One thing about London, and two about Italy, that kind of creeped me out

[xiphias]

Of course, not everything in Europe was wonderful.

London: is there any square inch of London you can be in where you're NOT being taped by a closed-circuit television? MAN, that's creepy. How do y'all get USED to it? I really loved the city, but I couldn't live there, just for that reason alone. WAY too much surveillance. Just. . . creepy, man. Orwell was a Brit, after all. . .

Italy: um. Doors that need a key to unlock from the INSIDE. See, I guess it's just a cultural difference, but, here in the United States, we have this thing called "fire". . . sometimes we accidentally get "fire" on our buildings, and then we need to get out of the buildings. And so, we like to be able to get out of buildings pretty easily. So we do things like have doors that you lock and unlock with a key from the OUTSIDE, but, from the INSIDE, you just use a knob or something, so that you can get out easily.

Freaked me out some, it did.

The other thing that I didn't quite get was the caribinieri. There's something creepy about having your civilian policing done by your military. I just don't like it -- rubs me the wrong way. They seem like perfectly nice, competent people (and the impression I was getting is that they're among the ONLY competent authority figures around -- c.f. my story about the woman fainting on the train to get an idea about the competence of all non-caribinieri first responders in Rome. . . ), but still -- the military is the military and the civilian is the civilian and it seems kind of worrisome to have one group do both.

Comments

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

is there any square inch of London you can be in where you're NOT being taped by a closed-circuit television? MAN, that's creepy. How do y'all get USED to it?

I'm not even conscious of having had to get used to it, though clearly I have done, since the things were practically unheard of in the time and place where I grew up and, as you note, are now more or less ubiquitous in the centre of London. (They're less common outside the centre - where I live, for instance, only the high street and the street leading to the station have them, those being the ones with the banks and the pubs that attract the more loutish element.) At the moment, I think they do more good than harm; for instance, they made it harder for the police to cover up what happened to Menezes, the Brazilian who was mistakenly shot in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks. Obviously, that has the potential to change if our Government tips even further in the authoritarian direction than it already has, and particularly if it manages to take the police with it; but in that case I don't expect to last long anyway, cameras or no.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Makes sense, I guess: the fact that the government is on camera as much as the people is, I suppose, a beneficial side effect.