Under Their Eye

You do not need a camera pointed at you to feel watched. The condition comes before the device. It has, in fact, been with us for some time — with some of us longer than others.

I grew up in a country where the state watched. Not always literally, but the consciousness of potential observation restructured everything: what you said in public, what you said at home, what you allowed yourself to want, if you talked with priest, about what, where did you get the piece of meat.

The watched self is not the free self. The watched self is managed: it edits in real / reel time, performs its safety, presents only what it has pre-approved for consumption. This was not paranoia at first, as it was adaptive intelligence, but it became paranoia later. Trauma in the body, I guess.

Byung-Chul Han calls our current moment the society of transparency — not in the sense of openness or honesty, but in the sense of total visibility. The transparency society demands that everything be seen: the self, the family, the process, the feeling, the making. What cannot be seen begins to feel suspect. What is not shared begins to feel incomplete, even to the person living it.

The difference between the communist surveillance consciousness I grew up adjacent to and the digital transparency Han diagnoses is instructive.

The communist panopticon was external: a watcher you could, at least in principle, locate, fear, and organize your private life against. The transparency society has internalized the watcher. You are now your own most efficient surveyor. We all think it's the phone. It's you, silly. The panopticon has migrated inward.

Listen to Thiel telling us how to do it:

You scare people. You tell them the wolf will eat your grandma, death is near, or Putin is by your doorsteps with his bears and a 6-pack. No? It has been working for 50 years in Poland.

Han argues that [...]