'by the time anton B. left the building in the morning, he'd already been recorded three times...'

horsemouth shares with you the first christmas present of the season (from his brother and family) - privacy.: a manifesto by sociologist wolfgang sofsky.  

'by the time anton B. left the building in the morning, he'd already been recorded three times...' goes the kafka (metamorphosis) echoing opening line. sofsky tells you a tale of surveillance. one that (interestingly) relegates foucault to a footnote. sadly sofsky does not go on to tell us what changes this causes in anton B. (or at least not immediately). 

horsemouth's parents internet service provider will have logged him looking at amazon's page for it (so that he could show you a picture of the book on facebook).and now he's telling you about it. the owners of all the pages horsemouth uses will know (this is basically the deal). 

horsemouth (due to an unfortunate series of events) is onto his second biometric passport. - he has come back into the UK through one of those automated borderforce robocop facial recognition barriers. 

for the last few years the government could tell where he was by means of his debit card transactions (tap tap tap). horsemouth, a fully paid up member of the tinfoil hat militia, is contemplating a return to cash. this is not because he is engaged in party work requiring the utmost secrecy but more because small shopkeepers get charged a transaction fee whenever you tap. (further it is useful to have change to fund the addictions of the homeless)

however tapping for everything was most useful to him as it enabled him to keep a better track of his expenditure (particularly down the pub). horsemouth is not in fact a great pub drinker.

as you can see horsemouth's plea for privacy is somewhat undermined by his willingness (enthusiasm even) to tell you about himself. 

horsemouth's impromptu gift to his brother (not in exchange) was his copy of hannah arendt's on violence. 

now hannah takes the unfashionable side of the student power, black power arguments (she's against them and she is not impressed by their arguments).  she is, for horsemouth, overly impressed by the US constitution's separation of powers,  seeing this as some guarantor of freedom. but this opposition is interesting because we are at a moment when those kinds of claims are being made again in the current debates. she also notes the change in the ability of violence to resolve political disputes that the age of nuclear deterrence and the balance of terror ushered in (an age we may have left as we dismember the ghost of the USSR) and the defection of the new left from marx's critique of political economy towards an insurrectionism.

ok horsemouth is off to breakfast. 

he's back from breakfast he has got his tea.

he has donated the nylon strung guitar he keeps at his parents to his brother's eldest's desire to learn guitar (he may replace it when he is back in london with a better nylon strung guitar from his collection if this looks like a good idea. 

in a little bit he will be out of the door in search of wandering about. what he will get up to this week he does not know. he has been watching adam curtis's traumazone about not just the collapse of communism in the USSR but also the collapse of democracy too (and the sheer economic looting of those years). anyway he will watch the rest of those as well.