(Around 2 200 words - 10-15 minutes' read)

(Forenote:

This is a kind of... dystopian look at the dystopian world we now live in, and the direction it's going in. If of a sensitive disposition, and already aware of the many sins of the surveillance society we live in, you may prefer to skip ‘The Mess We Live In’ and go directly to ‘Living In This Mess’)

The Mess We Live In

In 1787, Jeremy Bentham published Panopticon; or the Inspection-House. In this work, he advocates for a system of organizing a prison, or similar institution, around convincing the inmates or clients that at any moment they may be under surveillance. In this work, while suggesting that prisoners should be observed by guards who are observed by government officials who are observed by the body public, Bentham writes:

And who ever objects to such publicity, where it is practicable, but those whose motives for objection afford the strongest reasons for it?

Or, to put it in slightly more modern phrasing, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’. Words which, I am sure, are of great comfort to everyone reading this.

In 1948, George Orwell wrote 1984. Where, on the second page we may read:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

In 2026, Meta’s sales blurb for their AI glasses proudly states:

Moments don't wait – and now you don't have to either. With AI glasses by Meta, hands-free capture, photos and videos are taken from your perspective using just your voice or a quick tap. Whether you're creating, moving or exploring, everything's saved effortlessly – no interruptions, no second takes.

Persecutory delusions, a specific type of mental illness which is both difficult to treat and frequently connected with particularly low scores on measures of psychological well-being. These delusions feature the belief that the sufferer is being persecuted, influenced, or watched by malevolent forces. These delusions can be triggered by being harassed and surveilled.

Harassing and surveilling innocent people and posting the resultant footage to social media is a long-standing and popular genre of online content, having begun long before smart glasses were available.

We are being watched. And it is not good for us.

But it’s profitable.

Aside from those who steal our image on the streets to harass us, our personal information is an absolute industry to others.

Your shopping information is gathered with loyalty card schemes and sold off to help power algorithms which, around fifteen years ago, were capable of so precisely analysing shopping patterns and predicting someone was pregnant that they had to stop sending vouchers for diapers to people who didn’t yet realize they were pregnant. Instead, they more subtly altered personalized sections in larger adverts in hope their customers wouldn’t feel like the store was stalking them. Unfortunately, the store is stalking them - facial recognition provider FaceFirst claim a reassuring 99.97% accuracy in detecting shoplifters under perfect testing conditions, and now instead of winning a door prize, every 3 334^th customer wins a false accusation of shoplifting.

You can use the same great technology to unlock your phone! If you’re lucky, your phone provider won’t sell your measurements to a firm developing a modern take on phrenology. (Phrenology, of course, back in the day, was used to work out if you were a criminal, or if you showed traits of an undesirable ethnic group.)

Palantir, the data analytics company, who are able to throw billions of dollars around to buy whatever data they want, work with ICE in the United States of America to help facilitate deporting people. (They also produced a manifesto with the phrase ‘Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.’, which reads to me like something out of White-Nationalist propaganda.)

The theoretical good society, the perfect one, where we all watch each other in benevolence profits from surveillance. So does the real society we live in, where police officers given access to privatized surveillance stalk their partners and school kids handed smartphones film themselves bullying each other. The world where we can walk securely down a dark street knowing we’re safe, because we’re being watched, is the same world where a corrupt government agency can shove you into an improvised concentration camp because you have the wrong kind of last name. And somehow we’ve made peace with the fact that recommendation algorithms, which define the majority of the intellectual content we consume, are being run by people who would absolutely love to brainwash us all into doing as they desire.

Do you think you could brainwash someone, or at least shift their opinions significantly, by picking out exactly what they watch and listen to, 10% of the time? How about 50%? When was the last time you found something to watch on YouTube or TikTok without letting the algorithm bring it to you?

Fox News radicalizing a generation is so commonly understood to be true that it’s barely worth mentioning. But do you think Incel culture would exist if not for the indoctrination pipeline that starts with some guy explaining to young men how they can be better men?

Do you think you’re immune?

We live in a world where we are being watched, and those who watch us can use that information to gain power over us and our societies, and they use that power to watch us ever more closely.

I’d say it’s like some kind of dystopian fantasy, but I already quoted 1984. Instead, I’ll quote Bruce Sterling’s 1985 essay, The New Science Fiction:

The objective world-view of the sciences has no moral component. It will fry you or run your stereo, makes no difference.

It holds true, whether we’re talking about electricty or atom bombs or total surveillance societies or artificial intelligence powered police states.

Surveillance technologies exist. They have no innate moral component. They will be used for good and for ill, but in our current society, there’s plenty of benefits for those seeking to exploit us. And that’s why they’ve figured out how to make smartphones hear you from a room or two away, and how to watch people through walls by measuring how much of the local WiFi signal their body absorbs.

How are we supposed to retain our human dignity when every embarrassing sound we make in the bathroom is being overheard, and every time we wipe our ass it’s being carefully observed? Granted, probably nobody is watching or listening, but are you sure?

You can’t be. And that’s the goal.

In Panopticon Jeremy Bentham pointed out that it was impossible to watch people constantly. But:

This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.

You get the same effect so long as the subject thinks he could be being watched.

How the fuck are we supposed to live like this? How are we supposed to stay sane?

How are we supposed to make art?

Loudly.

With anger. And compassion. Forgiveness, for each other and ourselves. Acceptance. Kindness. But don’t forget anger.

Living In This Mess

In a world where we are so surveilled, there is no point in hiding ourselves. We do not hold secrets, so whatever we are, whoever we are, we can no longer view the burden of silencing ourselves as being worth the emotional cost of doing so.

Google Docs can, and in some cases has, ingested everything users have placed into the service and fed it to their in-house AI. That’s everything from someone’s draft of an e-mail to their private journals.

Be loud, because there is no purpose to being ashamed of our secrets, because we no longer have any.

They have been stolen from us, by technological oligarchs so desperate to know our private lives that they claim the state of our minds and bodies to use as marketing data just so they can extract a little more money from us.

Be angry, because what is yours, what is ours, is being taken from us every day. To lose our privacy to surveillance like this exposes the crass poison behind the statement ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’

You walk past a storefront. That storefront is using a privatized CCTV system with cloud-based storage. The cloud storage is insufficiently secure, perhaps through negligence or vibe-coding, and an uninterested stranger downloads the footage and uses an automated facial recognition system to find the social media accounts of everyone on that street. They then use Elon Musk’s Grok or another similar service to make sexualized images of every person there, including parents and children, and extorts them all for money against the threat of releasing these vaguely plausible images to friends and family.

Do you fear that?

Do you post readily AI-modifiable photographs of yourself on social media? Social media which has a publicly accessible list of your friends and family attached to it?

Be angry, because you have been misled into giving away your privacy, without being told what you risked.

But be compassionate, be forgiving.

Because in a world where our every flaw is exposed, in a world where bad actors can deepfake new flaws for us, we cannot live if we do not forgive each other for our flaws. We cannot live if we do not act with compassion towards ourselves and others.

Without that compassion, this transparent society we are moving into is one where we will constantly caught in witch hunts against each other. A moral failing we had decades ago is held up as a moral failure now, a reason to ostracize each other, to attack – because in an environment without compassion and forgiveness, proving we have no moral failures is of absolute importance. And the fastest way to ensure we pass as one of the ‘good ones’ is to pursue others for being ‘bad ones’.

Without compassion and forgiveness, we are turned into the Stasi – repressive secret police, acting to smother one another for not living up to the necessary standard. And if we do live up to that standard, then a new one will be drawn, and another, until eventually we fall prey to it.

But we stop that by accepting that we ourselves are in some way fucked up, love ourselves, and accept that others are similarly fucked up, and love them.

The very, very thin silver lining here is that we will not have to worry too much about theoretical harms, the idea that people who hold a given opinion are dangerous, because the real harms being done to each other will be apparent. We will know who has harmed who, and where, and how, in detail excruciating enough that many of us will likely develop trauma conditions in response to that much exposed pain.

Our bad breakups will be picked over by others with a fine toothed comb, to see if we were unkind, in exactly the same way first person drone footage from warzones gets picked over to determine exactly who killed who with which specific device.

Which is where the anger comes back in.

Anger is an emotional state caused by wanting the world to be different to how it is. Someone causes you injustice? Cheats you? Steals from you? Anger, at them. Didn’t manage to behave the way you wanted to? Anger, at yourself.

Anger can drive us to fight injustice, but it can also cause us to commit injustices. To be cruel to each other.

We have to be careful about that. We need to avoid being cruel. But we also live in a world we need to change, so we need to be angry.

We live in the world we live in. We, as individuals, can no more change the facts of our world than people could at any other time. Even emperors of old could not make the rain fall when there was a drought, and no billionaire can stop you from hating (or loving) them.

The first step is confronting the reality around us, instead of blindly letting our assumptions guide us.

At some point, we have to see the world around us for what it is. Make peace with what the world is. Negotiate a way to live in it that gives us as much happiness and safety as we can find. And then, only then, can we try and do our best to use the happiness and safety we’ve found to give others that happiness and safety too.

I get angry about the world I see around me. Often, that anger reminds me that I desperately need to try and be kind to others. Sometimes, when I am lucky, I find some happiness and safety in contemplations like these, in the realization of how importance kindness is.

I cannot undo climate change, or the financial crises suffered by untold multitudes, or even (with the state of my own barely-stable finances) do as much as I’d like to feed the hungry.

But I can write. Sometimes essays like these, and sometimes stories, sometimes other works.

Troubling as all of the above is, I hope it gave you a measure of happiness and safety.