The Surveillance Coast: Liberty and the Watchful State

The surfer’s distrust of authority is a healthy instinct in an age of monitoring

The surfer’s instinctive wariness of authority is sometimes dismissed as mere attitude, but as this publication and our friends at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have argued, that distrust is in fact a healthy and necessary instinct in an age when the state’s capacity to watch and control its citizens has grown beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. The libertarian commitment to civil liberties finds a natural ally in the surf community’s suspicion of the watchful state.

The expanding eye

The technological capacity for surveillance has expanded enormously, and with it the temptation for governments and other powerful actors to monitor, track, and record the activities of citizens. Cameras, data collection, location tracking, and the analysis of digital footprints have given the state a power to observe its citizens that would have been the envy of any historical tyrant, and the libertarian tradition, through institutions such as the Cato Institute and Reason, has consistently warned of the dangers this power poses to a free society.

Why surveillance threatens freedom

The danger of pervasive surveillance is not only that it may be abused, though it surely may be, but that its mere existence changes the character of a free society. People who know they are being watched behave differently, becoming more cautious, more conformist, less willing to dissent or to live in ways that might attract official attention. The private sphere, the space in which individuals can think, speak, and act free of observation, is essential to liberty, and its erosion by pervasive surveillance threatens the independence of mind and conduct on which a free society depends.

The libertarian vigilance

The libertarian tradition has always insisted that the burden of justification lies with those who would watch, not with those who would simply be left alone, and that the expansion of state surveillance must be resisted regardless of the good intentions offered in its defence. Power granted to the state for benign purposes does not stay confined to those purposes; it accumulates, expands, and is eventually turned to ends its original advocates never imagined. The vigilance against surveillance is therefore not paranoia but prudence, a recognition that the capacity to watch is a capacity to control, and that liberty requires limits on that capacity however it is justified.

The surfer’s instinct

The surf community’s deep streak of independence, its resistance to authority, its insistence on the freedom to live as one chooses, makes it a natural defender of privacy and civil liberties against the encroachments of the watchful state. The surfer who values the freedom of the open water, unmonitored and unmediated, has an instinctive grasp of why the erosion of privacy matters, and the culture’s suspicion of authority, far from being mere attitude, reflects a sound understanding that freedom requires limits on the power of those who would watch and control. This instinct is a civic virtue in an age of surveillance.

Defending the unwatched space

The defence of privacy and civil liberties is among the most important tasks facing a free society, and it requires the kind of vigilance that the surf community’s anti-authoritarian instinct embodies: a refusal to accept the steady expansion of surveillance, an insistence on limits to the power of the state to watch its citizens, and a commitment to preserving the unwatched space in which free people can live, think, and dissent. The surveillance coast need not be our future; it is a choice, and the surfer’s healthy distrust of authority is exactly the instinct a free society needs to choose otherwise. Liberty depends on limits to the watchful state, and defending those limits is the work of everyone who values freedom.

The ratchet of power

One of the most important insights of the libertarian analysis of state power is the ratchet effect: the tendency of government powers, once granted, to expand and persist rather than to recede. Surveillance capabilities acquired for one purpose are rarely surrendered when that purpose is served; instead they become permanent fixtures, available for new uses their original advocates never contemplated, and the apparatus of monitoring, once built, tends only to grow. This ratchet is why the libertarian tradition insists on resisting the expansion of surveillance at the outset, for powers far easier to grant than to reclaim accumulate over time into a capacity for control that no free society should possess.

The defence against this ratchet is vigilance and the insistence on limits, a refusal to accept the steady normalisation of monitoring and a demand that the burden of justification always rest with those who would watch. The surf community’s anti-authoritarian instinct, its reflexive resistance to being monitored and controlled, is exactly the disposition a free society needs to counter the ratchet of surveillance power, a healthy refusal to surrender privacy in exchange for promises of security or convenience. The preservation of a free society depends on maintaining the unwatched spaces in which individuals can think, speak, and live without the chilling awareness of observation, and the defence of those spaces against the ever-expanding eye of the state is among the most important tasks facing anyone who values liberty. The watchful state is not inevitable; it is resisted, and the surfer’s distrust of authority is a resource for that resistance.

For satire on the surveillance age, readers may enjoy The Onion, watching the watchers since 1988.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/