We Are The Panopticon

It didn’t happen all at once.

That’s what makes it so terrifying. There was no singular law passed, no dystopian regime, no camera drilled into the center of every ceiling. What happened instead was slower. Quieter. Cultural. Algorithmic. We turned ourselves into witnesses, into judges, into brands. We learned to perform—and then forgot we were performing. And somewhere along the way, the surveillance state didn’t need to grow stronger.

It just needed us to keep watching each other.

I’ve written about this before—how the machine doesn’t care about truth, only about usefulness. How grief becomes narrative, and narrative becomes law. How once a story is told, it becomes the only story that matters. That’s the shape of modern power. But what we didn’t realize back then—what I didn’t fully see even when I said it—is that we are part of that power now.

Not just the oppressed. Not just the audience.

We’re the enforcers too.

The irony is unbearable.

We used to fear the NSA, the surveillance state, the wiretap in the wall. But the real threat is the group chat, the retweet, the stitched TikTok response. The witch hunts didn’t disappear—they just digitized. Now, it’s the public dragging of a stranger in a Starbucks for being “weird.” It’s doxxing a teen for saying something awkward. It’s watching someone’s unfiltered moment get recycled endlessly, turned into a punchline, a reaction image, a meme.

And the cruelty is somehow worse when it’s cloaked in righteousness.

We hold people—especially anyone with even a glimmer of a platform—to standards no human can meet. “She never misses.” “He’s always based.” “They’re unproblematic.” We strip away complexity and replace it with myth. And when that myth cracks? When someone is revealed to be messy, complicated, real—the backlash is biblical. Not justice. Not accountability. Just fire.

We learned this from the same machine that told us to brand ourselves, curate a persona, become a product. You are what you tweet. You are what goes viral. You are the story people tell about you, and you'd better make sure it's the right one—or they’ll write it for you.

And the younger generations know. They’ve grown up in this. They’ve been taught, by necessity, to curate everything: their jokes, their hobbies, their voices, their joy. Because they’ve seen what happens when someone is caught off guard. When someone forgets to filter. When someone is cringe.

This is why I don’t trust words like “unproblematic” anymore. It’s why I flinch when someone calls a figure “safe” or “pure” or says, with fanlike devotion, “they never miss.” Because I know what comes next. I’ve seen the cycle. I’ve lived it. I’ve written about it.

It starts with adoration.

It ends with crucifixion.

And it doesn’t matter what they did—or if they even did it. What matters is what people say they did. What matters is whether the myth holds. And if it doesn’t? If it fractures under the weight of real humanity? Then the machine devours them. Not for justice. But for hunger. Content. Rage. The performance of clarity in place of actual truth.

That’s what I meant when I said the machine is always hungry.

We live in a world where silence is framed as complicity. Where grief is regulated. Where the wrong facial expression in the wake of a death can get you fired, not for saying the wrong thing—but for not saying the right thing fast enough, loud enough, in the correct tone.

We’re not surveilled by the state.

We are the state.

Meanwhile, the real villains hide in plain sight.

Corporations harvest our data while laughing behind paywalls. Governments don't need facial recognition when TikTok does the job better. And all we do is make it easier for them—filming each other, judging each other, offering each other up to the algorithmic gods.

We made the panopticon—and we are both the prisoners and the guards.

This is how the performance starts to rot you. It doesn’t ask you to be evil. It just asks you to be cautious. It trains you to mirror, deflect, flatter, minimize. It tells you that if you want to be loved, be agreeable. Be curated. Be less real than the version of yourself they’ve already decided is “safe.” Until one day, you don’t remember who you were before the mirrors. You just remember what kept you out of trouble.

I’ve been on both sides of this.

I’ve watched friends be eaten alive by people who once praised them. I’ve watched good people vanish because their truth didn’t fit the script. I’ve seen activists turned into villains, and villains handed microphones. I’ve seen the same silence we feared from government institutions echoed by peers, friends, colleagues, bystanders who said “I agree with you privately” and then stood back while the fire raged.

That’s how it always goes.

And if you think I’m just being poetic—look back.

Look at the platforms that reward outrage. Look at the culture that punishes hesitation. Look at how many people have stopped speaking publicly altogether—not because they don’t care, but because they know one sentence out of context could end them.

I don’t write these posts because I think I’m above it. I’m not. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve stayed silent too long. I’ve flinched when I should’ve spoken. But I’m trying now to speak clearly—to cut through the noise, and say what I see happening:

We are watching each other die inside, and we are calling it accountability.

We are starving for meaning, and we are offering each other up for attention.

We are so afraid of being labeled wrong, dangerous, unkind, unworthy, that we’ve stopped risking being ourselves at all.

We are not just branding ourselves—we are erasing ourselves.

And the machine applauds. It doesn’t care how many voices it devours, so long as the story continues. So long as the script is clean.

But maybe we can change the script.

So what do we do?

Maybe we start small.

Maybe we risk being cringe.

Maybe we let ourselves sing out of tune, dance badly, post something unedited. Maybe we stop pretending we’re perfect. Maybe we let the myth crack on purpose. And maybe—just maybe—we stop watching each other like cops, and start watching each other like humans.

I want to believe that’s still possible. That we can build spaces where the goal isn’t purity, but progress. Not performance, but connection. Where grief is allowed to be messy, and joy is allowed to be loud, and no one has to be perfect to be seen.

Because if we don’t—

We’ll keep waking up to a world where fear is our native language, and empathy is a liability.

And I don’t want to live like that anymore.

This post is part of an ongoing series tracing the collapse of empathy, the erosion of truth, and the machinery of silence we’re all asked to serve. For the full arc—and why it matters now more than ever—start here with the full series overview.

Note: I reject violence in all its forms. Nothing I write here is a call to arms, or a celebration of harm. These posts are warnings, not endorsements—an attempt to trace the patterns of power and propaganda so we might break the cycle, not fuel it. My writing is rooted in grief, in clarity, and in a stubborn refusal to give in to nihilism, cruelty, anger, or resentment. My love is for all people in this world—even those who would wish me harm.