” The technology uses cameras made by Hikvision, a state-owned Chinese company which also supplied equipment used in the surveillance of the genocidal Uyghur concentration campus in Xinjiang. Thirty-five Co-op stores use “novel technology and highly invasive processing of personal data,” to create “a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where its cameras are installed. The UK supermarket chains Co-op, Tesco, Morrisons, Aldi and Asda have already implemented AI facial recognition customer surveillance. The UK now has more surveillance cameras per capita than any other country except for China. In 2019, biometric facial recognition data-gathering technologies were introduced into the UK, first in Glasgow and one year later in London, allegedly to help control the Covid-19 pandemic. Image: Microsoftīut surveillance of civilians for data-gathering purposes is far from cute. The cutesy advertising for its Azure Face product depicts facial recognition tech as “fun for all the family.” Azure Face by Microsoft.
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In 2019, Microsoft even attempted to encourage people to use facial recognition software in their homes. The big tech firms involved then developed programmes designed to introduce it into the civilian population. The country has an estimated 626 million CCTV cameras, some of which have been placed outside citizens’ front doors and even inside their homes.įacial recognition software was first developed in the US and financed by an “unnamed intelligence agency” and later the military (DARPA).
China is home to around half of the 1,000 smart city projects that are currently being set up worldwide. This technology was pioneered at scale by Chinese Big Tech, in the so-called sharp eyes scheme, under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, which has placed the inhabitants of the smart cities of Taiyuan, Chongquin, Shenzhen, Wuxi, Beijing, Shanghai and ten others under constant AI surveillance and mandated the use of digital ID. I first came across cute authoritarianism in the imagery used to promote the adoption of facial recognition CCTV, which has been in use throughout the UK since 2019. Big Mother is watching you.Ĭute, Fun, Facial Recognition Surveillance The paternalism of 1984 has been replaced by maternal soft totalitarianism. Our cute authoritarians communicate in brightly coloured cartoons, smiling faces and childish fonts. The technocratic societies of today are closer to Huxley’s dystopia than to Orwell’s boot.
Whenever the controllers of this dystopia want to force people to do something, they couch the command in happy language: it is “for the good of all.” The novel depicts a thoroughly positivist and hedonistic high-tech society, which constantly reinforces cheerful messages and pacifies its citizens with daily doses of the addictive happiness drug Soma. However, there is a much more insidious authoritarianism that is predicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We associate the aesthetics of authoritarianism with Stalinism, Maoism and Nazism: soldiers and superhuman workers brandishing fists and flags, chanting slogans about political solidarity and the need to annihilate their enemies. How could authoritarianism ever be cute? Surely, it is “a boot stamping on a human face, forever,” as Orwell writes in 1984. Beneath all the smiling imagery is a growing phenomenon I call cute authoritarianism.
Over the last five years, we’ve seen the sudden appearance of cute Facial ID Recognition surveillance, cute government health messaging, cute military propaganda, cute identity wars and even cute robotic elder care. Something sinister is going on with cuteness.
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