THE STORY
Photographs by Y Touring
18 year old Mark has just finished his ‘A’ levels but is drifting. He can’t work out who he really is or what he wants to do. However, when his sister, Abi, suggests they go to the local music festival together, Mark agrees, the pair having always been very close.
At the festival, they visit a side-show – a Camera Obscura – which allows them to ‘spy’ on the people outside. Abi is entranced. She thinks that watching others is natural. It’s something we’ve always done. And isn’t that the point of technology - to make necessary things easier to do? Mark isn’t convinced… until he spies a girl he fancies outside.
Enter Candy. 16 years old, artistic and self-aware, Candy values her privacy, it being central to her ability to create. Her big dream is to become a professional artist. When she and Mark start dating, they take loads of photos of each other with their mobile phones. One night they go down to the beach and, when they get intimate, they take photos of that too. Later, Mark gets into a closed fairground and mucks around on the rides.
However, a few weeks later, the police come for Mark. It seems the same night Mark was at the fair, there was a serious theft. They’ve traced him from the CCTV. He’s arrested on suspicion of burglary and has his fingerprints and DNA taken but is soon released when the police catch the real criminals, again from the CCTV. Mark’s convinced that CCTV is a good thing: if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear, do you?
However, Candy feels unsure about their relationship. On the one hand, there’s strong mutual attraction. On the other hand, they’re so different: she’s ambitious whereas Mark’s just a big kid. Although it upsets her, she decides the right thing to do for both their sakes is to end it. And she thinks they should delete those intimate photos of each other. Both trust each other and agree to delete the photos, but Mark takes the split badly.
Abi tries to comfort him and when he asks her to help him transfer some photos from his phone to the web, she helps. The photos are just of the sea, but then Mark disappears to his room…
The first Candy knows of it is at a party. She’s devastated to discover that some friends have one of the intimate photos of her that Mark took… someone found it on the school web site and sent it to everyone’s mobiles! It’s spread to the social networking sites too and is impossible to get back. Candy becomes ill with anxiety: her privacy has been invaded and it affects her ability to create. She can’t draw anymore and even ends up dropping out of school.
Abi, meanwhile, is shocked at Mark’s behaviour. She wonders if her own brother can do something like this, how can she trust anyone anymore? She thinks, in this internet age, how many people do we let into our lives who we know nothing about? She starts to write a computer program that will search for a person site by site on the web to find out about them.
We take up the story again in 2016. Abi, now working as a data analyst for a company called Crosstech, feels it is a perfect world for people like her: due to terrorism, the country depends on surveillance technologies - her field exactly. She oversees a system that collates data on individuals from the 5,000 odd sources available, and from that creates ‘Projections’ (predictions of how individuals are likely to behave in the future) to supply to organisations. Because of her proficiency, colleagues have nicknamed her ‘The Projectionist’. To her, technology is only beneficial and exciting.
Mark meanwhile is training to be a teacher. Now well-regarded, he is starting to find himself. He feels terrible about what he did to Candy, but can’t feel he can get in touch with her - he feels paralysed, something he blames on the nervous atmosphere that pervades the country due to the terrorist threat. At least the widespread surveillance makes him feel safe.
Candy, though, hasn’t got far. She just works at a café up the coast. Her experience with the photo has caused her to resent the invasion of her privacy by all the new surveillance measures. When she hears of a demo against surveillance coming up in London she has to be there.
In fact, Mark is in London that day too. He’s sat in a restaurant when he sees Candy in the crowd. He rushes out, but blows his chance of saying sorry and Candy storms off, only to be further upset by the police who are filming the demo.
Back at work, Candy is shocked when Abi appears. Abi’s come to apologise. She’s pregnant and that’s made her think about the future… and the past. She’s always felt guilty about the part she played with the photo. Candy forgives her, only for Abi to admit that she used the system at work to trace her… Abi knows all her personal details! Candy is incensed. Rushing home, she finds an old file on her computer: it’s the intimate photos she took of Mark. Should she put those photos of him on the web and ruin his life as he’s ruined hers?
Back at her office, Abi receives a new request for a Projection: a school wants a full report on Mark as it seems he is up for his first job. But when she runs his report, she sees all the police data on him from the fair incident years before. She’s horrified: if she sends this report to the school as it is, they’ll see that Mark is classed as ‘criminally active’. She sets to work: she has only an hour to change the report because the system will automatically alert security if it doesn’t go off on time.
Candy, meanwhile, has a change of heart. She traces Mark on the web and e-mails him, suggesting they meet back on the beach.
Mark can’t believe his luck! Everything seems to be coming together for him at last. He goes to the beach and, waiting for Candy, he gazes up at the stars, thinking of all the satellites circling the earth and feeling grateful to live when he does. Without technology, he muses, there’d be increased terrorism. Without technology, his sister might be in some dead-end job. And without technology, Candy might never have traced him and given him this chance to wipe the slate clean. He feels safe. He feels blessed. He feels he has nothing to fear.
When Candy arrives, he explains that he was upset and posted the photo of her on the web without thinking. Candy sees how much he’s changed and for a moment it seems that their romance might rekindle.
We take up the story again a year on. Candy remains undecided about Mark. On good days, she thinks about getting back with him. On bad days, she thinks about putting an incriminating photo of him on the web. Mark, meanwhile, is jobless and unemployable owing to his Projection. And all because of harmlessly mucking around in a fair when he was a kid! He’s changed his mind about surveillance. Now he reasons that we’ve all done things ‘wrong’, therefore we all have something to fear.
And Abi? Well, she’s serving a suspended sentence for fraud because she was caught trying to amend Mark’s Projection. Seems the system she thought she controlled, instead controlled her… she’s no different from anyone else. Now nursing her baby son, she explains that everything he is or does is recorded from birth. All his options will be limited by what people assume about him from his data. But for the sake of her son, she’s still trying to look forward. These days she’s asking, ‘With technology, what sort of society do we want to create?’ So she’s still ‘projecting’. But these days she realizes, to get the best image, you have to balance the dark and the light.
Laura FitzGerald, 2008
