How to Protect Yourself from Mass Surveillance

We live in the most surveilled time in history.

Everyone wants our data. Everyone wants to track us. Everyone wants to catalog us. It’s about money. It’s about control. It’s about invasion. It’s about making you feel like you’re being watched all the time.

There’s a plan behind this. In fact, a social theorist named Jeremy Bentham once offered the concept of the panopticon. In short, it’s about creating the everpresent sensation that everything you do can be seen. When people feel like they’re being watched all the time, you don’t even need police.

Everyone polices themselves.

The desire for privacy lies at the core of our psyche. It’s no wonder so many of our anxiety dreams revolve around the idea of appearing in public exposed and vulnerable, or watching deep secrets spilling out everywhere. Most of us aren’t trying to do anything “wrong.” We just know how judgmental society gets when they find out you do something they consider “weird.”

The irony here is that everyone has secrets. Everyone has things about themselves they want to protect, simply because they don’t want to endure the shame we all heap on each other, for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately, bad people use privacy as an excuse to do bad things. In turn, governments use that as an excuse to invade our lives.

In a normal world, nobody would care about what we get up to in our private arenas. Instead, our sick social economic system has made that the focus of, well, everything. Kash Patel shouldn’t care whether you have a foot fetish, but he probably does. Fascists love invading our privacy, and the tech broligarchy wants to monetize all your deepest personal desires.

It’s their jam.