Aware of the moral problem of recording images of citizens themselves (when presenting an initiative that may be ethically questioned, the City Council has a habit of insisting that it has promoted it through an agreement that, as in this case, is always made with sectoral bodies of the administration itself; the Municipal Institute of Informatics and BIT Habitat), the municipal bureaucracy, in brotherhood with the Catalan Data Protection Authority, has assured that the processing of images will not include any recognition of individuals and that the system itself will eliminate them once the total capacity of the place has been added. I have reviewed most of the chronicles of colleagues who have written about the topic in the media and, symptomatically, the expert pens in the city have limited themselves to copying the administration's press releases without much effort.
Your humble servant is not a technophobe and I sincerely believe that the administration will not place drones on our beaches with the secret intention that several of its bureaucrats can get excited by our "chicha" and "tetilla." In turn, the hyper-visualization of the world (and of our bodies) is a phenomenon that is and will be present in human life for the simple fact that we ourselves have learned to traffic with our own image in the mass media. However, philosophers are a tremendously tiresome and insistent people in our amendments (ours, in fact, is a profession whose basic objective is to contradict). No matter how much image capture is already an undisputed phenomenon, the ethical question remains: does the administration have the right to record us when we carry out leisure activities? In other words: no matter how much I remain anonymous, does my safety on the beach require the City Council to have a camera over my head?As much as image capture is already an undisputed phenomenon, the ethical question remains: does the administration have the right to record us when we carry out leisure activities?Notably, most administrations in the world have responded to this question by emphasizing the good use made of the images. But the moral problem is not only that of anonymity. As we know from our own internet experience, our attitude varies when we have a camera in front of us; we are not the same human beings, ultimately, when we know ourselves to be the object of a reproduction made into an image, however banal or impersonal it may be. At an individual level, we accept being reified (posing on Instagram and concocting an album of feigned happiness). However much alienation this may havebookof images about one's own life, we make the decision ourselves and we ourselves decide to share it with a world saturated with photography.Normalizing drones in citizen spaces, this pact of will is broken: it is power that decides to record us and also to make us anonymous. In this sense, the administration continues, without much discussion, the inertia of airports, shops, and stadiums where the recording of our bodies is already a natural phenomenon. If the slowness of journalists and citizens remains intact, the City Council will achieve its milestone without too many problems, and the grumblers who question the gesture will soon become an old-fashioned relic. At the risk of being repetitive, I insist; the public sphere has the obligation to explain why it violates my state of mind when I am on the beach, walking through Ciutat Vella, or taking a nap on the terrace. Precisely because the administration is neither a company nor a private individual, it is necessary for it to place special emphasis on the restrictions of our free will. As much as the use of cameras is normalized, their presence alters our disposition in the world.And that no one sees it as a problem makes it even more problematic.
Sorry for the inconvenience.