Surveillance
The expansion of monitoring systems across public and private life. Facial recognition networks, location tracking, communications interception, workplace monitoring, and the normalization of being watched as a condition of existing in modern infrastructure.
What the fiction said
The genre imagined a watcher. A security AI on the corporate mainframe, a Section 9 operative tracing a cyberbrain, a camera in the ceiling with somebody behind it. Surveillance in the fiction was centralized, deliberate, and aimed. It cost something to point at you, which meant being watched implied you mattered.
What actually shipped
Nobody is watching. Collection runs by default because storage is cheap and the exhaust has a resale market, and attention gets applied later, retroactively, when a reason turns up.
Clearview AI built a face search engine out of billions of images scraped from public web pages and sold access to police departments; a 2022 settlement in Illinois restricted sales to most private US companies without stopping the product. Automated license plate readers from vendors like Flock Safety and Motorola log every passing car in thousands of American towns, storing the movements of people nobody suspects of anything. Amazon’s Ring spent years brokering footage requests between police and doorbells, retired the program in 2024 under pressure, and rebuilt it in 2025 through a partnership with Axon. The pipe was never removed, only re-plumbed. Most of the ads that load on a page run a real-time auction that broadcasts coarse location and inferred attributes to hundreds of bidders, and the data broker market turns that stream into products with price lists. US intelligence agencies have acknowledged purchasing commercially available data of a kind that would otherwise need a warrant. The commercial layer did the hard work, and the state became a customer.
At work it is more direct. Warehouse rate tracking, keystroke monitors, and productivity scoring are sold as management tooling and function as continuous observation of people who are not in a position to decline.
Where to watch it
The Surveillance feed tracks deployments, procurement, and the occasional enforcement action. Adjacent threads: Biometrics for identification tied to the body, Policing for what departments buy and how it gets used, and Adtech for the commercial pipe underneath all of it.
To cut your own contribution to the stream, start with a privacy baseline.