I watched a video on Twitter of a Russian tank rolling down an urban street somewhere in Ukraine. The man recording the video — presumably on his phone — from several stories up in his apartment building kept rolling the camera as the tank swiveled its turret over and raised its cannon up toward his window and fired. The shot was a bit off target. It hit the next door unit, turning the nearby windows and walls into a cloud of debris that blew out from the building. The man cursed and ducked away back into his apartment, and the video stopped.
The camera has had a profound influence on human behavior ever since it was invented. It takes the need to construct an ego mask for social situations — evolved to address a person or a family or at most a moderate crowd in the village square — and makes one’s theoretical audience the entirety of humanity. It broadcasts you, gives you global reach, but it also exposes you. Nowadays that exposure comes with metadata, and a face that can be scanned instantaneously to reveal your identity and run that identity through countless networks and databases. The exposure also now comes with geotracking, thus providing one of the most important aspects of intelligence on any battlefield: knowing where your enemy is.
I’m not advocating firing upon civilians toting phone cameras, and the usual caveats about my having never been near an active war zone apply here. But armed conflict is the most extreme example we have of coordinated risk calculation — real and perceived cost/benefit of the most consequential order — and technology has changed the data sets and outcomes of those calculations constantly throughout human history.
Much as the industrial revolution brought the engine of warmaking to the cities — and thus the clouds of bombers that came to destroy them — so too has the digtial revolution enlisted us all in the conflict sphere. Treat your iPhone camera accordingly.
Comments