Feeling watched is the new episteme

There is always room for one more blog post that starts with some reference to George Orwell’s 1984. One of the plotlines of that story is that people are being watched by the government and that this changes their behavior.

It’s an old plot, we’ve all heard, it’s a compelling argument, it seems plausible, it is frequently cited but in a way - it did not really turn into reality.

Some of it maybe, including all the infrastructure needed (Orwell predicted TVs with cameras in 1948, we got smartphones, close enough). There is the technical basis for everything he predicted and more.

But psychologically and socially, I think what he predicted just did not happen. Goverments are subtle about it, are highly aware of privacy concerns and, mostly, I think people do not notice or change their behavior due to potential government privacy intrusions.

Orwell predicted something krass - people explicitly being told every day they were being watched and told what to think etc pp from some sort of central entity that rules them all. This did not happen.

But I think people have indeed changed over the last, say 20, years. I really think they have but they have done so very slowly and the changes in their behavior are subtle.

It’s not for me to say if people as a whole changed and maybe I just got it all wrong. But as I’ll try to argue in this post, the things that over the last two decades changed how people behave were due to the behavior of their peers, ordinary people like you and me.

What is the thesis of this post?

-> Phone cameras, screenshots, message forwarding, online reviews have created an atmosphere where people feel watched and behave accordingly.

I’ll try to describe what I mean with examples later on.

But the basic idea is the above - it’s really not that deep and maybe you are “yeah sure, everyone knows that”. But while it sounds a bit obvious, it is not usually talked about. There are some articles when you search for “peer surveilance” or “lateral surveillance” such as https://www.diggitmagazine.com/articles/peer-surveillance-and-cancelation-digital-panopticon and a small number of research papers such as https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:163150, many of them quite old.

So uhm I don’t claim that this is a new thought or anything, my argument is that this might be a larger thing than people currently think and that it should be more of a mainstream topic for debate, not a niche research interest.

I called it episteme (it’s not to me to call an episteme, this is mostly a joke) because I think acts as hidden force from below the surface of the things we generally think and talk about. I claim it is now part of the “operating system” of society - it changes what you do and how you do it but you usually do not think about it constraining or enabling you on a normal day. You are being shaped, without you being fully aware of what is happening.

Foucault, author of bangers like Discipline and Punish, would probably have said that you can’t name the current episteme from the inside, that the point is kind of that you can’t do that, that it only unveil itself in retrospect, and anything in the direction of real-time-episteme-analysis is a dumb attempt to begin with.

However, dumb attempts are kind of my thing so HERE WE GO HAHAHAHAHAHA

Basically, what this post tries to do differently from what is already there is:

• to argue that this could be a larger thing that people think, maybe

• to provide specific examples where I observed or experienced lateral surveillance, where I think it needlessly discouraged a behavior and made the world a lamer place

Government surveillance could have turned out so much worse

As far as I know, no government ever pursued an idea like:

In order to plug the budget deficit, we will index all camera feeds from the public surveillance network in real time and we will let AI decide what currently is the dumbest real-life behavior to watch in the country. We will then give people access for 9.97$ per month.

It is not pursued because it will cause people to be needlessly careful in public. They might not tell each other a weird joke anymore out of fear they will become a 5s segment on the stream with it.

There might be a few who think exactly the other way, try to get on it and eehm yes, maybe, but I think most would be more careful.

I think they would certainly be more careful if:

• the AI choosing the stream to show is promoted to generally shows the dumbest, most embarrassing scenes that will make the people in it look bad

• if the AI tends to edit the material to take scenes out of context, for added effect

• if they are a minority of some kind

• if they are not visually or acoustically likable and make for a “fair target”

This is fictional - there is no such AI. Governments seem to use video surveillance responsibly to be point of it being weird how little there is to criticise. I don’t have strong opinions on it but I think a camera here and there in public places is maybe also not the worst idea.

They are not doing the above because:

• it would be bad for society as a whole - it would make people stop being themselves and not say what they think, admit mistakes, have minority opinions, present a concept early without being fully fledged out etc - anything that could be streamed and would make them look bad. This would discourage society-wide learning, feedback and exchange of ideas.

• it would make the world less fun, everyone would be too careful and not ever try something new, make a risky joke, play the fool etc. The stream might start of really good (I am now somewhat interested in that actually muhaha) but, over a decade or two, it would become absurdly boring as nobody wants to be on it and be publicly paraded around as the fool

The above, I argue, kind of happened, actually. But it happened with the availability of smartphone cameras, with recordings and transcripts of video meetings, message screenshots, with online business reviews, with running everything humans say through an LLM.

Uhm, my only qualification for writing this is being born at the right time: I grew up without internet and computers, had my first computer (a Casio programmable pocket calculator) with 15, my first personal computer (assembled myself) at 16, unlimited internet access roughly at 18 (BiG mIsTaKe IT WENT DOWNHILL FROM THERE) and my first smartphone when I was 21 years old.

This was normal at the time - nobody had a smartphone when we graduated from high school (at the age of 19) in Germany. At the risk of sounding like an old person philibustering how EvErYtHiNg WaS bEtTeR bAcK tHeN, BELIEVE ME IT REALLY WAS; I would say that people have indeed changed.

A part of it might be my peer group getting older, like me. People have grown up, including me (DEBATABLE) but I think it’s not the main factor, actually.

People across all age gaps drink less alcohol now than 2 decades ago. The number of night clubs and bars decreased by almost 50% in that time (in Germany we call it “Clubsterben”). Young people are not rebellious anymore but grade-obsessed. They take amphetamines prescribed by their doctors in bright offices and don’t smoke weed obtained from a shady dealer in a dark street corner, they like uppers, not downers; always be active, never recover.

The are more sedated and obsessed with fitting in to the point of being suck ups to the system, an anathema to the wildness of the generation of the 70s.

The crazier the world feels on the high level issues and in many ways more urgent, the more sedated, mundane and repetitive it feels in everyday life, people acting and talking like well-behaved robots, trying not to draw any attention by their overzealous masters.

The masters are we ourselves as a collective.

References