Live To Win

Some years ago while shoplifting from a major hardware store I experienced a type of old fashioned security system – one that needs no technology, or cameras or electronic tags and yet has the possibility to be everywhere. I’m speaking of the undercover security guard, and I found the experience remarkable because it caused me to reflect on how systems of fascism and state control have always relied on the impulse that humans have to turn on one another. Much like the panopticon (a circular prison system designed around a central tower from which guards could, in theory, always be watching), centralised states with heavy surveillance – like the former German Democratic Republic, or the Stalinist USSR, keep their citizens in check by making sure that there could always be someone watching. Lets call this “someone”, Mr Invisible – because he is everywhere, yet only reveals himself at strategic moments. Mr Invisible is the shadow that walks just a step behind you, keep

‘Are you sure this is it?’ he whispered as they crawled through the gap under the fence, dragging his shirt in the dirt and tearing the stitches at the edge of the patch clumsily sewn on to the pocket. It had been easy to spot the circus site with its sign picked out in lights in the corner of the old showgrounds, but harder to find an entry point between the rusty strands of barbed wire amongst the scrub in the dark. They’d been walking for almost 30 minutes now after leaving the car parked several blocks away in the suburban badlands of Townsville, itself wedged between the newly swollen river and the highway – which was their one route out of here and back to civilization. ‘Of course it bloody is Morgan! Look, the cage is right there’ came the reply from a few feet ahead of him. Clouds crowded the moon and left the two men feeling ahead with their feet for the level of the ground, searching for the next fence between them and their target. ‘Don’t call me that,’ he hissed b