The Zero Camera |
In the summer of 2012, Shane Meadows pointed his camera at seventy five thousand people in Manchester’s Heaton Park and let William Burroughs narrate what he saw. “The camera and recorder can photograph and record from a point of zero interference,” the dead writer’s voice announced over slow-motion footage of Ian Brown approaching the stage. “The camera achieves a nirvana of uncritical acceptance. It rejects nothing. It clings to nothing. It fears nothing.”
It was a strange benediction for a rock concert. But Burroughs understood something that Silicon Valley would spend the next decade discovering and monetising. The camera is not a tool of memory. It is a tool of power. And its power lies precisely in its indifference.
Thirteen years after Meadows released Made of Stone, the camera has lost its nirvana. The devices that watch us in airports, shopping centres, border crossings and bedrooms have abandoned uncritical acceptance for something far more unsettling. They classify. They predict. They pre-empt. The modern camera does not achieve zero interference. It is interference, automated and optimised for throughput.
Burroughs knew this trajectory. In The Electronic Revolution, written in 1970, he described how recordings could be weaponised, scrambled with fabricated news broadcasts, spliced with old footage until nobody could distinguish Toronto from Barcelona. “You construct fake........