I don't believe mature democracies have the motivation or manpower to sift through each individual photograph searching for malicious intent, though it's clear they can target individuals where they deem necessary.
True, which is why AI has become the tool of choice. Indeed "human sifting" of any kind would be utterly preposterous. but AI can, and is, doing this around the clock.
Art is often political and considered dangerous to state power. When art is (literally) in the hands of artists it has the most power. As more and more art becomes subject to surveillance, it's power decreases accordingly.
I'm sure everyone - even JTK - is by now aware of the massive new censorship operations being set up to combat so-called fake news. Everywhere you look, some company related to the Internet is developing plans to weed out their understanding of fake news. How do you imagine they are doing this? Certainly not with human eyeballs, but with the aid of AI engines. Just the very notion alone that some authority is going to prune the news should cause an immediately awakening to what the future is for photography that is being "processed" on the Internet. You can think of
processed in the narrowest or broadest terms you want.
In terms of
systems, photography of the 1950s was a loose one. From buying a roll of film at the drug store to having it processed into prints, the photographer could remain anonymous and the pictures were uncontrolled and not part of a database. In today's Internet scheme of photography, tracking photographer and photograph are part of an integrated system. Adobe and Google are cataloging photos and storing information about the photog. Remember, you can't even USE an Adobe product without an Adobe account, with validated email addy and so on. Same with Google. Same with FB. Posting to social media, or using Google's cloud, is nothing more than registering your images with the security apparatus.
So, I know the refrain from Mom and Pop: "I've done nothing wrong, so I have no concerns about all this." And it's absolutely true that generic masses will never experience a problem. But, artists are not generic masses. Artists are often dangerous rabble-rousers that strike fear into state power when art is used against political forces. Even in 1958 "The Americans" was considered too radical for American publishers, and had to be published in France first. Today, it would be far, far easier to permanently squelch a controversial work in photography. Could a new version of "The Americans" ever find the light of day in 2018? If print publishers wouldn't touch it for fear of loss of government confidence, and ISPs and other Internet tyrannies considered it too radical and wouldn't host a web site, then the effects of modern technology on "photography" will finally be understood.
Today, when people want to have 100% security against electronic eavesdropping and tracking - for example with a Bitcoin wallet - they operate an "air-gapped" computer - one that is never connected to a network. What would be the equivalent of that for a photographer? An air-gapped darkroom?
Now, none of this is about individual experience. It's about photography writ large. As changes in social system structure occur, changes to photography are simply unavoidable. That's what I mean when I say photography in the 1950s was different than in 2018. The
enveloping process was far more free, open, and democratic in the west that it can be said to be now in the era of mass surveillance.
This is not about conspiracy, or about paranoia. All this surveillance is fact, and I'm too old to be worried for myself. I'm worried for the future photographer who is going to try to make some social comment through photography that meets head on with the new censorship and surveillance regime. If you can't see it coming, you probably just haven't been looking.