WATCHLIST

„Watch something and you change it. This is something that we all know pretty intuitively, and something that's been explored by science. It's hard to check the air pressure in your car's tires without letting some of the air out, thus changing the pressure. Photons change from waves to particles when they're observed under electron microscopes. There's the paradox of Schroedinger's cat. Is it dead, or is it alive inside the box? The act of opening the box and observing the creature, or its corpse, determines its fate.

We act differently, perform differently, when we know we're being watched. Or even when we think we are. That's the logic of the Panopticon, the circular prison in which the inmates can't escape the watchman's eyes.

The question that this book seeks to address is how are we affected by this constant surveillance. Does a camera trained on a sleeping child change him? How does an ever-present, faceless audience alter who we are? One way to interpret the old Delphic maxim “Know thyself” is to take it as a warning to ignore the masses, their judgment and opinions. But what does it mean when our notion of self is tied inextricably with our notion of audience? In a world without privacy what becomes of the private self?“ (From the introduction by Bryan Hurt)

An amazing collection of 32 writers, including Cory Doctorow, T. Coraghessen Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Amelia Gray, Randa Jarrar, Etgar Keret, Alissa Nutting, Jim Shepard, and many others