2013 will likely be remembered as the year in which global surveillance disclosures dented the confidence and quietude of a Western monoculture previously blithe and blasé to the potentially deleterious effects of total surveillance. This ongoing issue was concurrent to a parallel development that year, the Europe-wide meat adulteration scandal, in which advertized beef was found to contain undeclared animal meats such as horse or pork. Collective awareness often operates contrapuntally, so that a story meriting mass attention (the NSA scandal) is echoed and inverted in a comparatively minor phenomenon (a lack of faith in food distribution oversight), which at times gains even more attention than the ‘larger’ phenomenon that serves as its backdrop. This process wherein attention is both focused and displaced – akin to Freud’s transference and Hegel’s sublation – partly accounts for what can otherwise seem like collective blindness or evasion in the face of the obvious. The writing of collective memory – what was once simply called ‘history’ – is not simply a case of retracing the superficial fixations of a ‘mainstream’ media, but of reconciling this with the buried points that it conceals. Crucially, we need both, the surface chatter and the facts that endure a communal meme culture. In 2013, both the NSA revelations and the horse meat scandal rocked confidence in mechanisms of supply and distribution, while confirming the eerie proximity between the agents of outrage and the agents of enforcement – the double-bind of a ‘prosumer’ economy, in which the witness is the former surveillant (Snowden), and participation is equivalent to ‘disruption’.
