Isn’t The Hand-Wringing Over “Surveillance” Now Performative?

Seems that way in a lot of cases, honestly.

Ted Bauer
3 min readNov 29, 2023

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It feels often that people love to hand-wring about “surveillance” and “lack of privacy,” and yet many of those same people log onto TikTok — which is, breaking news, essentially controlled by China — and do dances and give data about how they look, where they are, when they’re bored, etc. I’ve met no fewer than 120 mothers in my life who will mention data and privacy and surveillance, yet blast their young kid’s face all over the social Internet before the kid can speak, much less consent to having his or her image used online. It feels like data and privacy and surveillance are things we discuss, but don’t actually care about. I’m speaking in the aggregate, as I do have friends who won’t enter the home of someone with an Alexa for fear of being recorded. Not kidding on that either.

This video does a good job of breaking it down:

Considering that Ring doorbell footage and body-cam police footage are now entire cottage industries on YouTube, often creating…

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Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.