I’m a little late as these loudspeakers have been harassing London’s public since last September, but I couldn’t really pass up the opportunity to talk a little about it. In the world’s most surveilled city, London tops out the count at over 4 million CCTV cameras; one camera for every fourteen people. As if that wasn’t enough, now the operators have the ability to reprimand the public for deviantly deemed behavior.

This poses an interesting question in light of the recent video distributed on youtube where a person in Montreal throws a double handful of cigarette butts back into a person’s car that just littered them all over the street. Add private camcorders, cameras, and cell phones and we have become a self surveilled society.

With audio incursion into the public sphere, state surveillence has become even more insidious. With live police on the street, walking a beat, at least the public hade an opportunity to develop a relationship with authority. I won’t go into the problems here with police authority - its a bit too long to discuss, nor do i have the time to do all the research I wish I could on the subject.

However, how long will it be before we are used to being controlled aurally from a faceless pole, with a voice blaring down on us. Say the person in Montreal heard a voice from the pole, and was verbally reprimanded for littering? I think it’s more effective for him to consider his actions as he cleans out his car and clothes.

This post is rambling a little, but I do want to consider what the implications and alternatives are for what I see as a real incursion into the public sphere. The US army has been using sonic warfare since Nicaragua as a form of psyops. Now the police do too.