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Fear of police state morphs into society of watchdogs
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Philosophically, what the ghastly shooting in Oakland of a young father by a transit cop shows is how everyday people turned the paranoid fear of invasive government surveillance on its head.
Instead of a lefty-dreaded police state where everyone is monitored by Big Brother – as exemplified by the City of Chicago's installation of police cameras in high-crime neighborhoods – we regularly see civilians shining a light on the powers that be.
You've heard about the New Year's Day confrontation on the Fruitvale BART platform that claimed the life of 22-year-old Oscar Grant of Hayward, and the protest Jan. 7 in downtown Oakland calling for a stronger response by the city to the killing.
The issue very likely wouldn't have gathered such popular momentum if not for the plethora of dramatic videos taken by BART train riders via mobile phone, PDA and what have you.
After 9/11, French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote: "Liberal globalization is coming about in precisely the opposite form – a police-state globalization, a total control, a terror based on 'law-and-order' measures. Deregulation ends up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a fundamentalist society."
The danger of that dystopia is far from unrealized, of course, but with affordable video technology, "they" may be watching us, but we sure are keeping an eye on them, too. So much for know-it-all postmodernists, I guess.
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