We are all Big Brother now

This type of surveillance system exists around the globe. In May, American activists shared a viral spreadsheet that color-coded authors according to whether they were sufficiently pro-Palestine and encouraged boycotts of those who weren’t. Other vigilantes have contributed to websites that target professors for being too liberal and students for being anti-Israel. Still others identify and shame the hapless stars of so-called “Karen” videos, which document white women behaving badly.

Sometimes agents of this surveillance system operate locally, using grainy footage posted to neighborhood apps like Nextdoor to crowdsource the identity of a suspicious figure. At some point, intentionally or not, you have almost certainly participated. And even if you haven’t, you are still a potential target.

Welcome to the grass-roots panopticon, the largest surveillance system in history.

The panopticon was originally conceived by the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who observed that all the inmates in a circular prison could be effectively monitored by just one guard in a central location, since every prisoner would have to assume he could be watched at any moment. As a metaphor, the panopticon has been used to critique the power of top-down surveillance, whether conducted by governments (Orwell’s Big Brother) or corporations (“surveillance capitalism”).

The grass-roots panopticon is fundamentally different from Bentham’s. Unlike top-down systems, it has emerged organically, the product of ubiquitous, privately owned surveillance technology — smartphones, dashcams, doorbell cameras, drones — combined with our ability to share and process the data we collect via the internet. Big Brother is not the state or corporations: It is us, billions and billions of us, watching one another, eager to pass judgment.

We are far less likely to criticize power when it is our own. Who wouldn’t cheer the human flesh hunters on as they searched for a cartoonishly villainous Chinese woman, seen in a video crushing a kitten to death with her high heels? Surely justice was served when she lost her job, as it was when outed Jan. 6 protesters lost theirs. Positive terms have even emerged for civilian surveillance: “Sousveillance” and the “synopticon” refer to public surveillance of authority figures, an activity enshrined as indispensable after George Floyd’s murder and other examples of public citizens holding state power accountable.

But this optimistic vision of righteous justice and holding power accountable fails to capture the tremendous harms caused by the grass-roots panopticon.

Some of these harms are obvious. As in a totalitarian government, there are no fixed rules governing ethical surveillance practices, adequate evidence of guilt, or proportionate punishment, which is a recipe for abuse. Anonymous vigilantes drunk on power tend to make mistakes, like outing the wrong person. And what appears righteous to one person — like holding Israel accountable for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack or supporting anti-abortion legislation — may, through the lens of the grass-roots panopticon, look like a crime that merits a campaign of merciless exposure and harassment.

Less obvious but no less concerning are the chilling effects of living under constant potential surveillance. Sociologists have documented how totalitarian surveillance regimes result in higher stress levels, constrained public speech, and eroded interpersonal trust. There is no reason these effects would be absent when the surveillance is grass-roots.

As a professor who teaches on controversial topics, I have experienced the chilling effects myself. Should I include a unit on the “right” age for marriage in my comparative ethics class? What if a video clip of me saying “Sometimes, 14 is an acceptable age for marriage” circulates on social media? Would it matter that I said this while summarizing a finding in a scholarly article about marriage norms in pre-industrial forager societies? Should I even share this example here?

I am a tenured professor, so my position is more secure than that of contingent faculty. Consequently, I’m less vulnerable to the punitive whims of vigilantes, which in turn makes me less likely to censor myself. And that helps show how the grass-roots panopticon’s justification of speaking truth to power is an illusion. In reality, the people most likely to constrain their speech and behavior are the least powerful: those who cannot survive without their jobs, those who cannot afford a legal battle, those who have no resources for scrubbing accusations from the internet, and those who are stereotyped as “dangerous” and therefore particularly likely to be the subjects of unjust scrutiny.

Consider doorbell cameras and online neighborhood associations. Like many forms of public surveillance, there is little data to show they reduce crime. But they are certainly effective at eroding interpersonal trust. “Anyone else really creeped out by Nextdoor?” wrote one Reddit user in Los Angeles. “It seems like all people do is post pictures of people of color walking around the neighborhood, minding their own business. . . . I feel like one day I’m going to step outside of my home and be sacrificed in some sort of ‘Get Out’-esque ritual.” (In the 2017 film “Get Out,” a cult of white people tries to take over the bodies of Black people.)

Surveillance is a special kind of observation: It is the collection of information for the purpose of judging or controlling. When you engage in surveillance, you flatten people into a narrow set of data points. Are they behaving inappropriately? Do they believe in the “wrong” ideology? Other factors — like the mental health history of the Karen or the kitten murderer — aren’t taken into account. Human flesh hunters necessarily dehumanize their targets.

In addition to reifying stereotypes, surveillance also dissolves contexts. A devoted Christian checks his dentist’s Facebook page and discovers she is a militant atheist who thinks religion is evil; a parent is shocked to see a video circulating online of a beloved schoolteacher drunkenly berating a police officer outside a local bar. There are no longer private spaces, no way to compartmentalize our personal, professional, and ideological identities.

This is a disaster. My home is not my classroom, and my classroom is not the bar. I should judge my neighbor — if I must! — according to different criteria from those I use to judge my child’s teacher or my dentist. But in the grass-roots panopticon, we are forced to see them all according to a set of myopic data points. How can I give money to a dentist who hates God? Shouldn’t my child’s school know about the teacher’s drunken behavior?

In his doctoral dissertation, the sociologist Janos Mark Szakolczai describes, among other things, how the truly private sphere has shrunk to a single, dismal location: the toilet seat. Want to dance like no one is watching? Better lock that stall door. Our lives have become like reality TV shows in which participants seeking genuine refuge from omnipresent cameras must flee to the bathroom. But don’t feel too safe even there. The grass-roots panopticon can watch you on the toilet if you bring your phone there.

Szakolczai told me that he observed a vicious cycle of suspicion and surveillance in couples and parent-child relationships, eroding the trust necessary for sustaining them. “People, without even realizing it, were engaging in cyberstalking,” he said. One woman began obsessively checking the WhatsApp status of her boyfriend. When she saw he was online at 2:00 in the morning, she confronted him. The boyfriend wanted to maintain his privacy. This in turn led to more suspicion: If he wanted privacy, he must be hiding something! “She got completely obsessed, fantasizing about what he must be doing, and that ended the relationship.”

The harms of being surveilled may be obvious, but surveillance also degrades the people who engage in it. Our vision of humanity becomes distorted, ugly, fearful, judgmental. And unlike professional agents of surveillance, human flesh hunters can’t leave that vision at work. The grass-roots panopticon is ever present, which means we will always be tempted to dehumanize people by seeing them as objects of our surveilling gaze.

Many contemporary problems — political extremism, increased levels of stress, feelings of loneliness and isolation — are doubtless exacerbated by our situation. But the fundamental problem is not new. Long before smartphones, wisdom traditions recognized the temptation and danger of judging our peers and spreading information without adequate context. Proverbs 21:23 warns that “a perverse man stirs up dissension, and a gossip separates close friends.” Confucius is equally concerned: “To hear something on the road, and then repeat it everywhere you go, is to throw Virtue away.”

Pushback on grass-roots surveillance can’t take the same route as criticisms of government and corporate surveillance. In those cases, the law can step in to secure civilian privacy. But in the case of civilians surveilling one another, we must solve our own problem.

One way is to recognize how tempting it is to participate and to make a public declaration that you won’t. Put something like “This account never shares negative content about private citizens” in your social media bio. Read up on the unproven effectiveness and security flaws of doorbell cameras and then take yours down. And resist the urge to find out who your dentist voted for. Instead, restrict your curiosity to the quality of their fillings.

Perhaps most important, we can start teaching the value of privacy and the dangers of vigilante surveillance to our children. Parents can model a better approach by refusing to use parental surveillance apps and nanny cams. It will take faith and trust to let go of our suspicions and our desire for control. But that’s the only way to throw the human flesh hunters off our scent and escape the grass-roots panopticon.

Alan Levinovitz is professor of religion and philosophy at James Madison University and the author of “Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.”