Lollipop ladies and backlash watch

The papers this morning feature lollipop ladies with head-cams so that they can record video in case they fall victim of road rage. Part of me says that this is a good use of such technology, protecting good people from abuse. Another part sees annoyance at another step towards the surveillance society. Or more appropriately, the Stepford Society, because it is another piece of technology to force rule-compliance on ordinary people.

At face value, there is nothing wrong with a nice lady (it is decades since I saw a lollipop man) using a camera to video someone who has made her an innocent victim of their road rage. Where she is a genuinely innocent victim, I would support her to the end with any technology possible. But looking deeper, and replaying some personal experiences, the face value glance is just too simplistic and the video will present a very one sided story. It won't record, for example, whether the lady has interrupted the traffic flow for every individual child, even long before they get to her, so that they won't have to wait a second to cross, even though there is a long jam of cars trying to get past, just trying to get to work on time. Those innocent victims who arrive late at work because of an overenthusiastic lollipop lady will have no video evidence and no ear in the authority even if they had. And the video won't record her personality, whether she takes great pleasure from wielding power over car drivers, or makes insulting faces or gestures at them as she stops them.

And it is the latter that I really think is the problem here. While most people doing this job are sensible and will wait until there are several kids before forcing a line of cars to stop, there are others for whom power goes to their heads. And we see the same stories everywhere when a degree of one-sided authority is given to people. Traffic wardens whose love of giving out tickets extends well beyond professionalism, bin-men who love to fine householders if the bin is slightly open, or road planners who seem to take great delight in creating traffic jams by redesigning a junction where previously there was no real problem, or of course the lollipop lady who really just hates cars and does her best to inconvenience them as much as she can under the banner of helping kids cross the road safely. The ability to wield power over other people is a primary career driver that takes people to director level in big companies, but at lower levels, it can just as easily attract the wrong types of people to a job. Lack of proper accountability and even misguided performance incentives give power-hungry people who can't make it to senior management posts another route to indulge in power-wielding.

Technology in such hands just amplifies the problem, because it can provide the evidence they need to show that their decision could be considered right. But without the other half of the evidence, their victim's side, this technology creates asymmetry.

Each time we hear new uses of technology to amplify the asymmetry that exists between the authorities and the people they are meant to serve, we are one step closer to a backlash. Ultimately, government exists to serve the people, and if the people are abused too much and too long, they will eventually take back the power from an abusive government and install one that promises to serve their interests again.