrets were annoyed that somebody else made all the money while they got plastic beads and well shots.

Well the Girls Gone Wild guys could do this now, in any city in America, and if the people walking down the street aren’t taking their clothes off, they can probably use software to make it seem like they did, in real time. It also means that any surveillance camera could not make it look like anybody has committed a crime, again in real time. Maybe that’s far fetched.

Here’s what isn’t — if the portal priests can decide what New York and Dublin see, then much better capitalized corporations can really take control of speech and expression in real time. Like, a new generation of AI-powered phones can render one language into another as the words are spoken. But a phone company or manufacturer could easily say, "We don't want to translate misinformation, or dangerous ideas or even things that don't reflect the values of the Qualcomm corporation." You might be wondering why they would bother, but if there’s a public health emergency or a war or an election, companies might find themselves under a lot of government pressure to do that, and they now have the technology.

We are entering a new surveillance society that has evolved from passive and backward looking to real-time and editable. Flashing a public art work is a pretty minor and insignificant act of civil disobedience, but your political statement or protest could easily be the next thing that some AI sanitizes. Because this art isn’t there for you, you’re there for it.