So how might human-machine symbiosis in the policy realm prove discomfiting? Consider, for example, Choe Sang-Hun’s fascinating report on “South Korea’s growing ranks of camera-toting bounty hunters“: 

Bounties have a history in South Korea; for decades, the government has offered generous rewards to people who turned in North Korean spies. But in recent years, various government agencies have set up similar programs for anyone reporting mainly petty crimes, some as minor as a motorist tossing a cigarette butt out the window. …

There are no reliable numbers of people who have taken up the work since governments at all levels have their own programs, but the phenomenon is large enough that it has spawned a new industry: schools set up to train aspiring paparazzi.

The outsourcing of law enforcement has also been something of a boon for local governments. Not only can they save money on hiring officers, but they say the fines imposed on offenders generally outstrip the rewards paid to informers. (The reward for reporting illegal garbage dumping: about $40. The fine: about 10 times as much.)

For most infractions, rewards can range from as little as about $5 (reporting a cigarette tosser) to as much as $850 (turning in an unlicensed seller of livestock). But there are possibilities for windfalls. Seoul city government, for instance, promises up to $1.7 million for reports of major corruption involving its own staff members. [Emphasis added]

On one level, I find this completely awesome: South Korea is crowdsourcing law enforcement and in the process lowering its cost! For cheapskates, that’s no small matter. And in doing so, perhaps the government can build a better database that can help shape better deterrence/prevention strategies — an example of the human-machine symbiosis O’Reilly references above. Yet there is something somewhat alarming about this level of mutual surveillance. In traditional societies, i.e., in societies in which social networks are primarily kin-based, “mutual surveillance” of a kind is a way of life that enforces various social norms. To some extent, the rise of family disruption and the attendant social consequences, including the crime explosion, represent the breakdown of this kind of “mutual surveillance” in a more atomized, urbanized society, a trend that had both positive and negative consequences.

Now, however, we’re bringing the gesellschaft in to do the work that had once been done by the gemeinschaft. That is in a sense the point of social insurance: to socialize functions that had once been the sole preserve of multigenerational kinship networks, to at least partially redress the inequalities created by varying sensibilities (some are more capable of passing the “marshmallow test” than others) and circumstances. Formalized, routinized mutual surveillance of the kind we see in South Korea might represent the state’s effort to correct for the failure to shame to do its job (of shaming people into fulfilling their obligations as citizens and as human beings) sufficiently well. 

If nothing else, mutual surveillance might incline us to eliminate laws that we feel uncomfortable enforcing. The proliferation of laws criminalizing various kinds of behavior has been aided and abetted by the knowledge and the conviction that the enforcement resources of the state are limited, and that as a result most “crimes” will go unpunished — unless, that is, the crimes are perpetrated by members of culturally disfavored groups that tend to be the object of our limited enforcement resources. To be more explicit about this, consider the contrast between the upper-middle-class marijuana smokers of Manhattan and their less privileged counterparts.

As our ability to enforce our laws gets better, we need to think seriously about expanding our freedoms after years when nanny-statists have been fighting to “costlessly” shrink them.  

Jamais Cascio reminded me via Twitter that he coined the term “the participatory panopticon” some years ago, and as you can see it is very salient to this discussion:

The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century model for a prison in which all inmates could be watched at all times. The term has in more recent years come to have a broader meaning, that of a world in which all of us are under constant surveillance. The proliferation of video gear in the hands of governments and corporations feeds a not unreasonable fear of the panopticon. The dramatic reduction in size of video cameras and the addition of tools for digital analysis have further enhanced that fear. (Charlie Stross, in his 2002 essay “The Panopticon Singularity,” expands on this notion, spelling out the various new tools for relentless observation.)

But in the world of the participatory panopticon, this constant surveillance is done by the citizens themselves, and is done by choice. It’s not imposed on us by a malevolent bureaucracy or faceless corporations. The participatory panopticon will be the emergent result of myriad independent rational decisions, a bottom-up version of the constantly watched society.

This day is coming not because of some distant breakthrough or revolution. The breakthroughs are already happening. The revolution has already taken place.

Cascio also spoke of how these technologies might serve the cause of limiting state power:

This notion of individual citizens keeping a technological eye on the people in charge is referred to as “sousveillance,” a recent neologism meaning “watching from below” — in comparison to “surveillance,” meaning “watching from above.” Proponents of the notion see it as an equalizer, making it possible for individual citizens to keep tabs on those in charge. For the sousveillance movement, if the question is “who watches the watchmen?” the answer is “all of us.”

Cascio is always worth reading.