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 a priest, about what, where you got 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 the inward panopticon is more effective as a control mechanism precisely because it is experienced as freedom. You choose to share. You want to be visible. Visibility feels like existence — and invisibility feels, subtly, like failure. The individual exploits herself voluntarily, offering her inner life to the feed because the alternative is to feel that her inner life doesn't count.
This is the terror of the current moment. Not that we are watched but that we have become unable to distinguish being seen from being real. Or being Reel.
I know, it hurts.
What does this do to the body that makes things?
It reshapes the act of making at the level of attention. Not just time — though it takes time, the documentation, the optimization, the decision about what to share and how. At the level of attention: the body that is simultaneously maker and observer cannot fully inhabit either position.
I mean this literally, and I've experienced this.
When you are watching yourself make something, the making changes. The hand that knows it will be photographed moves differently from the hand that has forgotten the camera. Not worse, necessarily — but differently. More legible. Smoother (per Han). Oriented toward the reception of the gesture rather than toward the object of the gesture. The making becomes, to some degree, a communication about making.
The philosopher (yes, not just a writer) who most helps me think about this is not Han but Lispector, who wrote that the thing before it becomes a concept is the only thing worth reaching for. The transparency society demands that we skip the pre-conceptual — the thing before it has been named, before it knows what it is doing, before it can be shown — and go directly to the form that can be communicated.
We live in the permanent skip. Neither time has time anymore.
Clarice Lispector / © Marta Spendowska
What is lost in the skip is not the polished work. The polished work survives fine. What is lost is the encounter with what you didn't know was there — the thing the hand found that the mind hadn't planned, the image that arrived from the direction of the painting rather than from the direction of your intention. This is what the transparency society cannot tolerate and cannot reward. It is invisible. It produces no metric. It happens in the private hours when the watcher inside you has gone quiet.
The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz — difficult, spiny, someone I return to when I need a diagnostic eye that operates without sentimentality — spent his life thinking about the gaze. Specifically, what the awareness of being watched does to the formation of the self. His answer, in rough summary, is that
we become the mask we wear for others, and the mask eventually eats the face. The self that has performed itself long enough for external consumption stops knowing the difference between the performance and the thing beneath it.
I think about this constantly in relation to what it means to be a working artist today. We are all, now, to some degree, performing the artist. The question is not whether — it is how deep the performance runs, whether it has reached the studio, whether the face is still there beneath the mask.
The transparency society, Han argues, eliminates interiority. Not by forbidding it — it does not forbid it. It simply makes it invisible, therefore valueless. The interior life that is not shared is not recorded, not engaged, not liked. It produces nothing. In a world where production is the measure of value, interiority becomes an inefficiency.
This is the world the artist now lives inside. The question is not whether to be visible — visibility is not optional for the working artist who needs to sell work, build a list, maintain a practice that sustains itself financially.
The question is what to protect. Where the watcher inside you is not allowed to go.
Rooms.
I have been thinking about this in terms of rooms. Today, the metaphor for "A Room of One's Own" — after Virginia Woolf — lands differently. That room, if you have one, may have been turned into a laboratory performing Under Their Eye. So, a room is not enough anymore. What's enough is to shut its door, at least occasionally. Remember, you owe nobody anything.
But even Virginia writes:
"I want to write a novel about Silence," he said, “the things people don’t say.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
The thing is, the transparency society doesn't take all the rooms. It doesn't need to; it just makes certain rooms feel wasteful — like they should be opened up, shown, shared, turned into content. The studio doesn't need to be one of those rooms.
The studio, the journal, the walk to the post office, the straddle you take before the session begins; these can remain interior. They do not need to be documented to be real. The work that comes from those rooms will be more real for their remaining closed.
Han, in his diagnosis, is not offering a solution. He rarely does. The solution, if there is one, is not systemic — it is individual, small, often plain, and daily. It is the decision to
preserve a self that is not performing.
Not because performance is shameful, but because the performance cannot be the entire self without the self beginning to hollow.
Under their eyes, you can still inhabit rooms they cannot see.
"The disappearance of the other is a crisis of the negative. Today everything is being flattened out into the Same." — Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros
