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...

1. Traffic To an outside Western eye, Indian traffic is a life-threatening spectacle of unexplainable near-misses, complete anarchy, and confusing politeness. Cars, Buses, Trucks, Motorcycles, Scooters, Auto-Rickshaws, Cycle-Rickshaws, Bicycles, and Pedestrians both Human and Animal safely share wide stretches of tarmac, seemingly without following any obvious set of rules and yet without incident. How is this possible? To answer this, we must first analyse what it is that the Western eye has been taught to appreciate as the fundamentals of safe traffic management, and what this says about the societies in which these fundamentals exist. In Australia, we have a strong body of traffic laws, accompanied by signs and symbols which relay powerful messages subconsciously. STOP signs. Traffic lights coloured in Red and Green. Lane markers which definitively split the road into independant sections. And so on. The adherence to these directives/laws is of course ensured by th...