 Writer Alex Klaushofer reports on a perfectly ordinary development in surveillance – the installation of cameras in the UK’s Sainsbury grocery store chain to ensure that every customer checks every item. This prompted Klaushofer to think back to her experience in Albania, which is still dealing with the psychological toll of its communist past when one in three people in the capital worked for the secret police. She writes in the British Spectator: “The poverty and under-development of Albania thirty years after the collapse of the regime were obvious to me. But I was puzzled by the behavior of some of the Albanians I got to know; there was a guardedness and often an indirect way of talking. Then Ana Stakaj, women’s program manager for the Mary Ward Loreto Foundation, explained the psychological effects of surveillance and it started to make sense. “‘Fear, and poverty and isolation closed the mind, causing it to go in a circle and malfunction,’ she told me. ‘In communism, people were forced even to spy on their brother, and the wife on their husband. So they learned to keep things private and secret, especially thoughts: your thoughts are always secret.’ “I wonder whether we’ve learnt the lessons offered by the authoritarian regimes of the last century: or the living lesson provided by China’s tech-authoritarianism. Do we really understand where using all this new technology so freely is taking us?” Comments are closed.
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