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.
