“Technology is fun for a little bit and then it’s no longer fun.”
In an age of growing surveillance, these disruptors are using fashion and art to stay one step ahead of technology and resist surveillance culture...
Brut filmmaker Jessey Dearing spoke to them on what it means to be a protector of privacy in our latest short documentary.
In an age of growing surveillance, these disruptors are using fashion and art to stay one step ahead of technology and resist surveillance culture...
Brut filmmaker Jessey Dearing spoke to them on what it means to be a protector of privacy in our latest short documentary.
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00:00Let me know when you start to record.
00:02Yeah.
00:03I got my questions on my phone, so...
00:05Can't even use paper and pencil anymore, huh?
00:08Can, but sometimes...
00:10This is exactly, exactly what it's all going to, man.
00:14It's really what this is all about, too.
00:18Not, you know, making everything a robot or technology.
00:24Alright, sorry, man. Go ahead.
00:27It starts as novel and fun.
00:31They make it fun for you.
00:34And then, soon enough, it creeps over your life.
00:38That's my biggest concern with all of technology,
00:43is that it's fun for a little bit,
00:45and then it's no longer fun.
00:47And then you won't have a choice.
00:56Everywhere we go, we are being tracked and monitored.
01:03And as technology evolves,
01:05it may seem like surveillance culture is unavoidable.
01:07For Brute, I'm meeting up with three people
01:10who are using fashion and art to disrupt surveillance.
01:13♪
01:23People call me Skitch,
01:25and I'm an eyeglasses maker
01:28who also cares about privacy,
01:30so I combine the two.
01:32I've always just been private,
01:36and I've never liked being on camera,
01:39even when I was a kid.
01:42Reflectacles work on two concepts.
01:44One is an infrared-absorbing lens,
01:48and then the other concept is a reflective element
01:51that is applied to the frame.
01:53The camera doesn't really know how to process that information,
01:55and it can make your face exposed
01:58with a bright light that you're sending back
02:01to its original source, which is the camera.
02:04Yeah, the manufacturer actually...
02:07I don't like the design on this one,
02:09so I actually have to bend it around a little bit.
02:12You can tell them a million times how to do it,
02:15but it still doesn't get done right.
02:18I focused all my energy on learning
02:21about the technologies of facial recognition
02:25and how I could defeat them with a simple pair of glasses.
02:29And I'm always trying to be one step ahead of them,
02:33because it's going to come.
02:35You know, technology is not stopping.
02:37It's on a roll.
02:39So I'm ready to go.
02:45Surveillance is no longer about criminal.
02:48It's about making money.
02:50So it's not that you don't have anything to hide anymore.
02:53It's do you want to be a product?
02:56I think it basically takes away a sense of our humanity.
03:00So all I'm trying to do with, you know, privacy eyeglasses,
03:05it's just an option to say I don't want to participate
03:10in, you know, being tracked and monitored everywhere I go.
03:20After meeting with Skitch, I came to Providence, Rhode Island,
03:23to meet with Leo Silvaggio,
03:25who instead of protecting his identity, decided to sacrifice him.
03:29So tell me about this mask.
03:31Well, this mask is my face.
03:37Yeah, yeah, it's my face.
03:39I created it as a way to thwart facial recognition systems.
03:43When someone goes out into public and they put on this mask,
03:47surveillance cameras will essentially attribute
03:49all of their actions as my own.
03:52While at the same time,
03:54While at the same time,
03:56anyone who is performing my identity in public as, you know, a Leo,
04:00if you will, creates disinformation and feeds it back into the system.
04:04And that's just one way that I'm thinking about
04:06how we can resist surveillance culture.
04:15I created You're Me Surveillance because I'm really concerned
04:18about what surveillance culture will do to what it means to be human.
04:22When we are watched or observed, we alter our behavior.
04:26The reality is, is that we're always constantly watched and observed.
04:30I remember being like a kid and like, if I knew my mom was watching me,
04:34like, I was just like a much better kid.
04:36I was like a much, much better kid than when I was alone.
04:39Like, and like now, like literally big brothers watching us all the time.
04:44Who are we going to be when we're constantly on guard
04:48Who are we going to be when we're constantly on guard
04:52and being measured to a value system that we didn't sign up for?
05:01I started with a white male face because that is my face.
05:06If you want to be invisible to surveillance, just be a white man in a suit.
05:11The sad reality is we don't live right now in a country where,
05:16where you could say the same about other faces, right?
05:22So there's this concept called sousveillance,
05:24which is using surveillance technology against the surveillers
05:28or against the party in power.
05:32I wanted to create a project that encouraged people to record video
05:36when they're going to protests or other actions
05:40so that they had a way of defending themselves in court
05:43should they be arrested or should someone that they were recording be arrested.
05:47So I found some flip-flops and just about figuring out the right size I want.
05:53What it is, is it's an online archive of DIY tutorial design for body cameras
05:59that can be made out of household materials
06:02or things that you can switch from the dollar store.
06:06To not be concerned about surveillance, especially in this day and age,
06:11in the time of George Floyd and all of these Black, Indigenous, people of color
06:17who have been murdered by the police,
06:19is to also not empathize with an entire community
06:24who is prey to this kind of culture.
06:35With the body cam project, I am very inspired by the materials that I find.
06:48There's a huge part of me that just wants to try stupid things to try stupid things.
06:55Why not take two steering wheel covers and a flip-flop and see what you could do with it?
07:06I think my balance is about showing people what something that's functional could be
07:14and then the more spectacly, kind of like fun, weird, crazy things
07:19are all about like opening your mind to what could be.
07:22I'm actually shocked that that worked.
07:26You know, I didn't do all of the other things that I did to the other one,
07:30but like, I mean, you know, with all of the straps and the security stuff,
07:36like, that might actually be better.
07:38That's not what was supposed to happen.
07:43Hopefully I can get this in correctly and I don't pop a staple.
07:49There we go.
07:52So I've got that there.
08:00Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
08:05There's something to be said for a kind of humor that feeds into something
08:11that is way more serious than it might look to be.
08:15Hey everyone, I'm here in Providence and we're going to be participating in the protest.
08:22So I'm going to put this hands-free on top of my head
08:25and hopefully you'll be able to see it if you're not able to participate here.
08:28Okay, cool.
08:32George Floyd!
08:33Say his name!
08:34George Floyd!
08:35Say his name!
08:36I think that my work ends up asking more questions than it provides answers.
08:42I don't think that any of my projects offer a kind of panacea of sorts.
08:46I think what they offer is one take, one perspective on what you could do.
08:54Hopeful disruptor.
08:55That's what I like to think of myself as, a hopeful disruptor.
09:06I drove out to the Columbia River Gorge in Washington to meet with Kate Bratash,
09:10who created a fashion line that floods license plate readers with fake data.
09:18It's been fun also to see the resurgence of hacker fashion.
09:22You know, we're all living in a very dystopian time
09:25and cyberpunk is kind of resurging both as a fashion influence in the world
09:31and it's kind of nice then to have a place in that conversation
09:34and say that some of the ideas that we take from these images of the world gone wrong
09:39can actually be used to bring a little bit of fun to the everyday world right now.
09:45This is a live demo test using a mobile phone version of a mobile license plate reader
09:52meant to be used by maybe like a business owner or a landlord or somebody.
09:58It actually does use the same systems that some of these commercial systems sold to police actually use.
10:05You can see the different boxes that are lighting up across all of the different parts of the shirt
10:12where it thinks it detects various license plates.
10:15And this is one of my favorite bits.
10:17It's like the Fourth Amendment plate design really, really goes wild on some of these systems.
10:23You can see like the captured screen, the number of plates is counting.
10:28So it was really important to me that these things also work not just hypothetically but live.
10:32I think something that people don't realize about license plate readers is like, you know,
10:36you might see one on a police car or at a stop sign,
10:40but unfortunately they are always reading all the time and they can ingest thousands of plates a minute.
10:46They create a very detailed map of your day.
10:56Hopefully by showing that they could be affected by something as simple as like a piece of clothing
11:02that we kind of question sort of the places these systems have in our society.
11:10These systems are not that smart and they don't work most of the time.
11:15And even if they did, we should ask very important questions about, you know,
11:19like should this be something we have to accept in the world?
11:25I was living in Los Angeles up until very recently.
11:28And Los Angeles is one of the surveillance capitals of the country.
11:31We imagine that people have different values between like city people versus like rural country folk.
11:36But like I think all of us together have an intuitive sense of the fact that we have the right to privacy.
11:42And I think that that's something that I think can really, really, if we let it, like bring us all together.
11:51Future facial recognition, I think it's going to be a battle.
11:54And honestly, I'm not very optimistic with people's rights to privacy.
11:59I think it'll continue to erode.
12:02So right now, I believe our best option, you know, I'm trying to fight the system.
12:10One of the things that kind of comes up also through these art projects is that, yes, I'm showing mistakes in these systems.
12:15But they should also invite us to ask questions about like, would this be right for me to use it,
12:20even if it worked perfectly all the time? And in my opinion, the answer is no.
12:26When you look at the resources of myself compared to like the government, I'm not going to win.
12:31But if I can make their job a little bit harder, a little bit more annoying, I'm here for it.