Qu’ils mangent de la brioche

Today I sat in the restaurant where Amelie was filmed, and listened to music and a series of podcasts about Russia, and then a book about French history.

It was well weird comparing the current and former state of both countries, and asking the question that’s on a lot of minds this year: Can Russia ever change away from fascism and still remain Russia?

One of the people I listened to was Mikhail Shishkin, speaking as a guest on an Intelligence Squared podcast episode, titled “Is Russia Doomed By Its History?” He made a very sobering point: People who live in a fascist state, and do not oppose it, do not see themselves as fascists, and when their state attempts to bring fascism to a neighboring state through subjugation (e.g. war) they see themselves as liberators, rather than conquerors or subjugators. Since fascism is what they know and believe in, inter-state conflicts are not a matter of freedom versus subjugation, but a matter of a big fish eating a smaller fish. It’s kill or be killed in a zero-sum game, because there couldn’t possibly be a form of governance they could switch to that would move them even a little bit out from under the bootheel of the criminals at the top.

In a word, they have been broken.

Besides, if you live in fear of your ruling party, then what better way to distract them from plundering you than encouraging them to plunder someone else?

Just so with the Russian people, over the last 100 years, inside and outside the USSR.

Anyway, I ate two lunches at the cafe, since I’d skipped breakfast and intended to skip dinner: A caesar salad with ham, and a rich avocado toast with salmon on top. As one should on a proper vacation, I ate slowly!

Lots of people came in to take photos of the place, giggle a bit, and then dash right out again. So to be a contrarian, I left without taking a photo of the interior. If it ever came up, I could certainly remember that I’d dined in the restaurant used in the film. I wouldn’t go scrambling for photographic proof of it and no one would ask. What, would they accuse me of being a liar? Maybe when I was 16 years old and boasting in a schoolyard. Not now. At the same time, that photo isn’t something I’d put on my wall or even in a screensaver. Most of my keepsakes are either highly portable digital items, or living things walking around looking after each other.

I followed this train of thought as I rode the bike over to the Cimetière de Montmartre. Alas, it was closed for the day…

I still remember the time when film was expensive and photographs were prized artifacts from an otherwise obscure and unseen era. That’s so thoroughly not the case now. And now we’re making our way into a realm where photographic evidence is no longer evidence of anything in particular, given that you can ask a computer to bake you an image of yourself doing whatever you can describe, in any place you can name. So what is the point of taking a photo when you do go there?

Maybe now you can start to relax and just be. You can even take the photo retroactively if the need arises.

It seems like a matter of time before we’re all wearing gadgets that take – or gather – photos of us everywhere by default. I’m imagining high-quality cameras all over the place that are not just used for city surveillance by the police, but made available to our phones (or whatever the gadget is), so when we want – if we want – we can just gather up dozens of photos of ourselves taken by these devices and aggregate them. You can imagine a camera on a stick planted in front of every scenic vista, constantly recording. People will embrace the implied total surveillance because of the convenience of sending a “selfie” to their friends and social media without even needing to reach into a pocket.

Roll that forward two or three decades, and we will not be carrying anything around at all, yet still able to gather photos of ourselves afterwards, interact with our personal digital worlds by talking to lampposts (since our voice and face is our password), pay with our fingerprint or our face, access transcripts of everything we’ve said, and so on. People will embrace total surveillance and recording because it will be fun. They’ll get to buy into it. And the old saying, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” will sound so very reasonable… That’s what they said in the USSR, as they dumped radioactive waste straight into the river…

I loathe this future.

The opportunities for exploitation will be practically infinite, and practically invisible. And as I get up and walk out into the seething crowd of tourists on this street, I’m asking myself a really frightening question:

At what point does a state become so exploitative – and skilled at crushing dissent through social manipulation and surveillance – that the people trapped permanently at the bottom of it have no other choice but to take up arms and start physically smashing the apparatus? Are we heading towards a level of lock-in through technological advancement so high that the ONLY way out is to beat down doors and set fire to mansions? Are we headed for another French Revolution, but on a global scale, with the attendant scale of death and chaos?

‘Cause you know, at some point, the food’s going to get too expensive even with fertilizer, and the water is going to get too expensive to clean, and the digital apparatus is going to be tightened and tweaked so that the wealthy keep eating, while the rabble drowns in poison.