Are You Watching Closely?

Credit: zabou.me

With a recent pilot scheme to film passengers in the back of taxis set to be launched in the Capital, Edinburgh-dwellers were immediately at their computers, furiously bashing the keyboard in a neck-and-neck race to determine who could comment the fastest. However, with observations such as ‘You’d need a very fast recording speed to capture the meter going round’, it seems Scots have rather failed to grasp the big picture.

And, admittedly, this is not the first time Scotland, or Britain in general for that matter, has managed to overlook the warning signs. Take Orwell’s vision of our future dystopia, for example. His omnipresent government surveillance and parody of the totalitarian impulse, deemed ‘momentous’ in 1949, has now largely taken a back seat in contemporary society, except perhaps in its most exploited form: Channel 4’s Big Brother.