How Does Being Watched Change Who We Are?

The One State in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a city enclosed behind a wall and constructed almost entirely of glass. Citizens — referred to as Numbers, not names — live in glass apartments, work in glass buildings, and move through glass corridors. Everything is visible. There are no curtains. There is no darkness. Privacy, in the physical sense, does not exist.

The effect is not merely practical surveillance. It is the abolition of the conditions under which a private self can develop. The self that forms in solitude — the self that thinks thoughts it has not yet chosen to share, that feels feelings it has not yet decided to perform, that doubts what it has been told — requires concealment in order to exist. Take away the concealment and the self does not go underground. It fails to form.

Zamyatin's protagonist D-503 is a mathematician and the chief engineer of a spacecraft called the Integral. He is a loyal citizen of the One State. He believes in its values. Then he meets I-330, and something begins to grow in him that the state has no category for: imagination. The state diagnoses this as a disease. The prescribed cure is an operation — the surgical removal of the part of the brain responsible for imagination. The novel treats this not as horror but as medical fact. Imagination, in a world of total visibility, is a pathology.

"We comes from God and I from the Devil."

The One State's use of architecture as surveillance prefigures everything that follows in the literature of engineered reality. Orwell's telescreen, Eggers' Circle, and the smartphone in a contemporary pocket are all variations on the same principle: visibility is not a side effect of control. It is the mechanism.

The panopticon is a prison design proposed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, in which a central watchtower is surrounded by a ring of cells, each fully visible to the tower but screened from each other. The tower's windows are darkened. A prisoner can always be seen from the tower but can never see whether the tower is occupied. The result is a prisoner who behaves as if they are being watched at all times, because they cannot determine when they are not.

Zamyatin's One State operates on the same principle at architectural scale. The glass city does not guarantee that every citizen is watched every moment — it guarantees that every citizen knows they could be watched every moment. The Guardians — the One State's secret police — do not need to be everywhere. They need only to be possible everywhere. The uncertainty does the work.

This principle — that the possibility of observation is as behaviourally effective as actual observation — is what makes modern surveillance technology so powerful. A smartphone that could be logging your location does not need to be logging it to change how you behave. A social media platform that might be monitoring your private messages does not need to be doing so to induce self-censorship. The architecture of uncertainty, whether built from glass or code, produces the same result: a population that surveils itself.

"There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite."

The panopticon effect connects directly to the concept of thoughtcrime examined in The Architecture of Thought Control. Thoughtcrime functions because citizens cannot know whether their faces, postures, and micro-expressions are being monitored for signs of unacceptable thought. The uncertainty is the enforcement. The telescreen does not need to be watched by a human being. It only needs to be watchable.

The telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a two-way screen, present in every room of every Party member's home and workplace, that both transmits Party propaganda and receives audio and visual data from the space it occupies. It cannot be turned off — only dimmed slightly. It monitors facial expressions, body language, and sound. Any sign of unacceptable thought or feeling is potentially detectable.

The crucial detail is that Winston does not know when he is being watched. The telescreen could be monitored continuously or intermittently. A human being could be watching, or a recording could be reviewed later, or nothing could be watched at all. This uncertainty means Winston must behave as if he is under continuous observation at all times. The telescreen does not need to catch him. It only needs to make him unable to assume it will not.

The consequence is a radical restructuring of Winston's relationship with his own body. He trains his face into a mask. He controls his breathing. He suppresses involuntary reactions. His body becomes a performance rather than an expression. The interior life — thought, feeling, desire — must be kept entirely separate from the exterior surface, which must at all times present the appearance of orthodox contentment. This split is exhausting. It is also, Orwell suggests, ultimately unsustainable.

"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard."

The telescreen's function as an instrument of intimacy destruction connects to the themes explored in Intimacy, Identity, and the Private Self. Winston and Julia can only speak freely in spaces where the telescreen cannot reach. Their relationship is defined by the geography of surveillance — constituted by the gaps in observation and destroyed when those gaps close.

The smartphone is the most widely distributed surveillance device in human history. It knows its owner's location continuously. It has microphones and cameras that could, in principle, be activated remotely. It carries a complete record of its owner's communications, searches, purchases, movements, and social connections. Unlike the telescreen, it was not installed by the state. It was purchased voluntarily and is carried everywhere by choice.

Dave Eggers' The Circle extends this logic to its conclusion. In Eggers' near-future world, the technology company called the Circle develops a programme called SeeChange — a network of tiny, cheap, weather-resistant cameras that can be placed anywhere and stream live footage to anyone with access. Combined with the Circle's other data systems, it creates a world in which complete transparency is technically achievable and — crucially — culturally framed as desirable.

The difference between Orwell's telescreen and Eggers' SeeChange is the direction of the demand. Orwell's citizens are surveilled against their will. Eggers' citizens demand surveillance — of themselves and of others — because transparency has been reframed as a virtue and privacy as a form of dishonesty. The architecture of visibility is identical. The political valence has been reversed. The result for the observed self is the same.

"Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft."

How the reframing of surveillance as participation prevents resistance is examined in Class, Power, and the Illusion of Resistance. The citizen who demands transparency is not a victim of surveillance — they are its advocate. This is the most stable form of the panopticon effect: one that has been internalised so completely that the observed self polices not only itself but everyone around it.

Surveillance changes behaviour by making the possibility of observation a permanent feature of the psychological environment. A person who knows they might be watched at any moment cannot act spontaneously. Every action becomes a potential performance. Every expression becomes a potential signal. The gap between the interior self — what a person actually thinks and feels — and the exterior self — what they display — widens until the interior self has nowhere left to exist.

Zamyatin traced this process with particular precision. D-503's growing interiority — his capacity for imagination, for irrational desire, for the experience of the private self — is presented as a medical symptom precisely because the One State has no conceptual framework for it. A self that exists only for itself, rather than for the collective, is by definition pathological in a world of total visibility. The One State's response is surgical not because it is cruel but because it is logical. Imagination is incompatible with the architecture.

The long-term effect of surveillance is not obedience — it is the atrophy of the capacity for disobedience. A person who has spent years performing compliance finds that the performance becomes their reality. The interior self that was being concealed gradually loses its content. There is nothing left to hide because there is nothing left that differs from the performance. This is the final stage of the observed self: not a person hiding their true self from the watcher, but a person for whom no true self distinct from the watched performance remains.

"I do not want anyone to want for me — I want to want for myself."

The destruction of the private self under surveillance connects directly to the themes of Intimacy, Identity, and the Private Self. The self that love requires — particular, ungoverned, known fully only by another — is exactly the self that surveillance abolishes. Where the telescreen ends, the question of whether anything personal enough to be loved remains is the subject Shteyngart takes up in Super Sad True Love Story.

• Surveillance restructures identity whether or not observation is actually occurring. Zamyatin showed in We (1924) that the mere possibility of being observed is sufficient to abolish the interior life — the self that forms in private cannot develop under conditions of permanent potential visibility.
• The panopticon effect requires only uncertainty, not omniscience. Both Zamyatin's One State and Orwell's telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) operate not by watching everyone continuously but by making it impossible for anyone to know when they are not being watched — producing comprehensive self-surveillance at negligible cost.
• Voluntary surveillance is more stable than coerced surveillance. Eggers demonstrated in The Circle (2013) that a population which has internalised transparency as a virtue will enforce visibility on itself and on others — making resistance not just difficult but socially illegitimate.
• The long-term effect of surveillance is the atrophy of the capacity for disobedience. Zamyatin traced in We (1924) the process by which sustained performance of compliance gradually extinguishes the interior self being concealed — until no self distinct from the performance remains to be liberated.

How does surveillance change human behaviour?

Surveillance changes human behaviour by making people act as though they are being watched even when they are not. Yevgeny Zamyatin explored this dynamic in We (1924), depicting a glass-walled city where permanent visibility abolishes the private self entirely. The panopticon effect — the way that the mere possibility of observation restructures behaviour as completely as actual observation — means that surveillance infrastructure does not need to be active to be effective. It only needs to be present. In contemporary life, this principle operates through smartphone cameras, social media platforms, and workplace monitoring software — all of which restructure behaviour by making visibility feel permanent, even when surveillance is intermittent or absent.

What is the panopticon and how does it relate to modern surveillance?

The panopticon is a prison design in which a central watchtower is surrounded by cells that are always visible to the tower but whose occupants cannot see whether the tower is staffed. The result is prisoners who behave as if continuously observed because they cannot determine when they are not. Zamyatin's glass-walled One State in We (1924) is a city-scale panopticon. Orwell's telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a domestic one. Modern surveillance technologies — CCTV networks, location-tracking smartphones, platform data collection — operate on the same principle. The behavioural effect does not depend on continuous observation. It depends on the impossibility of knowing when observation has stopped.

What modern technologies resemble the telescreen?

The smartphone is the closest contemporary equivalent to Orwell's telescreen from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). It knows its owner's location continuously, carries a complete record of their communications and movements, and has microphones and cameras that could, in principle, be activated without visible indication. Unlike the telescreen, it was not installed by the state — it was purchased voluntarily and is carried everywhere by choice. Dave Eggers extended this logic in The Circle (2013), depicting a world in which miniaturised cameras stream live footage from anywhere and transparency has been culturally reframed as a virtue. The technology is more distributed than Orwell imagined. The effect on the observed self is the same.

1. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. 1924.
2. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.
3. Eggers, Dave. The Circle. 2013.