The Seduction Of The Illusion Of Power

Dancing like there's nobody watching will feel like a skill game in the Crystal Maze soon if you're at Leeds Train Station. I think it's important to try and commit to memory, what your gut response at seeing this is, and put into words what it is exactly about this sight that generates this feeling. What is it that causes the pang of terror to arise in your chest all of a sudden? If you feel anything negative at all that is. This pic might be making you feel a bit safer and relieved right now, because you were mugged at Leeds Station once in the early morning, and haven't been back there since out of the fear it could happen again.

Because after the initial feeling of alarm, and the invasive, discomforting sense that Power can capture even more scrutinizing higher quality footage of you now, as you play the role of yourself walking across the stage of the newly refurbished Leeds Station each morning - every nose pick, bum scratch, goodbye embrace and public meltdown written to a hard disk in a random office somewhere that you imagine some security guard getting paid minimum wage to monitor the monitoring system, will be enjoying as his one solitary perk. The real reason why he applied for the job really - to experience a taste of real power.

Imagining he possesses the omniscience of God at 3am on a Saturday morning, zooming into countless faces and bodies that pique his interest as closely as the technology will allow him, wondering momentarily to himself if this is what an existence serving machines feels like in actuality, before clocking out at the end of his shift, going home to sleep with the residue of unrequited intimacy in his heart.

After Power makes a clear statement to its people, like the one in this pic does, setting the tone for how things will be from now on, comes the gradual stroll down the road towards Normalisation - as we become less and less aggrieved by the dense presence of CCTV and finally cannot even see them anymore. I don't think these all seeing eyes at Leeds Station are in operation at the moment, but they're already functioning.