Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power. The technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise is at the heart of this apparatus. The symbolism of the Frozen Words*, of the Tables of the Law, of recorded noise and eavesdropping — these are the dreams of political scientists and the fantasies of men in power: to listen, to memorize — this is the ability to interpret and control history, to manipulate the culture of a people, to channel its violence and hopes. Who among us is free of the feeling that this process, taken to an extreme, is turning the modern State into a gigantic, monopolizing noise emitter, and at the same time, a generalized eavesdropping device. Eavesdropping on what? In order to silence whom?
Attali, J., 1985. Noise: the political economy of music, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
* “As the cold of certain cities is so intense that it freezes the very words we utter, which remain congealed till the heat of summer thaws them, so the mind of youth is so thoughtless that the wisdom of Plato lies there frozen, as it were, till it is thawed by the ripened judgment of mature age.”Antiphanes in Plutarch’s “Morals.”