Mask on: The face of the fight of our times
As the world adjusts to life mid-pandemic, we're moving rapidly towards a widely-masked society. But masked citizens present new tensions for diverse states and communities
Health, security and liberty in newly faceless towns and cities
Although still deep in the midst of reporting some of the world’s heaviest pandemic death tolls, Western nations are beginning to slowly ease up their Coronavirus lockdown restrictions in an effort to return communities and the wider economy to a sense of pre-virus normality. As Germany, Spain, Italy and France announce a series of tactics designed to rebuild mid-pandemic and post-pandemic societies, the United Kingdom is also expected to present it’s own version of lockdown easing measures today, based on a series of disjointed press leaks, announcements and campaign pivots made in the last four days.
Politicians face a series of deeply unenviable tasks - balancing how to revive what’s left of an ailing economy with how best to preserve life and prevent healthcare collapse - as societies everywhere begin to imagine and design essential new ways to trade and socialise.
Transforming ritual and reality
Liberal societies are celebrated on the global stage as open, individualist cultures - largely free of much of the blatant cultural authoritarianism that characterises a host of anti-democratic global powers. But these same societies are now standing toe-to-toe with the new cultural rituals and realities critical to winning the fight against a present, killer virus - one that needs to be managed and navigated as society attempts to rebuild around it. Some of these new norms augment long-established ideas of freedom, creating instant and uncomfortable new traditions.
Of course, in East Asian nations, the use of masks for disease control is common and long-established. Both conceptually and in practice, wearing masks to protect yourself, but also to protect others from you - is not controversial - and instead seen as a responsible act of community safety.
But for highly diverse, liberal Western nations, masks present a new challenge - one tied up in a number of cultural battles that have ceremoniously broken the barriers of cultural discourse in communities all over Europe. On the grounds of homeland security, a large number of European countries already ban the Burqa - inciting incendiary exchanges on religious rights and social integration, in a culture hyper-sensitive to managing both real and perceived threats of radical terror activity. On these terms, facial obstruction is a complicated, and long-contested policy issue.
But even removed from their religious and ideological context (and ignoring other anti-mask legislation), widespread, long-term face coverings present a number of new issues for diverse societies, too.
New complications for police, citizen and community relations - especially for BAME and underrepresented communities
Masked citizens present a new challenge for policing at every level. Community policing is already complex and fragile in societies where inequality is rife, and both crime and poverty rates already sit at higher-than-average levels. Police relations are already packed with tensions and resistance, and fraught with ongoing issues of co-operation and communication. Much of this hostility is founded in generations of aggressive policing and inter-community issues (such as gang activity, among other things) - and where masks have historically been a trait of someone engaging in criminal activities.
It’s not new information that minorities and the underrepresented already suffer at the hands of disproportionately aggressive policing - both in volume of incidents and the severity of tactics used. Simply put, BAME communities are already at higher risk for incidents of arrest and police brutality, in a large number of conurbations all over the west, and the data proves it. Entire communities becoming masked quickly presents new challenges for both the state itself, and for over-policed citizens. Police will need to balance public health advice when justifying stopping and searching someone, and citizens may need to go to extra efforts to justify innocuous or innocent behaviours.
For a community that is already suffering disproportionately at the hands of the deadly Coronavirus, this presents new risk - where using masks to stop the spread of the virus may actually increase tension, suspicion and activity in these already delicately balanced communities.
Additional complexity for legitimate criminal investigations
For legitimate criminal investigations, obscured faces create problems for law enforcement in two main areas - constitution of suspicious behaviour and eyewitness testimony. Blanket masking blurs the lines between suspicious and non-suspicious activity - presenting basic issues in the ability to distinguish between those choosing to protect their health and those engaging in criminal activity. Beyond that, they also make eyewitness testimony complicated, ambiguous and unreliable - especially in situations with multiple assailants, or in crowded areas. Faces are important in tracking down perpetrators of both petty and serious crime.
Instability for regular, peaceful citizen relationships
Facial gestures are key to human social exchange, and provide a whole host of physical cues about safety, context and intent. Emotion recognition is important from an evolutionary perspective - it helps people to both gauge genuine threat as well as elicit and facilitate positive social interaction.
Masks change that, and risk introducing and dimension of distrust that we’re otherwise able to avoid. People will need to quickly learn new customs, cues and signals - changing the fabric of how we live, work and interact with each other in diverse societies.
Physical blockers for controversial surveillance and facial recognition technologies
Facial recognition software is a controversial collection of ultra-modern technology initiatives that use sophisticated pattern recognition techniques to build models that can identify human beings in real-time - and then cross-examine their physical identities with their national citizen data. As well as facial characteristics and gesture recognition, these applications also span gait recognition too - allowing machines to analyse not only faces, but also walking styles and other nuanced behavioural cues.
In many circles, this technology is generally acknowledged as an authoritarian overreach and blanket violation of civil liberty - especially in societies with already-established surveillance cultures. A wider ‘techlash’ is already on its way as communities reject a surveillance culture that is factors more powerful than it should be.
Masks render large blocks of the capabilities of this software irrelevant. Some engineers purport to be able to create accurate facial matches even with mask-covered mouths - but most of it isn’t so sophisticated yet. In this instance, I’d argue masks are a good thing - we’ve barely any of the ethical regulation in place to actually make use of this technology in a non-technocratic-dystopian way, and it’s already at the centre of hundreds of practical legal and ethical battles across the world. Citizens should not need to fight for a legal privacy that they never elected to give away in the first place and governments must do better.
Facing up to a new normal
So as societies begin to re-open, and masks become prevalent, we’ll be faced with a number of questions:
How will policing change to accommodate a newly faceless citizenry?
How will private business and retail respond to supplying masks, and adjusting to employees wearing them every day?
How quickly will citizens adjust to the new norm of mask wearing? How will social pressure inform this?
What de-escalation tactics will be deployed to keep police and mask-wearing population tensions to a minimum - while also still upholding criminal law?
How will local communities cope with local tensions arising from a newly suspicious citizenry?
How will existing anti-mask laws change - especially in the context of protest, riot or anti-establishment activity on the edge of a long, deep economic collapse?
How will surveillance technology change - and how, post-virus, will this accelerationism find its way into other spheres of public policy?
Have a day.
@thomas_k_r