Summertime Tube commutes are far from delightful. But I’d take the sweat patches and armpit odours any day over Transport for London’s terrible ideas to transform the London Underground into a nightmare of advertising and surveillance.
First there was the cringe advert — on LinkedIn, the place ambition goes to die — offering brands an “exclusive sponsorship” deal for the Waterloo and City Line. Advertisers could wrap the trains in vinyl adverts and even get their logo printed on the seats.
What fresh hell? It was bad enough when TfL pimped out its station signs (Old Street becoming Fold Street for Samsung, Bond Street turning into Burberry Street) confusing commuters and outraging disability campaigners. Or when giant eyelashes were attached to trains to shill mascara. Now they’re telling us an entire line will become a hideous immersive brand experience.
There’s already more than enough advertising on the Tube. Your eyes are barraged with billboards and panels from the moment you walk through the gates, down the escalators, onto the platform and into the carriage. The concourses in certain stations, such as King’s Cross, sometimes transform into seemingly endless tunnels of brand. This is an underground bridge too far.
TfL has turned our public transport system into an inescapable subterranean attention economy extractive site. What next — sponsored takeovers of the Mind The Gap announcements? Advertising jingles played over the driver intercom? Unblockable pop-up ads over the wi-fi? I shouldn’t give them ideas.
Most insultingly we have to pay through the nose for the privilege. We have one of the most expensive public transport systems in Europe, and fares are only going up. Tube users’ brains and wallets are already cash cows, and immersive advertising on an entire line will milk our minds and bank accounts dry.
Still, I’d rather be commuting up to my ears in adverts than be actively surveilled without my consent via facial recognition cameras. This is the latest not-so-bright idea floated in an attempt to ward off those pesky fare-dodgers. While it’s not currently installed, TfL said it is working closely with the Met as “part of our thinking over the next five years about how we best use technology to be able to tackle fare evasion”.
Personally, I find the obsession over fare dodgers deeply weird. Again, this is a wildly expensive transport system and a lot of Londoners are struggling in the cost-of-living crisis. Like shoplifting and other petty victimless crimes of survival, if you see it — no you didn’t. Leave Robert Jenrick to be a nark and go about your day in peace. If the cops are looking for a job to do, they can start with sorting out the phone theft crime wave.
If facial recognition cameras are introduced to the Underground network, there will be no going back. These sinister surveillance systems are already being rolled out all over the city’s surface level. The Met has rolled out its live facial recognition (LFR) systems with fixed cameras in Croydon and roaming vans that could be anywhere. They use it at protests and at football matches.
The Met likes to trumpet their successes, catching the odd paedophile or rapist (if they are already on their system, of course) wandering down the street. But this is a distraction from the erosion of our civil liberties and the infringement on our human right to privacy. We already know that facial recognition entrenches inequality and disproportionately targets non-white people.
Don’t think that being a law-abiding citizen will keep you safe from being (mis)identified by these cameras. With the government introducing ever more draconian laws to outlaw things like carrying signs at protests and the police arresting people meeting peacefully in churches, who knows how these “bespoke watchlists” are being created.
A 2020 report from the Alan Turing Institute outlined the grave risks that these technologies pose. “The gradual creep of face surveillance infrastructures into every domain of lived experience may eventually eradicate the modern democratic forms of life that have long provided cherished means to individual flourishing, social solidarity and human self-creation,” wrote Dr David Leslie, who authored the report.
If you think a sprinkling of graffiti or the delay to the Piccadilly Line rolling out its air conditioned trains are the biggest problems facing Tube users, think again. Soon we could be paying exorbitant fares to enter a world of dystopian surveillance while having brands blasted into every sightline.
If it comes to pass, you’ll still probably find me on the Tube, reading a book and sweltering in a balaclava. Trying to ignore adverts for the latest Tom Cruise film while living through the real life version of Minority Report.
But this dystopian future can be averted. Now is the time to push back in the strongest terms — before the ugly logo seats and creepy cameras colonise the London Underground.
India Block is a columnist at The London Standard
