In World 214, people protect their privacy by creating anti-surveillance accessories, dressing up to hide their faces from facial recognition cameras, as well as wearing baggy clothes to detract authorities from their real identity. As the surveillance state in large cities like China, the US, Germany and including the UK grows, people fear of constantly being watched at. Minorities, especially, are being monitored with their every move, creating a hysteria of unconscious visions from all angles.
What if …
we lived in a world where surveillance have reached our wardrobe, where emerging textiles and technologies adapt to create wearable technologies that detect our emotions, movements, and even location?
Issue targeted:
Fashion Activism in terms of mass surveillance: who’s watching over us? What’s more than security?
Inspiration:
China’s Surveillance state, RFID tags on garments (could we produce tags so little that it can read our information?)
Wearable technologies: Science has produced chips sewn onto garments without us knowing to detect activities like falling, monitoring heart rate, etc.
This World was contributed by Thea Viernes (located in the UK) using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the author and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
Does this World remind you of something?
I am keen to hear about any historical or contemporary real-world examples – whether individual practices, subcultures or mainstream activities – that this fiction brings to mind.
Please share any such examples using this form. Thank you!