Smart Cities and the Future of Surveillance

You may keep your secrets from your friends, from your parents,

your children,

your doctor,

even your personal trainer.

But it takes real effort to conceal your thoughts

from Google.

And if that is true today, in future there may be nowhere to

hide. Smart cities will pullulate with sensors

all joined together by the internet of things.

Bollards communing invisibly with lampposts so there is

always a parking space for your electric car, so that no bin

goes unemptied, no street unswept, and the urban

environment is as antiseptic as a Zurich

pharmacy. But this technology

can also be used to keep every citizen

under round-the-clock surveillance.

A future Alexa will pretend

to take orders, but this Alexa will be watching you,

clacking her

tongue and stamping her foot.

In future, voice connectivity will be in every room

and almost every object. Your

mattress will monitor your nightmares, your fridge will beep for more cheese,

your front door will sweep wide the moment you approach like

some silent butler. Your smart meter

will go hustling of its own accord for the cheapest electricity,

and every one of them minutely transcribing your every

habit in tiny electronic shorthand

stored not in their chips or in their innards, nowhere you can find

it, but in some great cloud of data that lowers ever

more oppressively over the human race.