This year seemed like the year we got our peep on.
Businesses like Target, Home Depot, eBay, and JP Morgan were hacked for financial and personal information. The private cell phones of celebrities were hacked and nude photos were leaked. And most recently hackers hit Sony pictures leaking movie scripts, internal memos, and personal information on actors and employees. We were all about getting up in other people’s business in 2014.
Then, of course, the year culminated, like it always does, with the Peeping-est Tom of all, king of hackers, the sultan of surveillance, the Big Man above—Santa Claus.
Yes, I know I’m being ungrateful for the incredible gifts I got this year in giving the big guy a little flack. But my analytical mind has been trained this holiday on his business practices. And why not? What global enterprise—nonprofit or for profit—doesn’t get its every corporate decision critiqued? What I’m talking about is that these days Santa has, in true entrepreneurial fashion, begun to outsource. Of course he’s always outsourced his production but now he’s outsourced his intel process. Enter, The Elf on the Shelf.
Disguised as a delightful holiday book or “infiltration instructions,” depending on your conspiracy-meter, The Elf on the Shelf has become a behavioral control tool for some parents, a way to demonstrate superior left-brain skills for others, and unwanted pressure to perform for some holiday-weary parents. Then again, to some researchers, he may have yet another, perhaps, more insidious effect on the world.
The pint-sized spy guy was introduced to the world in 2005 by Chanda Bell. The book became a bestseller and this year actually entered the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade as a float. Though not everyone was excited about seeing the wide-eyed elfin-cutie/minion. Since his introduction, some parents have embraced the idea behind The Elf on the Shelf, which is in its essence a game to place him somewhere he can watch kids to see if they are being naughty and report back to Santa Claus each night.
The thought is that because kids don’t know when they are being watched they will be good throughout the season. In other words, it’s a fun way to inspire Christmas anticipation within the household.
Some creatively inclined parents have placed the elf in increasingly amusing situations each day for their child to find each morning. Time-crunched and less-creative parents have been outspoken on social media about the pressure of finding innovative ways to present the elf each day.
Then there’s the paper called “Who’s the Boss” introduced by researchers at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives by digital technology professor Laura Pinto and co-author Selena Nemorin. They argue that The Elf on the Shelf is prepping kids to willingly accept “increasingly intrusive (albeit whimsically packaged) modes of surveillance,” according to a Dec. 16 story in The Washington Post. They admit to understanding that yes, it’s just a children’s book, but they also say that allowing a bureaucratic elf to spy on them in their home normalizes the idea of surveillance for children and that future privacy restrictions might be more easily accepted.
In short, they are saying that the decision of Santa Claus Inc. to outsource the monitoring of its Naughty or Nice List was an innocuous move that had the unintended consequences of de-sensitizing children to life in a Big Brother society and possibly paving the way toward a more communistic—or perhaps—dictatorship model of society. Way to go, little elf.
Whether I believe them or not, I like conspiracy theories. It’s interesting to me to think that someone might be conducting surveillance at the precise moment when I make the choice on whether to give my last dollar to the dreadlocked young guy hitching across the country or whether I continue on to buy a Diet Coke with it. Intellectually, I’m interested in how that cognizance of possible surveillance ultimately influences behavior.
And for good reason. Like, I know for a fact most places watch us. For instance, I recently covered a trial at the courthouse. I expect to be watched while in the courtroom. What I didn’t know was that people watch the entire grounds. I was surprised when I was told this after my visit there. “You mean when I was adjusting my, um, skirt, behind that pillar in the corridor, I was on camera?”
“Yup, they saw that,” this person said.
Yikes.
I’m still unclear on who that “they” is, but maybe it’s Santa.
I mentioned that to someone else, who told me that Santa Claus Inc. has technology that can read the face of a dime on the ground based on the data collected from a satellite.
Then, I read the Dec. 14 essay in The New York Times by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who said we live not only in a surveillance state but a surveillance society. He said totalitarian surveillance is not only embedded in our governments and economy but in our mundane uses of technology and everyday interactions. Shudder.
But let’s get back to the topic here. Can an adorable toy be a way to, unintentionally, acclimatize people to be more accepting of a surveillance state? From my perspective, it all depends on whether I land on the Naughty or Nice List next Christmas.
Shelly Cone likes a good spy story and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas, not bah humbug. No, really. To reach her, email the Sun’s executive editor at rmiller@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Dec 25, 2014 – Jan 1, 2015.
