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…

As my university joins the sad list of institutions overreacting to protesters this popped up in my newsfeed

One of the oddities of our age is that the professional managers that have taken over the running of universities show themselves so unimaginative and so insecure with their authority. They echo each other’s slogans, and they role-play leadership from behind a large desk. Even as risk and reputation managers they are a flop. This is not just an American thing (although the armed snipers on rooftops are).

it’s from Dear University President, You Could Run Out the Clock; a Plea for Repressive Tolerance—and Renewal by Eric Schliesser

It’s always a sad surprise when universities are prepared to trot out their academics as ‘experts’ when it suits them, but refuse to listen to them when it would be prudent.

Universities love their slogans, mottos, and missions, but actions speak louder than words. Calling in overly armed riot police with zip ties is a hell of a lesson for students (and faculty).

The following cites Quora as the original source, but no link to that source is ever provided.

“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response.

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. 

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.  

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.  

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Ending a course is always bittersweet. I am happy it’s over but we are finally a functioning group and everyones personalities are starting to show. Ending a course online due to covid was going to suck because it felt like it was all going to fade away.

So for the last class, I asked my students to share a picture of something that makes them happy and after the usual stuff I ended with the presentation of the pictures. Best Zoom ever, here are the slides

https://klangable.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Happiness2.pptx

The perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments. Before the general use of these instruments pf precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments; a longer period was required and prepared for, especially in travelling… men judged of the time by probabilities, by looking at the sun, and needed not, as a rule, to be nervous about the loss of a moment, and had incomparably fewer experiences wherein a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime. (page 103)

Beard, G. M. (1881). American nervousness, its causes and consequences: a supplement to nervous exhaustion (neurasthenia). Putnam.

American Nervousness was published in 1881 and it reminds me of the regular panics surrounding smartphones today.