If Big Brother is watching us, can we fend him off by watching him back? Thanks to the proliferation of smartphone videos and social media connections, we’re starting to find out.
The past, present and future of surveillance technology was the focus for one of the sessions last week at Seattle Worldcon 2025, this year’s edition of the world’s premier science-fiction convention.
Surveillance societies have been a frequent topic in science fiction, with George Orwell’s “1984” (which gave birth to the slogan “Big Brother Is Watching You”) and “Minority Report” (a 2002 Tom Cruise movie based on a 1956 novella by Philip K. Dick) among notable examples.
But last week’s session focused primarily on fact, not fiction.
Futurist and sci-fi author David Brin noted that his nonfiction book on privacy and freedom, “The Transparent Society,” came out 27 years ago. “Unfortunately, too many of the chapters are completely relevant today,” he said.
Participants on a Worldcon panel focusing on surveillance and science fiction included Lauren C. Teffeau, Ray Naylor, P.L. Stewart, K.C. Aegis and David Brin. (Photo by Alan Boyle)
Brin’s book laid out an argument for radical transparency. In a society where everyone is recording what’s going on, it’s theoretically impossible for the secret police to do their work in the shadows. “‘The Transparent Society’ basically argues from many directions that we have more privacy and freedom than our ancestors because we can look back and hold the mighty accountable,” Brin said.
The concept is controversial, but it’s being put to the test in cases ranging from the police killing of George Floyd in 2000 to the current spate of on-the-street seizures orchestrated by ICE.
“Right now you have people who are following ICE vans, and then putting out the call on social media, saying, ‘This is where the ICE van is.’ And one of two things — either ‘go there and protest’ or ‘get the hell out of there,'” said Lauren C. Teffeau, who wrote a sci-fi novel about a college student who’s blackmailed into becoming a courier for a clandestine organization.
Canadian fantasy writer P.L. Stuart, whose résumé includes work in law enforcement, said citizen surveillance of the authorities has become “a movement which begat some real changes” over the past decade.
“Surveillance of the surveyors, unfortunately, is one of the most simple, effective tools that we can use,” Stuart said.
That view was seconded by Ray Nayler, an award-winning sci-fi author who also works for the federal government on nuclear risk reduction. Nayler’s latest novel focuses on a future world in which governments have embraced surveillance, repression and AI-fueled authoritarianism.
“Coming from the arms control perspective, surveillance of power is what arms control is,” Nayler said. “You’re literally surveilling the powerful things that can destroy other things, and you’re trying to know where they are, know who is controlling them, and know how they might be deployed at any moment.”
There have been cases where citizen surveillance runs into privacy issues. For example, the early 2020s saw the rise of trackers who monitored the comings and goings of private airplanes used by Elon Musk, Taylor Swift and other celebrities, using publicly available records. That stirred an outcry from the celebrities — and in April, the Federal Aviation Administration changed its rules to keep that kind of flight information hidden from the public.
You could argue that corporations are collecting more data than the federal government when it comes to our personal comings and goings. The most obvious example relates to online ads: Unless you’re unusually circumspect, your web-browsing history and shopping habits are likely to determine which ads you’re shown online.
“We allowed this to happen,” said science-fiction writer K.C. Aegis. “We allowed convenience to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Who cares if somebody knows what we bought last week?’ But everyone started doing it, so now it’s a problem.”
So how can we reclaim our data? It’s going to take collective effort. Nayler said that Indigenous groups have been pioneering a strategy known as data sovereignty, which puts each community in charge of the collection, ownership and application of its own data.
“You counter the surveillance by stating very clearly how surveillance can be used, and then holding violators of those statements accountable,” Nayler said.
Brin spoke up for the idea of setting up a system whereby people would receive a micropayment every time someone uses their personal data. He also suggested working with the banking industry to set up an anonymized credibility rating system.
“You would be able to rent or buy a pseudonym, and that pseudonym would carry your credibility ratings — not just your credit score, but how credible you are about astrophysics, or how credible you are about this or that or the other,” Brin explained. “The bad people who use anonymity badly today, who are a plague upon us … their scores will get dinged back to the bank.”
Brin said that striking a balance between privacy and transparency will be a crucial challenge in the decades ahead. “We should try to find sweet spots where we get a win-win, because that’s the only way we’re going to navigate the next 100 years,” he said.
But establishing those sweet spots would require buy-in from governments and corporations — the very entities that have fostered today’s surveillance society. Is it even possible to rein in Big Brother?
Teffeau sees some reason for hope.
“We did have the ‘Do Not Call’ list for a very long time, and it did work. It stopped working because … for reasons,” she said. “And so we are capable of passing these kinds of regulations and legislation, but we have to hold our elected officials accountable. We have to have an electorate that demands these things, and we’re just not there yet. We’re not organized enough yet.”
Lead image of “Big Brother” stencil in Ukraine by Борис У., licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
