This week I presented at the 2026 Surveillance Studies Network conference in Lille, and I am still processing how good it was. Three days of genuinely sharp, wide-ranging work on planetary surveillance from Gaza and the US-Mexico border to corporate platforms and the intimate devices we keep in our homes. Plenty of ideas I will be thinking about for a while.

My own presentation, “Surveillance Microcosms as Planetary Infrastructure: Intimate Monitoring and the Atomization of Control.” The paper asks a question that I think gets less attention than it deserves: what happens when we are not just the subjects of surveillance but its architects, financiers, and maintenance crew?

It is easy (or easier), and important, to protest state surveillance. Mass data collection by intelligence agencies, facial recognition in public spaces, the carceral infrastructure of ankle monitors and predictive policing: these are visible, identifiable, and have identifiable institutions to push back against. The harder conversation is about the surveillance we build ourselves. The baby monitor we install in the nursery. The fitness tracker we strap to our wrist. The smart doorbell we mount by the front door. The period app we use to understand our own bodies.

These devices are not experienced as surveillance. They are experienced as care, health, convenience, and self-knowledge. That gap between what they are structurally and what they feel like experientially is the central problem the paper addresses.

Foucault, Sartre, and Why We Pay for Our Own Monitoring

The paper draws on two theoretical frameworks that I think work well together, even though they are rarely combined.

Foucault’s account of confession and biopower explains the apparatus: the institutional, economic, and discursive structures that produce subjects who experience self-disclosure as authenticity and self-monitoring as prudent self-investment. The fitness tracker does not watch us so much as invite us to produce ourselves as a continuous stream of biometric data. That production feels like self-expression. It is also, simultaneously, the generation of a legally accessible record we did not intend to create.

Sartre’s concept of bad faith explains the psychology: the existential move by which structurally constrained choices are experienced as free ones. The parent who installs a baby monitor because responsible parents do, the gig worker who accepts location tracking as the condition of employment, the driver who opts into insurance telematics to save money: each experiences a choice whose alternatives have been made costly by the apparatus as an obvious and natural exercise of freedom. Bad faith does not mean deception. It means treating yourself as having no choice when in fact you have one — and the apparatus works very hard to produce that experience.

Together these two frameworks explain a political economy in which subjects finance, operate, and maintain their own surveillance infrastructure, experiencing that maintenance as personal responsibility and rational self-investment. The carceral cost has been successfully reframed as a capital expenditure whose returns accrue to the subject. The actual returns accrue to the platform, the insurer, and sometimes the state.

From the Nursery to the Nursing Home: A Lifecycle of Normalization

One of the structural arguments in the paper is that surveillance does not arrive in adult life as an alien imposition. It accumulates across the lifespan through a series of stages, each building on the formation established by the previous one.

Infancy establishes the foundational equation: to exist is to be rendered legible as data. The Owlet Smart Sock streams infant biometrics to parental smartphones and corporate servers. The infant cannot consent and does not resist. What is being built is not just a dataset but the inaugural confessional subject — a person for whom self-disclosure is the natural condition of being known and cared for.

Adolescence is where bad faith is learned. Location sharing becomes the price of smartphone access. Surveillance is experienced as care. The teenager who objects to tracking registers as someone with something to hide, not as someone exercising a reasonable claim to autonomy.

Adulthood is where the neoliberal subject invests in themselves. Fitness trackers, menstrual cycle apps, insurance telematics: each adopted as rational self-management. The quantified self as entrepreneur of one’s own health capital.

Old age closes the loop. The geofenced elderly parent and the geofenced parolee occupy structurally similar positions. The ankle monitor is acknowledged as a condition of constrained liberty. The GPS wristband is marketed as a condition of independence. By this stage, no coercion is needed. The subject arrives already formed.

When the Data Leaves the Relationship

The paper documents what happens when the data generated within intimate relationships flows outward — sometimes through channels built for that purpose, sometimes simply because nothing was built to stop it.

A Connecticut man’s alibi was undone by his wife’s Fitbit, which showed her walking around the house after the time he claimed she had been shot. Amazon provided Ring doorbell footage to police without a warrant at least eleven times in the first half of 2022. A smart speaker in Farmington, New Hampshire was subpoenaed in a double murder case; the defendant was convicted in 2024. In the post-Dobbs United States, period app data, Google search histories, and text messages have been used to prosecute women for seeking abortions.

None of these users purchased surveillance infrastructure. They purchased care, fitness, home security, and reproductive self-knowledge. The carceral use of that data was not what they signed up for. But the confessional subject — formed across a lifetime of progressive self-disclosure, trained to experience monitoring as self-expression — was never equipped to recognize what they had built.

The Hard Part

What I find most interesting about this argument, and what generated the most discussion after the panel, is that it does not let any of us off the hook, myself included.

It is genuinely easier to protest state surveillance than to be honest about our own. State surveillance has identifiable authors and institutional addresses. Self-financed surveillance has us. The Ring camera I install to deter package thieves. The Fitbit I wear to understand my own health. These are real uses, real care, real needs — and they are simultaneously nodes in an infrastructure whose implications I am not fully reckoning with when I make the purchase.

That does not mean the solution is individual consumer choice. The apparatus has been specifically engineered to make bad faith the path of least resistance — to arrange the costs of critical recognition higher than the costs of compliance. Calling for better consumer awareness in this context is not a solution; it is a defense of the apparatus dressed as one. The political response has to be regulatory and mandatory: data minimization, encryption by default, prohibition of purpose-built enforcement pipelines, legal protection for sensitive categories of intimate data.

But the regulatory argument and the existential argument are not alternatives. Both are true. The apparatus produces subjects in bad faith. Those subjects are still responsible. And recognizing that we have been produced by a structure designed to keep certain questions from arising is itself the beginning of something different.

In Lille

The conference itself was excellent. The theme of planetary surveillance generated real intellectual range — from papers on satellite earth observation and colonial surveillance archives to the intimate devices we carry on our bodies. There were conversations I will keep thinking about and people I hope to keep in touch with. That is what a good conference does.

Last week, a Twitch streamer named Kenneth went viral for catching his girlfriend cheating — not through a private investigator, not through a tip from a friend, but through the camera embedded in their $900 smart litter box. The Litter-Robot 5 Pro, marketed as a premium solution to the indignities of cat ownership, has a built-in camera so owners can monitor their pets remotely. Kenneth remembered this while his girlfriend was in the shower. He logged in. He saw enough.
The story is funny in the way that only surveillance stories can be funny: the technology was bought for one purpose and used for another, and nobody saw it coming except, in retrospect, everyone should have.
This is, more or less, the argument of my book.

Surveillance Microcosms: Intimacy, Technology, Control is a study of how surveillance has migrated from the institutions we associate with watching — governments, employers, police — into the most ordinary spaces of domestic life. Baby monitors. Fitness trackers. Elder-care sensors. Parental control apps. The book’s central claim is that these devices don’t feel like surveillance because they arrive wrapped in the language of care: I’m watching because I love you, because I’m worried, because I want to keep you safe. The litter box camera is marketed to cat owners who want to check on their pets. That the same feed can surveil a girlfriend is not a bug or an abuse; it’s just what cameras do.

What makes the Kenneth story almost too perfect as an illustration is the layering. The bathroom — the last refuge of genuine privacy in most homes — contained a networked camera that its owner had forgotten was there. His girlfriend had forgotten too, or never knew, or knew and miscalculated. Either way, the watched became the watcher’s evidence, and the watcher became the watched without consent or awareness.
Foucault spent considerable energy arguing that surveillance is productive — that it doesn’t just record behavior, it shapes it. We act differently when we believe we might be seen. Kenneth’s girlfriend presumably did not act differently in that bathroom, which is the whole point. The panopticon only works when the watched internalize the possibility of the gaze. A litter box camera is beneath the threshold of surveillance consciousness. It watches precisely because it has been forgotten.
The book does not end with tidy lessons. But if I had to identify the sharpest edge of this particular story, it’s this: we are embedding cameras into objects that have no obvious reason to have cameras, buying them freely, installing them in our most intimate spaces, and then being genuinely surprised when they see things. We built the panopticon ourselves, stocked it with our cats, and paid nine hundred dollars for the privilege.

The cat, for its part, remains above suspicion.

 

Some goodbyes arrive quietly. On January 6, 2026, First Monday announced it would cease publication following its May 2026 issue. For those of us who have followed, read, cited, and published in the journal over the decades, the news landed with a particular weight. First Monday wasn’t just a venue. It was, for many of us, a kind of intellectual home on the early internet.

I first published in the journal in 2005, and I am enormously proud to have just barely slipped through the door before it closes, with a piece in the April 2026 issue. There’s something bittersweet about that timing that I can’t quite shake.

What First Monday Was

First Monday was born in the summer of 1995, when Edward J. Valauskas proposed a new internet-only, peer-reviewed journal about the internet. The first issue appeared on 6 May 1996 at the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference in Paris, distributed on diskette and simultaneously released online. That detail alone captures the historical moment the journal inhabited: one foot in the old world of physical media, one foot in whatever was coming next.

What made it great was its ethos. The journal had no article processing charges and no advertisements. Open access wasn’t yet a movement with a name, but Valauskas and his colleagues were already practicing it. Copyright remained with the authors. The work stayed free to read, free to share, free to build on. In the current academic publishing landscape, where so much scholarship is locked behind paywalls, this remains a principled and admirable stance.

A Word for Edward J. Valauskas

Journals, unlike most institutions, usually have a face: someone whose vision and stubbornness holds the whole thing together. For First Monday, that person is Edward J. Valauskas, its founder and Chief Editor from the very first issue to the last. Valauskas is an American librarian, educator, and editor-in-chief who built something that lasted thirty years, free of charge, free of advertising, free of the usual academic publishing machinery.

That is genuinely remarkable. The pressures to commercialize, to hand off, to merge into a larger platform are real, and most journals eventually succumb to them. First Monday didn’t. I don’t know exactly what it cost Valauskas personally and professionally to hold that line, but I am grateful he did.

My Twenty-One Years with the Journal

My four publications in First Monday trace a line through my own intellectual biography that I find strangely moving to look at now.

The first, in 2005, was about free software and open source: about the politics of digital freedom at a moment when Creative Commons was new and the stakes of software licensing felt urgent and real. The second, co-authored with Jan Nolin in 2011, examined how Swedish municipalities were regulating social media, an early sign of the governance anxieties that would come to dominate the next decade. The third, with Nora Madison in 2016, looked at how activism was being domesticated by digital platforms, how resistance was being absorbed and neutralized. And now, in 2026, there is this final one.

“Lying to the Machine” is an essay about why people manipulate fitness trackers: shaking their step counters before bed to hit a daily goal they didn’t reach, or doing the bare minimum on a Peloton to keep a streak alive. It might sound lighthearted, but it touches on something fundamental about how we relate to the quantified self, to surveillance capitalism, and to the gamified systems that increasingly structure daily life. The argument is that these small acts of deception, particularly when they serve no social purpose and no one else is watching, can be understood as a form of everyday resistance in the tradition of James C. Scott’s “weapons of the weak.” We lie to our machines not because we are lazy or dishonest, but because some part of us is pushing back against the logic that reduced us to a number in the first place.

It feels right, somehow, that this is the piece I managed to get into First Monday at the end. The journal was always interested in the internet not as pure technology but as a social phenomenon, as something we inhabit, contest, and make meaning within. That’s what I was trying to do here, too.

What We Lose

Academic publishing has its problems, and open-access journals in particular have faced structural pressures that only intensified over the past decade. First Monday survived longer than almost anyone would have predicted. But its closure is still a loss, not just for internet studies as a field, but for the particular model it represented: that you could build something serious, peer-reviewed, and genuinely free, and sustain it for thirty years through commitment rather than commerce.

Thank you, Edward. Thank you, First Monday. It was a privilege to have been part of it, even in a small way.

Remember the first time you realized your smart speaker was always listening? Or when you discovered your fitness tracker was mapping every step you took? Maybe you felt a little creeped out. But if you’re like most people, that feeling didn’t last long.

Welcome to surveillance numbing.

The term comes from psychologist Robert Jay Lifton’s work on how people cope with nuclear threat. He wondered: how do we go about our daily lives knowing nuclear annihilation is possible? The answer: we become numb to it. We create mental stories that help us ignore what feels too overwhelming to process.

The same thing happens with surveillance. When monitoring becomes everywhere, our phones, our homes, our fitness trackers, our baby monitors, it stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like infrastructure. We don’t resist it. We rationalize it. We tell ourselves it doesn’t matter.

 

Here’s the thing: surveillance from governments and corporations was already ubiquitous. But now we’re building our own surveillance microcosms in our most intimate relationships. We track our partners’ locations. We monitor our children through cameras. We quantify our health, our sleep, our steps. Multiple overlapping spheres of observation capturing every aspect of our lives.

And we’ve mostly stopped caring.

Part of this is deliberate. Tech companies have nurtured this apathy through promises of safety and convenience. But part of it is just… exhaustion. The sheer volume of data collection is so vast it resists comprehension. So instead of outrage, we feel resignation.

But here’s why resisting that numbness matters: when we accept surveillance as inevitable, we lose our capacity to imagine alternatives. We stop asking whether constant monitoring is actually making our relationships better, our children safer, our lives richer. We stop noticing that the infrastructure is already there, so using it requires no additional choice; it’s just the path of least resistance.

Interestingly, we can walk through dozens of surveillance cameras without concern, yet feel violated if one person points a camera directly at us. We’ve become numb to the forest but still flinch at individual trees.

Fighting surveillance numbing doesn’t mean rejecting all technology. It means maintaining the capacity to question what has come to feel normal. It means resisting the temptation to let overwhelm turn into apathy. It means asking, repeatedly: “Is this surveillance actually serving me, or have I just stopped noticing it’s there?”

The first step is simply this: notice. Notice when you reach for the location-sharing app instead of texting your partner. Notice when monitoring feels easier than trusting. Notice when you’ve stopped feeling anything at all.

Because once we’ve gone completely numb, we’ve lost the ability to choose differently.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

We’re living through something strange. Every day, millions of us willingly wire our homes with cameras, strap tracking devices to our wrists, and carry computers that log our every movement. We know these technologies watch us. We just… don’t really think about it anymore.

The sociologist Langdon Winner called this “technological somnambulism”; we sleepwalk through the most profound technological changes in human history, barely registering how they reshape our lives. And nowhere is this sleepwalking more evident than in our most intimate spaces: our homes, our relationships, our bodies.

Consider the baby monitor. A century ago, the idea of installing a microphone in your child’s bedroom would have seemed dystopian. Today, internet-connected cameras in nurseries are so normalized that not having one might raise eyebrows. We’ve drifted from simple audio monitors to HD video feeds accessible from anywhere on Earth, often processed through cloud servers owned by distant corporations. This transformation happened gradually enough that we never quite stopped to ask: Wait, when did we decide this was normal?

Or take location-sharing apps between romantic partners. What began as a safety feature has become, for many couples, a constant ambient awareness of each other’s whereabouts. One partner glances at their phone and sees the other stopped at an unexpected address. Is this intimacy? Surveillance? Both? The technology arrived so quietly, so pleasantly packaged, that we adopted it before fully working through these questions.

This is what I call a “surveillance microcosm”: a small-scale system where surveillance becomes woven into the fabric of care, intimacy, and daily life. Unlike the distant, bureaucratic surveillance of government agencies, these microcosms live in our pockets and on our nightstands. They’re sold as tools of love and protection. They arrive wrapped in the language of care.

And that’s precisely why we sleepwalk through their adoption.

The genius of surveillance microcosms is that they exploit our best intentions. Of course, you want to keep your baby safe. Of course, you want to stay connected with your partner. Of course, you want to take care of your aging parents. The technologies slide into our lives on the back of these genuine desires, and by the time we notice the surveillance, it’s already embedded in our routines, our relationships, our sense of what it means to care for each other.

We’re not being forced into this surveillance. We’re adopting it voluntarily, one small decision at a time. Each choice seems reasonable in isolation: Sure, I’ll share my location with my spouse. Why not let the doorbell camera keep the footage? What’s the harm in a smart speaker that listens for keywords?

But sleepwalking is dangerous precisely because it happens one step at a time. You don’t wake up in a different room through a single dramatic leap. You drift there gradually, unaware you’ve left your bed until you open your eyes somewhere unexpected.

The question isn’t whether we can somehow uninvent these technologies or return to a mythical pre-digital past. They’re here. We’re using them. Many of them genuinely make our lives easier or safer in specific ways.

The question is whether we can wake up. Whether we can develop enough critical awareness to make genuine choices about which forms of surveillance we want in our intimate lives and which we don’t. Whether we can distinguish between technologies that enhance care and technologies that simply trade it for control.

Because right now, we’re still sleepwalking. And every step takes us deeper into homes and relationships structured by constant visibility, ambient monitoring, and the subtle assumption that to care is to surveil.

Maybe it’s time to open our eyes and see where we’ve ended up.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In a moment of synchronicity, I was quoting Orwell in a text I was writing when I read about a recent incident on the New York City subway that offers a troubling glimpse into our surveillance-saturated future, and our ability to resist it. A woman broke a man’s Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses after he wore them on public transit, and the internet erupted not in outrage at the destruction of property, but in celebration of her act, with commenters praising her resistance against what they saw as invasive recording technology.

The parallels to George Orwell’s 1984 are striking, though perhaps not in the way we might expect. In Orwell’s dystopia, surveillance wasn’t just about being watched. It was about the psychological transformation that constant monitoring creates. As Winston Smith reflects: “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.”

This passage introduces the concept of “facecrime”: the offense of wearing an improper expression. But what made facecrime so insidious wasn’t just that it was punishable, but that it forced people to constantly police their own faces, their own bodies, their own spontaneous reactions. The surveillance state didn’t need to watch everyone all the time; the mere possibility of observation was enough to make people surveil themselves.

Now consider the subway incident. The man wearing Meta smart glasses claimed he was “making a funny noise people were honestly crying laughing at.” But one woman wasn’t laughing. She was, presumably, aware that those sleek glasses could be recording her without her knowledge or consent. The woman’s violent response (breaking the glasses) wasn’t about humor or personality conflicts. It was about refusing to be recorded, refusing to have her image, her reactions, her presence in public space captured and potentially shared, analyzed, or stored forever.

Here’s where our moment diverges from Orwell’s nightmare: Winston Smith had to manage his face for the telescreens, for Big Brother’s institutional surveillance apparatus. But in 2025, we manage our faces for each other. The surveillance isn’t coming from a totalitarian government. It’s coming from the person sitting across from us on the subway, from the stranger at the coffee shop, from anyone with $300 smart glasses.

The discipline is the same. That awareness that you might be recorded forces a kind of performance, a self-monitoring that mirrors Winston’s careful facial management. Do I look normal? Am I doing anything that could be taken out of context? Could this moment be clipped, shared, and go viral? The woman who broke those glasses was rejecting that forced performance, that requirement to live as if always on camera.

Yet there’s a crucial difference in power dynamics. Winston Smith lived in paralyzing fear of the state’s retribution. He could only rebel in the smallest, most private ways: writing in a hidden diary, seeking brief moments of unauthorized intimacy. The telescreens were backed by the full apparatus of totalitarian violence: arrest, torture, vaporization. His fear was so complete that even his acts of resistance were saturated with the certainty of eventual punishment.

The woman on the subway, by contrast, acted. She overcame whatever fear of consequences she might have felt and physically destroyed the surveillance device pointed at her. The man’s threat to file a police report and press charges rings hollow compared to the Thought Police. Her unfazed expression as he shouted threats through the train window suggests she understood something important: distributed surveillance lacks the concentrated enforcement power of the state. She could fight back, and the crowd’s silent support confirmed her assessment. No one intervened to protect the glasses wearer. No one called the authorities. The power of retribution, it turns out, is far more diffuse when surveillance is decentralized.

Orwell understood that surveillance changes behavior not through constant watching, but through the internalized possibility of being watched. Today’s distributed surveillance network (where anyone might be recording at any time) creates the same effect. We’re all learning facecrime, learning to manage our public selves, not for the state, but for an invisible, ever-present potential audience.

The difference is that Orwell hoped we’d resist this. He couldn’t have imagined we’d buy it ourselves for $300, wear it proudly, and call anyone who objects a criminal for breaking our toys. But perhaps he also couldn’t imagine that resistance would still be possible, that unlike Winston Smith, some people would choose action over submission, even knowing the cameras might be watching.

We’ve all seen that painting, or one like it. A mother slumped in exhaustion beside her child’s bed, fighting to keep her eyes open through another endless night. Christian Krohg’s 1883 masterpiece captures something timeless about parenthood: that bone-deep fatigue that comes from caring for someone who cannot care for themselves. Today, we have a solution for that exhausted parent: the baby monitor. A device that promises you can finally get some sleep while still watching over your child. The camera never blinks. The microphone never misses a sound. Technology, we’re told, makes us better parents. But what if that’s not quite the whole story?

There’s a difference between the caring that flows naturally from love and the caring we have to consciously maintain when we’re stretched thin. Natural caring has limits. We get tired, we need to sleep, we have other responsibilities pulling at our attention. The baby monitor enters right at this threshold, promising to bridge the gap when we simply cannot stay awake another minute. It extends our awareness beyond the walls. Except awareness isn’t the same thing as caring.

The monitor can tell you when your baby needs something, but it can’t warm them, feed them, or comfort them. It extends your surveillance, not your presence. And it might actually change something fundamental about how you connect with your child. A parent learns to read their infant through countless hours of physical proximity: the feel of their breathing, the warmth of their skin, the subtle differences between an “I’m hungry” cry and an “I’m uncomfortable” cry. What happens when you learn to read your baby through a screen instead? When their breathing becomes a waveform, their movements a series of motion alerts? The attention changes. It becomes filtered, abstracted, mediated.

Caring for dependent people requires practical wisdom, the ability to interpret needs that can’t be clearly stated. You develop this wisdom through sustained physical presence, learning the vocabulary of someone else’s body, their patterns, their particular ways of expressing discomfort or contentment. The baby monitor offers you data instead: breathing rate, movement patterns, sound levels. But data isn’t interpretation. The parent who learns to distinguish seven different types of crying, who can sense something’s wrong before any alarm goes off, that parent has developed knowledge that can’t be captured by sensors. The device gives you information. Care requires attunement. They’re not the same thing.

Consider the parent who checks the monitor compulsively, anxiety amplified rather than eased by constant surveillance. Or the parent who starts trusting the device’s silence more than their own intuition, who overrides that nagging feeling that something’s wrong because the monitor shows everything’s fine. These aren’t failures of care. They’re transformations in how care happens, changes that slip into our lives without much conscious thought about what they mean.

By suggesting that monitoring an infant is essentially a data problem, manufacturers imply that the work parents have always done isn’t really that complex. But what these devices can’t replace are the fundamental elements of caring: sustained attention to a specific person, physical presence that enables embodied response, the practical wisdom that develops through repetition, and the reciprocal relationship where the person being cared for responds to your presence. Your baby can’t respond to you through a monitor. The device creates pseudo-presence, awareness without embodiment, knowing without all the tactile, olfactory, and emotional dimensions that constitute actually being there.

None of this means exhausted parents shouldn’t use baby monitors. Parents need sleep. Sometimes you need to be in another room. The devices serve real purposes. But we should recognize what we’re trading. When surveillance becomes the primary mode of parental presence, when monitoring replaces the messier, more demanding work of sustained physical proximity, care transforms into something else. It becomes management, a system, a practice that looks more like institutional oversight than intimate attention.

Krohg’s exhausted mother hasn’t left the room. She hasn’t delegated awareness to a device. Her care, however taxing, remains immediate and embodied. She’s right there. As technology extends further into how we care for children, and increasingly, how we monitor aging parents, track partners’ locations, and maintain awareness of everyone we love, we might ask ourselves: Does this technology enable care, or does it progressively displace care with something that merely resembles it?

The real work of caring has never been about perfect monitoring. It’s about being present, even imperfectly, even while exhausted. Technology can supplement that presence. But it can’t replace what happens when one human being holds another in mind, in body, in the fullness of attention that care requires.

I’ve spent years collecting quotes about writing, first in notebooks, then scattered across devices and margins of books. Recently, while procrastinating on revisions (a writer’s most creative form of avoidance), I found myself hunting through this digital and analog archive for a half-remembered line. The search took longer than it should have. But sometimes procrastination delivers unexpected gifts.

In May 1937, Albert Camus wrote in his notebook: “To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art. Rewrite—the effort always brings some profit, whatever this may be. Those who do not succeed fail because they are lazy.”

That word rewrite sits at the heart of the passage like a command. Not edit. Not polish. Rewrite.

We live in a culture obsessed with first-draft genius, with the myth of writers who conjure perfect sentences on the first try. Social media amplifies this illusion: we see the published essay, the finished book, the viral tweet, never the fifteen versions that came before.

But here’s the truth: first drafts are supposed to be messy. They’re thinking on paper, arguments still finding their shape, ideas not yet fully formed. The real work of writing happens in revision, when you return to those rough paragraphs with fresh eyes and ask: *What am I actually trying to say?*

Rewriting isn’t just about fixing typos or smoothing awkward phrases. It’s about rethinking. It’s where you discover the argument you didn’t know you were making, cut the beautiful paragraph that doesn’t belong, and find the clearer, sharper, truer way to say what matters.

When Camus writes about “disinterest” and “renunciation,” he’s pointing to something profound: rewriting requires letting go. You must abandon your attachment to what you thought you were writing and embrace what the work actually needs to become.

This means killing your darlings, as the saying goes. That horrible command: you see that digression you love, that entire chapter you sweated over? Delete it all. Not because they’re bad, but because they don’t serve the larger whole. It’s painful. But it’s also liberating. When you’re willing to renounce your first vision, you make space for something better to emerge.

Camus promises that “the effort always brings some profit, whatever this may be.” He doesn’t say the rewrite will be perfect, or that you’ll always succeed in saying exactly what you meant. Just that the effort itself yields something valuable.

Sometimes that profit is obvious: a clearer argument, better pacing, more vivid examples. But often it’s subtler. Through rewriting, you discover what you actually think. You clarify not just your prose but your ideas. The act of struggling with your own words sharpens your understanding.

And here’s what I’ve learned across years of writing and rewriting: you can’t think your way to clarity. You have to write your way there, draft by draft, revision by revision. The thinking happens through the rewriting.

Camus’s final line is horribly harsh: “Those who do not succeed fail because they are lazy.” Damn dude!

But he’s not talking about natural talent or inspiration. He’s talking about showing up, again and again, to do the unglamorous work. The willingness to face your own inadequate first draft. The discipline to read your words with brutal honesty and start again.

Laziness, in this sense, isn’t about working too little, it’s about being unwilling to look at your work clearly, to admit it’s not yet what it needs to be. It’s easier to declare a draft “good enough” than to do the hard work of making it actually good.

So here I am, first draft complete, standing at the threshold of what comes next. Maybe writing this text to procrastinate

The surveillance book exists now as a manuscript, full of ideas I’m excited about and sentences I’m already cringing at. The real work begins today: the rewriting, the rethinking, the renunciation of what I thought I was writing in favor of what it could become. It won’t be easy. It will take time I don’t feel like I have. But Camus promises there will be profit in the effort, whatever it may be.

I am not sure there is joy in rewriting; its just another job that needs to be done. Or maybe, I will spend the rest of the day searching for another quotation…