“Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

The internet is simply a tool, our phones are passive objects, the quiet hum of data flowing across invisible infrastructures has no intention behind it. It is a carefully maintained illusion. Technology is a meeting of powers: the architects who build it, the institutions that fund it, and the users who move within it—often unknowingly.

Big brother is no longer a dystopian warning; it is a banal condition of modern life.

In Citizenfour, Edward Snowden does not present himself as a hero but as a witness—someone who stumbled upon the architecture of a system so vast, so normalised, that it had become invisible. A senior NSA analyst turned whistleblower, he revealed a surveillance apparatus capable of collecting vast quantities of digital activity without individualised mandates. The shock was not merely in the scale, but in the realisation that this scale had been achieved quietly, bureaucratically, almost mundanely.

“There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.”

― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

The lingering question is not whether surveillance exists (it demonstrably does) but how much of its current form is the product of a post-9/11 psyche. Fear, once institutionalised, rarely recedes. It calcifies into policy, expands into infrastructure, and eventually dissolves into the background of everyday life. The extraordinary becomes ordinary not because it is justified, but because it is repeated.

There is no denying that the United States leads the intelligence field. But leadership in this domain is not simply about capability—it is about precedent. Once a system of totalising observation is proven possible, it becomes difficult for any state to argue against its necessity. Surveillance, like power, rarely contracts voluntarily.

What is most striking about contemporary surveillance is not its intrusiveness, but its seamlessness. It has been integrated so effectively into daily life that it no longer feels like surveillance at all. Until someone bursts through the door, we remain calm. Curtains open, lights on, routines uninterrupted. Yet the difference between perceived privacy and actual observation is vast. You may sleep peacefully with your curtains open—until you realise someone has been watching from outside all along. If you have a phone, a search engine account, a digital wallet, you are already participating in this system. Not forcibly, but structurally. The distinction matters, but perhaps not as much as we would like.

The internet complicates this further by positioning itself as the successor to disappearing “third places”—those informal public spaces where social life once unfolded organically. Cafés, parks, libraries: places where conversations began and created something more. As these spaces erode or become commercialised, the digital realm steps in as their replacement. It is where we meet, argue, flirt, organise, confess. It feels open. It feels free

But how free can a space be when it is simultaneously a site of extraction?

This brings us to a quieter, more unsettling question: how much do we actually know about the systems we inhabit? Information is, paradoxically, both abundant and inaccessible. In theory, we live in an open society. The tools of open-source intelligence (OSINT), investigative journalism, and decentralised information-sharing mean that knowledge is often available to those who seek it.

But availability is not the same as accessibility.

Do people know where to look? And more importantly, who is information designed for?

Dissemination is the final step of the intelligence cycle, yet it is also the most political. Information that is technically public can remain effectively hidden if it is too complex, too fragmented, or too poorly contextualised for general audiences. Transparency without legibility is its own form of opacity. We see this with what’s declassified and transmitted to general audiences. We don’t really get to see the important bits until they are devoid of any tangible value. 

The result is a peculiar asymmetry: we are watched in granular detail, yet we understand the watchers only in abstraction.

There is a theory (ancient in origin, modern in articulation) that societies move in cycles. That periods of growth, complexity, and stability eventually give way to stagnation, followed by collapse, followed by renewal. Whether one looks to ancient civilisations or contemporary thinkers, the pattern is difficult to ignore.

Creative disruption emerges from this framework: the idea that when a system becomes too complex, too inefficient, too resistant to change, crisis becomes not just likely but necessary. Innovation, in this view, is not born from comfort but from discomfort. It is the breaking of inertia. Ruling elites, unsurprisingly, tend to resist this process. Stability preserves power. Disruption threatens it. And so systems are maintained, patched, extended—often beyond their natural limits.
The most pessimistic visions of this future take the form of projects like “collapse OS”: hypothetical operating systems designed to function in a world where modern supply chains have disintegrated. A world where advanced consumer electronics are no longer available, where technology must be scavenged, repurposed, simplified. It sounds extreme. It is meant to.

We are increasingly estranged from the tools we use most.

Our devices are more powerful than ever, yet our understanding of them is increasingly superficial. There is a dissonance between those who master the use of technology (social media, interfaces, platforms) and those who understand its underlying mechanics. Often, they are not the same people. What happens, then, if the system fails? Who among us could repair, rebuild, or even meaningfully navigate a world without the infrastructures we take for granted?

This is not an argument for abandoning technology. Medical advancements alone make that position untenable. Rather, it is an invitation to confront our dependence. To ask whether our current mode of existence is resilient—or merely convenient.

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

― George Orwell, 1984

Some scientists suggest that the next phase of technological evolution will not be defined by speed or scale, but by resilience. Simpler, decentralised systems. Regenerative technologies that emerge not from abundance, but from necessity. The next great invention may not be a faster computer, but a more sustainable one. Yet this raises another question: are we capable of imagining limits?

Modern societies are deeply invested in the idea of continuous growth. To acknowledge limits is often framed as failure. But infinite expansion within finite systems is not just unrealistic—it is unsustainable. We cling to the hope of a “unicorn” technology, something that will solve energy, climate, resource scarcity. Something that will allow us to continue as we are, indefinitely. But what if the problem is not a lack of innovation, but a surplus of expectation?

We are, in many ways, adapted to our current conditions. Comfortable, materially secure (at least in certain parts of the world), buffered from the immediate consequences of systemic fragility. But adaptation can become a trap. The more specialised a system becomes, the less flexible it is in the face of disruption. Are we, then, simply buying time?

The idea of reform without rupture is appealing.

It suggests continuity, control, the possibility of improvement without loss. But history offers limited evidence for such clean transitions. More often, change is uneven, contested, and, at times, violent.

This is where human hubris reveals itself most clearly. We assume not only that we can manage these transitions, but that we will be present to witness them. There is a quiet arrogance in the belief that we will see everything through—that the arc of history will conveniently include us.

It may not.

The concept of a “data Atlantis” captures this fragility. We treat digital storage as the ultimate backup, the permanent archive of our civilisation. But what happens if it disappears? If servers fail, if networks collapse, if the infrastructures that sustain our digital lives vanish?

Even our economies are increasingly abstracted into digital form. If banks ceased to exist tomorrow (not physically, but digitally) how much of your wealth could you access directly? How long could you sustain yourself in the immediate aftermath?

These are not apocalyptic fantasies so much as stress tests of our assumptions.

We remain fascinated by the apocalypse.

Zombies, climate disasters, societal collapse—these narratives recur endlessly in popular culture. They allow us to rehearse catastrophe from a safe distance. To imagine who we would be, what we would do, how we would survive. We fantasise ourselves as safe and prepared. But embedded within this fascination is a contradiction. We imagine collapse, but we rarely imagine its permanence. There is always an implicit return, a rebuilding, a continuation. We want the drama of the end without the finality of it.

Ethical questions linger at the edges of these scenarios. In a true emergency, who is prioritised? The military? The intellectual elite? Those with resources? The logic of preparedness already suggests an answer: those who can afford to plan will secure safety first. Bunkers, contingencies—these are not evenly distributed.

The future, like the present, risks being stratified.

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. (…) Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? (…) We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Daniel Brooks

Ultimately, the illusion that binds all of this together is control. The belief that we are steering the system, rather than being carried by it. That our choices (what we click, what we buy, what we read) meaningfully shape the structures we inhabit.

We are not passive. But neither are we fully in control.

“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

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