volterator

It just tickles me, so I'm posting it again.

"In the case of Hackney Council , the library budget was sidelined as the surveillance network grew."

Inflammable means flammable? What a country.

I've never heard the experience of walking through afternoon city streets, beyond the shopping precinct, more accurately summed up.

"The earliest CCTV cameras were at the forefront of the paradigm shift brought about by recent new technology. The sites they surveyed introduced the idea of high security to the everyday. With privatisation, public buildings became more withdrawn; the addition of identity passes, access codes and guards turned business life into something more akin to a military state of alert. In his book Terminal Architecture (1998), Martin Pawley called these the first buildings of the digital age, rendering architecture redundant by their anonymity, leaving everything to the imagination because anything could be going on in the box."

Also,

"But the real explanation for the CCTV phenomenon is not futuristic, nor is it Orwellian or imaginative. It can be found in solutions of the sort served by Midsomer Murders: a familiar story of greed, commerce, land speculation and local politics, as councils turned from administrative backwaters into ambitious, driven and unaccountable organisations with no shortage of funds."

I refer you back to our first quote above. Doublespeak FTW. Sounds like it is, but it is also. Complexity eh? Enemy of journalism.

"To date, no novelist or film-maker has explored properly beneath the surface of this new technology. Surveillance in art and cinema remains a conceit. The subject resists embellishment and irony (though Banksy tried, by sticking a CCTV camera in a Constable landscape)."

Now try harder, you're a journalist. What's more, you're a journalist and filmmaker who has worked with Iain Sinclair.