The worst part of normalized surveillance is the normalization.
It's the thousands of followers who react to your secretly taken videos of noble good deeds with encouragement. It's them feeling cheered up, day made, hearts filled with warmth by your brazen voyeurism.
It's scrolling past a Tumblr post of a reddit post of a Twitter screenshot of a father and daughter sharing an intimate, family moment, oblivious to the tweeter taking a photo of them.
It's minding your business at the grocery store, hearing a weird noise, and realizing some teens are filming a tiktok dance and either did not notice or did not care that you are in the shot.
It's walking home with a mask on because every single condo and floor apartment in your neighborhood has Ring and you don't know what that means for you yet.
It's thinking about talking to a PR person just in case your recurring nightmare of your mental breakdown in the parking lot suddenly going viral comes true, hoping against hope a professional knows the magic set of words that will mitigate the harassment, stop you from losing your job.
It's that reddit post of the Sikh woman who found her and her mustache on the frontpage, forced to turn public humiliation into a teaching moment. It's some jackass redditor posting a couples photo, ostensibly to mock that his fly was down yet 70% of the comments target his girlfriend's appearance. It's seeing a top reddit pic with a headline demonizing a person in it months after you saw this same pic taken down after mods discovered op was lying. It's a lot of reddit.
It's wondering how many times your face has been posted online and if it was in a positive context at least.
It's that this is all normal, that so many of these things feel neutral to individuals, not a risk they're taking on behalf of a stranger.
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