How do you deal with people who refuse to wear masks?
According to fedscoop, tracking down rioters from the January 6th Capitol invasion will be easy due to three reason:
- rioters typically didn’t wear masks
- rioters photographed, videoed, and streamed their insurrection
- surveillance software is extremely good at analyzing photographs and videos for facial matches
- (as an aside, facial recognition software is better with white faces than with minority faces. the overwhelming majority of the rioters were white – and men.)
One way to make sense of this is to realize that masking has taken on mythic overtones in America’s culture wars and the Trump supporters who came to attend rallies in the capital, before they became rioters in the Capitol, are anti-mask. Then when they became a mob and invaded the home of the legislative branch of government, they simply didn’t have masks on them.
On the other hand, the rioters seemed anxious to be seen, livestreaming what they perceived as a revolution as it was occurring. If there was no COVID, it seems likely the rioters would have done the same thing and, potentially, there was more masking than there would have otherwise been because of the pandemic.
There are then two plausible reasons rioters didn’t wear masks. First, the rioting was a surprise to most of them and most of them hadn’t known that they would end up breaking the law. Second, they didn’t see themselves as breaking the law, but thought they were on the same side as the police, the president, and other lawful authorities.
At some point, not wearing COVID masks overlaps with not wearing criminal masks, the first from the belief that COVID is not real and the second out of the belief that breaking into the Capitol is not a crime. But surely, deep inside, there is the suspicion for these people that both the disease and the crime are real.
This inherent conflict between wanting to hide our true selves while also wanting to reveal ourselves online is at the heart of the societal changes driven by social media like Twitter and Facebook. We know that these companies make their money by surveilling our online behavior and selling our information. Yet we see this as a fair trade because they give us the ability to be heard and connect with other people who think like us.
The structural artifact created is that unwanted surveillance is inextricable from the opportunity for identitarian expression.
For Capitol rioters, being observed is the natural corollary to being observed.
Due to the bad optics of the rioting of the U.S. Capitol, some Trump supporters are now disavowing the rioters and attempting to unmask them as Antifa agents pretending to be militia/3 percenters/bougaloo bois/ proud bois/ white supremacists.
In this final turn, the ideology critique tradition that runs through Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, critical theory and eventually critical race theory, reaches an apex of sorts – unmasking as a tactic for erasing one’s tracks, even when everything has been caught on film.
In 1983 David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear on live television. It was similar to many other disappearing tricks he had performed over the years, but the scale and the fact that it was being filmed made it seem all the more inexplicable. According to some debunkers, however, the fact that it was filmed, and that we all have a bias toward believing what we see with our own eyes, made it actually easier for Copperfield to create his illusion.
As a software developer working with virtual reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence, and also as a former philosophy student, the intersection of these three themes, unmasking, optics and surveillance, are a rich mine for me. In the next few days I want to take each of these concepts apart philosophically and historically, in isolation and in relation to each other, and destrukt them to see what falls out. I want to address Kant’s distinction between the private and public spheres in What Is Enlightenment? while also covering the role of the unmasking motif in Scooby-Doo, naturlich. I want to dig into why magicians never reveal their tricks and why politicians never admit they are wrong. Along the way, if I am feeling particularly self-destructive, I want to touch on Critical Race Theory, cancel culture, right wing safe spaces, the politics of personal destruction, nuclear options and redemption through art vs salvation through politics.