Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom

Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei has been living in our future. His movements are restricted and he is structurally being watched by the government. He lives in a world without privacy. A world without privacy is a world without freedom.

He is one of the most important artists in the world. You probably know him through his contribution to the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing.

The Bird’s Nest

Or because of the way he deconstructed the Western trade relationship with China and its labor conditions in his masterful installation at the Tate Modern in London where he put millions of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds on display.

Sunflower seeds in the Tate

Ai Weiwei is very outspoken about the Chinese government and its freedom limiting policies. On April 3rd 2011 the Chinese government had enough and arrested him on trumped up charges of tax evasion.

For more than 65 days he was locked in a small cell with two guards from the People’s Liberation Army watching him 24/7 from up close. They even stayed on his side when he showered or went to the toilet.

In the cell

At the Venice Biennale he showcased six large metal boxes recreating scenes from his imprisonment. As a visitor you are forced in the role of a person watching the guards as they watch Ai Weiwei.

The Venice Biennale

After 81 days of staying in a cell he was released and could return to his home and studio in Beijing. His freedom was very limited: they took away his passport, put him under house arrest, forbid him to talk with journalists about his arrest, forced him to stop using social media and put up camera’s all around his house.

Andreas Johnsen, a Danish filmmaker, has made a fantastic documentary about the first year of house arrest. This is the trailer of ‘Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case’:

A fascinating element of the documentary is that you can see Ai Weiwei constantly experimenting with coping strategies for when you are under permanent surveillance. At some point, for example, he decided to put up four cameras inside his house and livestream his life to the Internet. This made the authorities very nervous and within a few days the ‘WeiWeiCam’ was taken offline.

Close to his house there is a parking lot where Ai Weiwei regularly catches some fresh air and walks in circles to stay in shape. He knows he is being watched and is constantly on the lookout for the people watching him. In a very funny scene he sees two undercover policemen observing him from a terrace on the first floor of a restaurant. He rushes into the restaurant and climbs the stairs. He stands next to the table that seats the agents, who at this point try and hide their tele-lensed cameras and look very uncomfortable. Ai Weiwei turns to the camera and says: “If you had to keep a watch on me, wouldn’t this be the ideal spot?”

This scene shows how being responsible for watching somebody isn’t a pleasant job at all. The young boys that had to guard Ai Weiwei in his cell had to stand completely still, weren’t allowed to talk and couldn’t even blink their eyes. According to Ai Weiwei their bones made cracking noises when they were finally allowed to move again at the end of their shift. This obviously is an inhumane practice and I wasn’t surprised to learn that these boys, even though there were cameras everywhere, still found a way to communicate with Ai Weiwei and regain some of their humanity. During the few moments that there was some movement in the cell, like when walking to the shower, they asked him questions with their lips tightly closed. Just like ventriloquists.

The people watching are, in some ways, imprisoned too. Gavin John Douglas Smith, in an article titled “Empowered watchers or disempowered workers”, convincingly shows how powerless most CCTV-operators feel. They are forced to look at situations without any way of influencing them, whenever something important happens they are pushed aside by somebody higher in rank, and they have zero freedom as they have to strictly follow procedure. They are actually being used as a small piece of human cognitive processing inside a giant automated surveillance system. They have to do the pattern recognition that computers aren’t capable of yet. We’ll get back to this theme later on.

Of course Ai Weiwei’s current life isn’t completely the same as our future lives. He is permanently and actively watched, whereas we will be permanently and passively watched. He is a public persona with hundreds of thousands of followers, so the Chinese government has to be a bit careful with him. That won’t be the case for most of us. But for me it is a fact that, unless we do something, our world will look more and more like his world. This is Ai Weiwei on how that feels: