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.
