Technology Is Our Friend ... Except When It Isn't

(Please see update at bottom.) I am grateful to Michael Ham, of the Later On site, for a tip about an amazing photographic site that makes one consequence of technology far more vivid to me than it had been before. If you haven't yet seen it, please follow along.

The technology in question starts with "gigapixel" photography. Gigapixel photos are giant panoramas that themselves consist of hundreds of component mega-pixel digital shots. This means that you can begin with, say, a distant view of London or Seville or San Francisco -- and then keep zooming in until you are looking at individual buildings, cars, street signs, people. It's the effect we've come to take for granted with Google Earth, but with much greater close-in photographic clarity.

When you combine that with better and better automated systems of matching faces to real identities, plus human-run social-network tagging systems, what do you have? The result is something familiar in dystopian sci-fi novels from 1984 onward but until now not part of real life: the impending extinction of the "faceless crowd" and removal of any mask of anonymity as we go about our daily affairs.

If you go to this site, you'll see what I mean. It starts with a big crowd scene in Vancouver, soon before the Stanley Cup riots, which were at this site and presumably involved some of these people. If you start zooming in on the photo, you can get close enough to almost any of the tens of thousands of faces to see who it is.

Here is an idea of the big picture:

And here is a zoomed-in bit from near the very back of the crowd, so far away in the shot above that the masses of people are just a blur. Up close, the people at the back look like this. You can imagine how ones nearer in look:

It's not hard to think of ways these technologies can combine for surveillance-state purposes. For a few implications, see the Daily Beast, Canada.com, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine in a Google-translated English version. Also, if you go to the Gigatag view of the photo above, you will see that, via Facebook, large number of faces in the shot have already been tagged with real identities. By their "friends."

Maybe we'll all start wearing bandanas and hoodies when out in public, following the lead of the recent rioters in London (where monitoring cameras are already everywhere)? More to think about later, but for now the site is worth trying yourself.

UPDATE: For further discussion of the ethical and practical implications of "recognition markets," like the Gigatag effort to have "friends" identify members of the Vancouver crowd, see this 2006 academic paper by Ryan Shaw. One of its conclusions:

>>"Ultimately, the best solution for protecting visual privacy in recognition markets may be education. In particular, people need to be aware of the consequences of indexing images for searchability and of linking images to other kinds of data."<<

My translation: if you have a chance to identify people in crowd shots, don't.

About the Author

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

The former Breitbart editor’s attempt to schedule a provocative event on the liberal campus featuring high-profile conservative speakers didn’t work out as planned.

At first, conservative agitator Milo Yiannopoulos’s Free Speech Week in Berkeley, California, seemed like it might be a major event. Four straight days of provocative events on campus featuring right-wing luminaries, culminating with appearances by conservative writer Ann Coulter and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and all in the heart of one of the most symbolically resonant places Yiannopoulos could have chosen: the campus of University of California, Berkeley, a campus with a longstanding image as a hotbed of left-wing activism where protests shut down an event of his last year.

But things didn’t go according to plan.

Speakers whose names appeared on initial schedules have either pulled out or said they were never planning to go; the campus publication Yiannopoulos is working with, The Berkeley Patriot, never reserved indoor school venues and appeared to pull out Friday afternoon; and Yiannopoulos announced on his Instagram a planned march through campus on Sunday in protest of Berkeley’s supposed clamp-down on free speech. “It’s time to reclaim free speech at UC Berkeley and send shockwaves through the American education system to every other college under liberal tyranny,” Yiannopoulos wrote in his post. The event would have been an important step in reviving Yiannopoulos’s wounded image on the right after a clip of him appearing to defend pedophilia caused him to be barred from CPAC and lose his job as a Breitbart editor in February. Earlier this week, Yiannopoulos told me in a text message that “We will fight until the last man is ejected from the last step on Sproul Plaza.”