National Geographic

54 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • FEBRUARY 2018POACHERSWATCHINGIn total darkness, a frame from a thermal imaging camera (above) shows rangers inKenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve chasing a poacher, who was soon caught. Thedevices, provided by the World Wildlife Fund to the Mara Conservancy, have allowedrangers (top right) to extend their work protecting wildlife into the night. By day,rangers rescue a male elephant calf (bottom right) that was separated from its herdDQGWKXVYXOQHUDEOHWRSUHGDWRUV7KHHOHSKDQWZDVƄRZQWRDQDQLPDOVDQFWXDU\&/2&.:,6()5207235,*+73(7(08//(5ǘ7:2Ǚ::)0$5$&216(59$1&<ultimate London selfie. I ducked and turned andapologized before realizing it was futile. And thesewere just the cameras in front of my face. Were allof my movements being casually documented inthis way? Did it really make any difference wheth-er Big Brother was watching, given that everyoneis already watching everyone else?I’d been discussing society’s growing pics- or-it-didn’t-happen fixation with two keen observers.The first, Chloe Combi, is a former schoolteach-er whose first book, Generation Z: Their Voices,Their Lives, is the fruit of hundreds of hours ofinterviews she conducted with British teenagers.They demonstrated a remarkable nonchalanceabout being photographed and filmed in almostevery conceivable setting. “You can watch a docu-mentary of someone’s entire life on their phone,”Combi told me. “We live in a world where, in-creasingly, nothing remains secret. And one ofthe signs of true wealth and power may end upbeing that privacy will become a commodity onlyfor those who have the serious money to buy it.For everybody else, all the world really will be astage, with all the people on it self-consciouslyplaying their role.”The futurist spectacle conjured up by Combi—one in which everyone is simultaneously voyeurand exhibitionist, 24/7—struck me as a somewhategalitarian version of 1984 and Brave New World,yet no less dystopic. Are we already there, at the``````POACHER RANGER