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A desperate cry in the dark

Book review written by Tori Aarseth
"I want you to know that I'm never going to commit suicide." The Snowden quote says a lot about the precarious existence of those who dare to challenge the power of the surveillance state. 

(THIS ARTICLE IS ONLY MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Laura Poitras (red): Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016

Astro Noise is an independent work, but also serves as a catalog for the exhibition of the same name that has been listed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this spring (featured in the March issue of New Time). The exhibition and the book are a culmination of 15 years of work to document the war on terror and its consequences. The woman behind the work, Laura Poitras, is basically a documentary filmmaker, and is also behind it Citizenfour, the Oscar-winning film about working with Edward Snowden's revelations.

To describe an invisible giant. Trying to understand and describe today's surveillance regime and how this is transforming our society is a recurring problem. You feel a bit like Tor trying to lift the Midgard worm: It's almost impossible to find the head and tail of the beast, and it's far bigger than it looks at first glance. Although intelligence services have grown into a global squid whose goal is to exercise total control, they operate in hiding, and the consequences for democracy and freedom of speech appear abstract and philosophical.

No. . .

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Tori Aarseth
Aarseth is a political scientist and a regular journalist at Ny Tid.

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