This is a very wordy article with a lot of non sequitur. A lot of big claims about surveillance states and behavior modification, but then the only practical examples are things like people installing doorbell cams to catch package thieves instead of “the prying eye of their neighbors” or traffic cameras catching red light runners.

The article then veers toward complaints about “cancel culture”, albeit with very flowery language:

> Used to purge public life of these individuals, social media enables the construction and enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy.

Is it really surveillance if people are responding to public social media posts that someone deliberately uploads to a website for the purpose of public discussion?

I read the whole article but struggled to get anything useful out of it. The author’s entire premise seems to be built on a “good old days” vision of the past that has been idealized as a sort of utopia where everyone behaved well because their neighbors were constantly watching them, which is an ironic premise for an article that also complains about cancel culture on social media:

> Omnipresent surveillance, a technical fix for social disorder, is a surrogate for the communities a post-Enlightenment world has destroyed.