Sabrina DelMonaco
On April 9th, 2019, Vanity Fair published an article called "Coronavirus Surveillance Is Entering Dystopian Territory," where author Eric Lutz describes how the police department of Elizabeth, New Jersey is encouraging social distancing during our current COVID-19 pandemic. The police posted on Facebook that they plan to use drones with voice capabilities to tell people to "STOP gathering, disperse and go home." A few days later, the Facebook account posted a follow-up that asserted that "We are just trying to save lives, not trying to be big brother... There is no recording and no pictures being taken, it is a tool of encouragement to follow the rules.” This second post seemingly emerged in response to residents' privacy concerns, of which Lutz situates among the national discussion about privacy in the time of COVID-19. He concludes his article with a quote from an article by Thomas Gaulkin, who writes that "If drones do begin to hover over US streets to help control this pandemic, it will be yet another visible reminder that we’ve entered a public health Twilight Zone where Americans have no better option than to embrace what was once only imaginable, and never real."
In articles like this one, the author and their publisher take advantage of our knee-jerk panic when the words "dystopian" and "surveillance" are connected in order to garner traffic. While Lutz's article avoids the typical clickbait trope that asks its audience if fiction like the Twilight Zone "predicted" our real-life circumstances, he still evokes these fears through the headline's use of "dystopia," as well as his use of a quote that invokes the Twilight Zone.
Part of the appeal of articles like these also stems from the siren song of recognition. Surveillance is often conceptualized via dystopian iconography that is already manifest in fiction: Big Brother, precogs, sentinels, etc. In tenuous times like these, dystopian media becomes a touchstone for us to interpret our current moment. It may also help us establish boundaries as we respond to COVID-19: Are we prepared to put sentinels à la The Matrix into Elizabeth, New Jersey?
(I can't help but add that it's for this reason that I'm so irked by articles that suggest dystopian authors are prophets. If certain forms of surveillance reflect iconography in fiction, I have no doubt that it's because the content informed its creators.)
II. The American Constitution, Race, & Surveillance
Another, more tangible way we shape our response to COVID-19 is through how we interpret the American Constitution. On April 13th, 2020, former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee gave Fox & Friends his response to Dr. Fauci's quarantine timeline.
First, while it isn't relevant to surveillance, I'm dropping a quote of his that I think is especially indicative of both the of American conservative mindset and the faults of representative democracy:
"I think on one hand we listen to the health experts... but none of those people have been elected. I just wanna remind... All of us something. We live in a democracy. We live in a country where we elect our leaders to make decisions. We do not relegate, delegate, and give over those decisions to people no matter how smart they are. We don't give them to people who havent been elected by we the people. And ultimately, while I respect what they're telling us and we need to listen carefully, these are decisions that are gonna be made by the president, and by the fifty governors of the states, and they make them on what's best for their population and balancing the health concerns with the fact that right now we've got millions of people out of work, our economy is tanked, and it is really threatening the civil liberties of a lot of people."
Huckabee continues to say that, “That is a concern to me that I don’t hear enough about — how we are shredding the Constitution by telling people such things as you can’t sit in a car by yourself, you’re going to get arrested, you can’t drive up to a church in your own vehicle, and the closest contact you have is with the police officer who comes and tells us you can’t do it." It is ironic that Huckabee uses the scenario that one might be stopped while driving as an example of a gross violation of one's civil liberty, as we know that Black people are needlessly pulled over while driving at such a rate that the phenomenon has its own idiom: Driving While Black. The only unique phenomenon in Huckabee's scenario is that the police interaction could be the "closest contact you have." Ultimately, it's clear that the "you" in Huckabee's statement addresses white people, which may be why, to Huckabee, this "oughta scare the daylights out of us for the long-term future." Not only is Huckabee's response indicative of how our idea of civil liberties are distinctly racialized, but it is also indicative of what may be most terrifying about COVID-19: The virus's indiscriminate spread.