Certains d’entre-vous ont peut-être déjà entendu parler de Benjaman Kyle, trouvé inconscient près d’un Burger King et n’ayant absolument aucune idée de ce qu’il avait bien pu faire les 30 dernières années. N’ayant pas non plus le moindre souvenir de son vrai nom ou de sa famille. The New Republic a publié en novembre un long reportage retraçant toute l’histoire, et c’est passionnant.
We live in an age of extraordinary surveillance and documentation. The government’s capacity to keep tabs on us—and our capacity to keep tabs on each other—is unmatched in human history. Big Data, NSA wiretapping, social media, camera phones, credit scores, criminal records, drones—we watch and watch, and record our every move. And yet here was a man who appeared to exist outside all that, someone who had escaped the modern age’s matrix of observation. His condition—blind, nameless, amnesiac—seemed fictitious, the kind of allegorical affliction that might befall a character in Saramago or Borges. Even if he was lying about his memory loss, there was no official record of his existence. He lived on the margins, beyond the boundaries mapped by the surveillance state. And because we choose not to look at individuals on the margins, it is still possible for them to disappear.
Extrait de l’article “The Last Unknown Man” sur New Republic