Today I decided to virtually walk around the Berlin Wall’s architectural remnants via Street View. That wall was arguably the most powerful architecture ever constructed, but we’ll save that for another post. While zooming towards Checkpoint-Charlie, I noticed a few blurry buildings. Germany’s post-wall, post-war mantra could be articulated as something like “beware of big brother.” It’s one of the few countries that has a devoted digital protection agency. In August, they finally allowed Google’s cars to zip and zoom through their streets and snap pictures of everything. Unfortunately, 250,000 people decided not to participate and it resulted in buildings being blurred from the ground up. Interestingly enough, some of these blurred structures are buildings devoted to Germany’s heritage, including the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. One of Germany’s privacy dudes, Johannes Caspar, puts it well: “The Google camera car was, for many people, a symbol of a digital world trying to appropriate the analog world.”
While Tron-like dystopias could be envisioned, the likely scenario will be more ubiquitous. We have cameras, GPS and photographs everywhere and while America and other countries twiddle their thumbs around digital privacy, Germany and the EU are already blocking Facebook’s proposed “suggested automatic tagging.” While it’s easy to think of Google and Facebook as big brother, would we really go so far as to agree with Germany’s fear that these capitalist/digital machines will create a digital version of the Berlin Wall or a Fascist regime? The odd thing is, Germany has loose regulations on warrantless wiretapping and surveillance, but it can only be used in terrorism cases.
