Skipping The Line

Big Brother is watching. But you already knew that. The question is just how deeply? Let's trace the insidious evolution of digital surveillance: how technologies once hailed as revolutionary conveniences have been weaponized into instruments of relentless monitoring, behavioral extraction, and propaganda machines.

The internet propelled us into the Information Age, unleashing waves of innovation and products unimaginable just decades prior. From Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to ostensibly "free" digital tools. Among the most emblematic is Google, which began life as nothing more than a humble search engine. That innocent framing drew billions in voluntarily; suddenly, arcane knowledge buried in physical archives became instantly accessible. In return, users handed over intimate cognitive maps of themselves: interests, dislikes, curiosities, fears. Every query, every click, every hesitation fed a cognitive profile ripe for exploitation.

Advertisers were provided great reason to place precisely targeted messages to the right user. This business model accounted for roughly 80–90% of Google's revenue. The service was free to users, because the users themselves had become the commodity.

Google soon recognized the limits of mere search. Once a user clicked away to another site, the company lost visibility into subsequent behavior. In response, they introduced Google Chrome, a browser that extended surveillance across the entire web. Capturing not just destinations, but dwell times, scrolls, hovers, and every micro-interaction that helps reveal intent and habit.

To Google? Still insufficient. What about offline life? App usage on mobile devices? Enter Android, an operating system where embedded tracking is at the foundational layer of billions of smartphones. Then Gmail.

The corpus of data to feed their advertising model was beyond exhaustive, but their business model extended beyond ads. Their "recommendation" engine had significant influence. Users, conditioned by years of accurate top results for factual queries (Where does ham originate?), internalized trust in ranked outputs. But when the questions turn subjective, contested, or ideological — such as what's the best pizza shop in NY? Which candidate deserves my vote? Should immigrant families be separated? — the algorithm becomes an arbiter of reality itself. Ranking controls perception. Perception is strong, as it can sway elections.

Facebook's founders, rooted in mathematics, took this blueprint further. As mathematicians, they understood that data wasn't merely for ads; it can be used to engineer echo chambers. Their algorithm was built to curate feeds that amplified posts that strongly align with you, suppress dissent, while burying encouraging truths. Facebook whistleblowers have confirmed deliberate manipulations: the algorithm hiding conservative stories, injecting favored narratives, and ignoring trending topics that clashed with the organization's internal ideologies.

Studies confirm the shift that social media has meticulously engineered: people now expect news to arrive passively through social media rather than to seek it themselves. In this regime of algorithmic silencing, atrophied critical thinking – this is beyond problematic, as nobody learns. You don't know what you don't know. For Facebook, that ignorance is profitable.

This blueprint has extended to most of "social media." Social platforms cloak themselves in the language of connection and community, mirroring Google's "just search" innocence. Innocent framing doesn't scare away the user. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) prophesied this exact trajectory. Omnipresent surveillance, propaganda as truth, blind obedience to "the good guys" – all factors that will lead to a dystopian society. We see that today in algorithmic content moderation, banned books, and selective visibility.

Surveillance has long since leapt from screens into flesh. I remember my first gym in Washington, DC, where the gym demanded fingerprints for entry. This was nearly a decade ago. It was marketed as pure convenience. I talked about this with friends and colleagues, and the sentiment was nearly identical. "Have you committed a crime?" "What do you have to hide?" Contrast that with Rikers Island, where mandatory fingerprinting is required to enter the facility, with the connotation that everybody entering for a visit is either a criminal or soon-to-be criminal. More importantly, a reminder that you are being watched.

The question I continued to ask myself? Beyond institutional benefit, what tangible gain does the individual receive from surveillance tech? Does humanity matter anymore?

The answer arrived via me meeting a new cousin! Discovered through my sister being a 99% match with somebody on Ancestry. My mother's casual curiosity on if my sister is related to Beyoncé or Denzel Washington led to me meeting a new cousin! I finally know the good with digital identity technology! (sarcasm)

We have normalized today's state of digital biometrics. Face ID to unlock your phone. CLEAR government ID just to "skip the line." CLEAR government ID to be "verified" on LinkedIn. Whether it's fingerprints, faces, or DNA, we have normalized surrendering biological markers to an unconscious network of power and influence.

Pushback is finally mounting. Ring's commercial during the 2026 Super Bowl showed a "search party" for finding a lost dog through neighborhood camera networks. A tale that critics denounced as dystopian normalization of AI-augmented mass surveillance. Discord is also facing substantial backlash and threats of user exodus amid its global rollout of age assurance requiring facial scans or government-ID uploads, sparking user privacy concerns, especially after prior breaches already eroded trust.

We've been conditioned for decades to crave convenience after all, where the popular outrage is more than a decade behind. Where do we go from here?