This episode could all too easily have become a standard liberal morality play about the evils of Cold War paranoia, but fortunately it avoids getting caught in that rut (though some will try to force the template onto it anyway). The danger facing us in the episode is not a clique of militarists and establishment scientists taking away our freedoms by hiding behind national security. It is a case of the real enemy being ourselves and what we all are inside, with aliens poised to take advantage of this weakness. The episode is pertinent to today not in regards to clichés about wiretapping of suspected terrorists, but as a prophecy of how we have become a paparazzi society that is obsessed with knowing all the private details of both celebrities and our neighbors. The really chilling part of the episode is when it is revealed that the individuals (whether military men or scientists) who have used the OBIT device to spy on others have done so not to create a dictatorship, but to satisfy personal curiosity and feed a growing addiction of wanting to watch the lives of others. In our case, the corrosive acid that threatens to dissolve society is not the White House or the Pentagon, but the supermarket gossip papers, confess-all talk shows (and the expectation that we are supposed to blab to each other about our souls and privates lives), personal monitoring devices, "reality" TV shows, and ravenous 24/7 news organizations which demand to know and report all. And we as a group enable all of this. People, whether celebrities or the average man, have much more to fear from a chance remark or action being spread like wildfire on the internet, on the news, or in the neighborhood and being used against them, than they do from being wiretapped by a national security agency. The growing hostility of celebrities against the paparazzi is just the tip of the iceberg of the fear and paranoia that can result from this desire to know all. Since it is part of our nature to want to know what is going on around us, we will never entirely put an end to delving into the lives of others. But a reasonable goal would be to balance the needs of our inquisitive nature with our need for privacy.
Review of O.B.I.T.
