Cyber Story

If you have a good internet connection it’s possible that you will need to step outside your home only on rare occasions - to visit A&E, for example. Indeed it could be argued that, given the likelihood of catching a deadly infection in hospital, it would be better not to bother even with that. Everything can be delivered to your home - although it doesn’t always happen without glitches, as I was reminded when I unpacked my grocery order and found it was short of a bag of frozen broad beans. But wouldn’t you miss the company of other human beings? Well, these too can be brought to your home - by way of invitation to dinner, drinks, tea, a game of poker, casual sex or whatever. The flaws in this arrangement, however, are firstly that guests may outstay their welcome and, secondly, that there will be no chance-encounters with faces either new or old.

With this in mind I ventured to the upstairs room of a local pub last week where a story-telling event provided an opportunity for a couple of hours of good old-fashioned live, interactive entertainment and, although I didn’t make any new friends, I did bump into a couple of old ones. The story tellers - three amateur and one professional - were admirable in so far as they had the skill to tell a tale and a belief in the need to maintain the oral tradition. But in doing so they recall a time when illiteracy was the norm and audiences had no way to distinguish word-of-mouth myths from historical facts. All the stories told were in this mould and, after a while, their charm wore off: what I began to hear was the age-old technique of controlling populations by keeping them ignorant.

A few days later I saw a film called Tehran Taxi by the Iranian director G Panahi, in which he drives a taxi around the city, all the while filming his interactions with his fares. It’s a brave film because, although Tehran looks like a normal city, its inhabitants live under a very controlling regime and, in order to avoid conflict with the authorities, their everyday activities are suffused with layers of covert behaviour and their conversations are guarded and coded. Their version of home delivery is a man with a bag full of Western DVDs quietly doing his rounds - like a genteel drug dealer - with the aid of a complicit taxi driver.

You might be thankful not to be living in a place such as Tehran; but consider the normal-looking cities in the UK, where people go about their legitimate activities apparently untroubled by a regime intent on imposing its religious-social code on all inhabitants. We face another kind of intrusion - that of the CCTV camera. Someone has calculated that UK residents have more cameras per head trained on us than anywhere else in the world. We are assured that it’s for our own good, to act as a deterrent for criminals and, as if to prove the point, there is a day-time TV programme which shows footage used in successful convictions.

This approach to criminality arguably has a deterrent effect but it tackles the symptoms not the causes. The two most effective ways to prevent crime are: to develop a caring social structure that nurtures individuals; and not to criminalise harmless activities. There will, of course, always be crime based on greed rather than need. As Roosevelt said, “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

But official UK statistics claim to show that crime is falling: evidence of the effectiveness of surveillance as a deterrent? Er, no. Cybercrime is on the rise: evidence of criminals realising the benefits of staying indoors and ordering in, just like the rest of us.