The panopticon will be user-generated.

The panopticon will be user-generated. There is a rising sentiment amongst young people that morality must be policed at all costs, including their privacy. But to Gen Z, privacy does not seem to be a very big cost to pay at all. So this week, a creator stumbled upon two grown adults making out in a New York City public park and decided to turn it into content. To Gen Z, adults showing so much unrestrained, non-performative emotion in public is genuinely shocking. People don't dance at clubs anymore. Gen Z's biggest fear is being seen as cringe, and it tracks for a generation terrified of being seen unposed. They'll treat someone else's open affection as an obscene threat. The creator and the commentariat were clutching their pearls that there were children around. When the video allegedly was having an affair with each other, I think they worked together as lawyers and were cheating on their spouses, which is objectively terrible. And therein lies their justification for their surveillance. They were being immoral, and they deserved it. Gen Z's obsession with morality permeates most areas of their life. Obviously, we see it in politics with how certain leftist communities operate, being more interested in policing their own rather than building coalition and community. But we also see it in their ideas around sex. Nearly half of Gen Z says that there's too much sex in TV and film. 43% say sex scenes are unnecessary, and 43% of Gen Z say that they have turned off a movie because of a sex scene, compared to 26% of millennials, which is the lowest of any generation. Rather than feel desire or affection, they prefer to perform it instead. The soft launch, the hard launch, the anniversary photo dump. Affection and desire must be curated for viewers rather than performed for their own pleasure. When affection only counts when it's been appropriately curated for an audience, unedited affection, desire, emotion doesn't just feel cringe or embarrassing, it starts to feel obscene to them. Because remember, the original creator did not know that they were having an affair. They just saw two people making out and thought that it was obscene. They've moralized the unedited, or the human. It's not dissimilar to how the Love Island contestants this season used the word lustful to describe the moral failings of their fellow islanders who were doing pretty much exactly what they're supposed to do in the show, which is get to know other people, including physically. In the book A Thousand Plateaus, the authors pose that fascism is not just a government system, but quote, fueled by a societal desire where individuals police, judge, and micro-survey each other at the molecular level. They call this micro-fascism, and it's enforced by something called over-coding. Over-coding is the idea of building social spaces that enforce conformity, making everyone readable, legible, and accountable to some omnipresent normative standard. And our social spaces largely being online and being accessible to anyone at the swipe of a button, everyone is now readable, legible, and accountable to some normative omnipresent social standard. The general consensus around this couple is that they were being devious. A concert with a Jumbotron isn't exactly where you go to expect privacy, but a couple kissing on a park bench has every reason to expect that they're not going to wake up tomorrow morning being the next villain of social media. Now they cheated. That's wrong. But I ask these next set of questions in earnest. Did they deserve to be filmed without their consent? Did they deserve to become a meme? What do we lose when we give up privacy in the name of morality? Whose morals are we upholding? We keep calling it accountability, but accountability to whom? You didn't marry these people. You're not their employer. You just liked the post. What happens when you're no longer just the one pressing like, but now you're the subject of the video because that's the deal you agreed to when you say that everyone deserves to be surveilled? Everyone's talking about the arrival of the surveillance state enforced by powerful institutions. Surveillance state didn't really need to do all of that. You volunteered to do the work for them. You're the cop now, and you're doing the work for free. A cap includes you, phone cops.