IoT, or Internet of Things, is, in theory, a beautiful thing. For instance, your fridge may be connected to the Internet, and, with a little bit of tweaking, it can even replenish itself, by automagically order some milk, if it sees you ran out of it. But hey, there’s a catch. It’s called security.
When your IoT device is exposed to the Internet, it can also exposes vulnerabilities, and an app is as secure as its less secure component. And an app is made of many, many components. A lot of IoT devices have been hacked over the years and things were nasty.
But when the hacked IoT device is a home security camera, we reach a whole new level of weirdness. That’s what happened a couple of weeks ago, when Chinese hackers were able to break some home security cameras, and they came up with the idea to actually sell the camera’s footage. Yeah, just boring private camera feeds. Some of them may have contained sex scenes, but, apparently, those weren’t significantly more expensive. People are not necessarily looking for porn, but for intimacy.
They even made packages, like a “set meal”, with a discount, and you could even watch live what other people were doing, without them knowing, obviously.
In some circles (mostly therapists), this is called “voyeurism”.
As I was browsing through the article, I started to ask myself why someone would want to watch someone else’s private life for hours. In the beginning, I couldn’t find an answer.
But as time went by, I started to ask myself what if, beyond the creepiness of the act itself, lies something else. Something deeper, something related more to our need for identity, or maybe our need for control. Voyeurism is usually linked to sexual deviations and is a crime if done consistently, in pretty much every jurisdiction around the world. But what if watching other people is not linked to sexual arousal? What if people are watching other people just because they lack something else? Maybe some sense of connection? Let’s be clear, I believe this act, with or without sexual arousal, is creepy as fuck and I’m not endorsing it in any way. I’m just observing how valuable are, on the open market, boring videos stolen from unsuspecting people minding their own lives.
We are by far the most connected species on this planet. We have phones, internet, live streams. Yet, we are by far the loneliest one. This over stimulation created by supra-connectivity carved a hole in our psyche. Thousands of influencers bombarding us day in and day out with beauty models, role models, life models, created a mess in our heads. We are unable to engage in an honest way to see and understand each other. We don’t know how to be intimate anymore, how to just mind our lives day in and day out, and we seek gratification by watching other people doing it.
We’re desperately aiming to be normal, and we do this by sneaking into other people lives, because we forgot – or maybe we lost the skill completely – how to be just “normal”.
