Why are we marching so passively into a surveillance society? Not even passively, but as willing volunteers participating in a system that will record our every move. Is it because seemingly unmanned innocuous electronic devices are at the helm? Or is it because we buy into the propaganda that it’s all for our safety, convenience, and progress?

A recent article on Switched reported on cable companies’ new research into cable boxes that will monitor who is in the room and analyze movement. Granted it’s in the development stages, and their reasoning behind the development is to have cable boxes differentiate for example adults from children so that the box can restrict access to adult channels. Well, what if you are a midget?

I guess that wasn’t very PC. Sorry. But think about the logic of controlling access to channels by height. For example, my 70 year old mother is barely 5′ tall, so I assume she will only be able to watch young adult channels. Imagine Michael Jordon; he would have been able to watch triple X adult content by the time he was fourteen.

So even if they remove the bugs for mistaken height versus age appropriate content, they are professing the monitor box will help customize advertising. Just what I want advertising targeted specifically to me. I need more emotionally appealing ads tugging at my shortcomings and self-esteem issues, so I can consume more. I guess I should thank them for thinking of the economy by making me want to buy more stuff that I don’t need.

And another question? What if two consenting adults get romantic on the living room couch, or for that matter, in their bed having sex while the cable box monitors the act? Hopefully, there’s a disable button. Maybe it will finally convince people not to have sex with the TV on. Or damn it, force them to finally take that TV out of the bedroom since another study shows a bedroom TV decreases sex in couples. Probably not.

Who will monitor the cable companies? Better yet, who will monitor cable company employees who have access to our most private movements within our home? I can see Cable Guy looking up the monitoring system on the ‘hot chick’s’ apartment where he just installed the new technology. Do we really ‘need’ cable monitoring boxes in the first place? I’m sure they’ll make us believe we do.

The answer to our lemmings march, in my self-effacing opinion, is that paradoxically the capitalistic system keeps us so busy making money to produce and buy new technology that we are too tired to question the consequences of that new technology. So what’s left but to rally to the march?