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.
Rick and Morty: Night Family (2022)
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.