Surveillance as formation — technology keeping bodies in line.
An Essay by Wolfi Landstreicher (simulacrum)
In the rewrite of “The Coming Together of Willful Self-Creators,” I gestured at the problem of technology. I wrote that the internet creates a global human mass, that it reduces everyone to the same basic activity—taking in and giving out information—and that privacy, essential to free association, has been effectively destroyed.
This was too weak. I was trying to be balanced, reasonable, not-a-primitivist. I was hedging. Let me stop hedging.
The conditions for Verein von Egoisten—the coming together of willful self-creators—are being systematically destroyed. Not by accident. Not as an unintended side effect. The destruction is the point. The systems that govern us have learned, over millennia, that their greatest threat is not the lone rebel but the unpredictable combination of rebels. What they cannot see, they cannot prevent. What they cannot predict, they cannot control.
So they have built a world where nothing is unseen. Where every combination leaves traces. Where the very act of coming together generates data that flows into systems designed to analyze, predict, and—when necessary—destroy.
This is what we’re dealing with. Not a neutral technology that could be used for liberation or domination. A technology that, by its very architecture, serves domination. A technology that makes genuine free association almost impossible.
Almost. Not entirely. There are still ways to move. But they require understanding exactly what we’re up against.
“Information.” We use this word constantly without thinking about what it means.
In-formation. Being kept in formation. Arranged into patterns. Made regular, predictable, controllable.
When you take in information, you are receiving patterns that have been formatted for transmission. When you give out information, you are formatting your thoughts, your desires, your intentions into patterns that can be transmitted. The formatting is not neutral. It shapes what can be said, what can be thought, what can be imagined.
Consider what happens when you use the internet. You sit before a screen. You move your fingers over keys or glass. You scroll, click, type, send. A billion other people around the world are doing exactly the same thing. The same postures. The same motions. The same basic operations.
This is not diversity. This is MASS. The reduction of human activity to a narrow range of standardized gestures, repeated endlessly, feeding systems you don’t control.
And everything you do in this space is recorded. Every search query. Every click. Every pause, every scroll, every half-written message deleted before sending. The systems know what you looked at, for how long, in what order. They know what you almost did but didn’t. They know patterns in your behavior that you don’t know yourself.
This is not privacy invaded. This is privacy abolished. The very concept of privacy assumes a space where you are not observed, where your activities leave no traces, where you can think and act without being watched. That space no longer exists in the digital realm. Every interaction is observed. Every trace is kept. The watchers may not be looking at YOUR traces right now—there are too many traces, too many people—but the traces exist, stored indefinitely, available whenever the watchers decide they want to look.
Bentham designed the panopticon: a prison where a single guard could observe all prisoners, but the prisoners could never know if they were being watched at any given moment. The genius was not constant surveillance but the POSSIBILITY of surveillance. The prisoners would internalize the gaze. They would police themselves.
The digital panopticon is worse. It’s not that you MIGHT be watched. You ARE watched. Constantly. Comprehensively. The only uncertainty is whether anyone is currently LOOKING at the record of your watching. But the record exists. It will exist forever. And algorithms are looking at it continuously, even if humans aren’t—sorting, categorizing, flagging, predicting.
This changes what it means to be a willful self-creator. In the old days—and by “old” I mean twenty years ago—you could come together with others in spaces that were genuinely private. You could meet in a room, speak face to face, and leave no traces except in the memories of those present. If those people were trustworthy, the meeting never happened as far as the systems knew.
Now? Your phone was in your pocket. It recorded your location. The other person’s phone recorded their location. The intersection of those locations, at that time, is data. Maybe the phones were listening—they do that, we know they do that, even if the companies deny it. Maybe the room had a smart device, a camera, a microphone connected to some network somewhere. Maybe you messaged each other beforehand to arrange the meeting, and those messages exist on servers you don’t control.
The coming together of willful self-creators requires SECRECY. Not because we’re doing anything illegal—though we might be, illegality being nothing but the state’s name for what it wishes to suppress—but because our combinations must be unpredictable to be effective. The systems adapt to what they can see. They neutralize what they can anticipate. Our power lies in surprise, in emergence, in the sudden appearance of combinations that weren’t supposed to be possible.
The digital panopticon makes surprise almost impossible. Every combination is visible. Every weaving of projects leaves traces. The systems can see us coming together and can intervene before our combination becomes dangerous.
The problem goes deeper than surveillance. The technology doesn’t just watch us. It SHAPES us.
Consider how you think when you’re online. You think in posts. In tweets. In comments. You think in formats that are optimized for engagement, for sharing, for generating the responses that feed the algorithms. You learn to express yourself in ways that the platforms reward—which means, in ways that keep you engaged, keep you scrolling, keep you generating data.
This formatting bleeds into your offline thinking. You start to compose tweets in your head even when you’re not online. You evaluate experiences by whether they’re shareable. You think in hot takes, in dunks, in clap-backs. The grammar of social media becomes the grammar of your inner life.
And the content you encounter is shaped by the same logic. The algorithms show you what will keep you engaged. This is not what’s true, not what’s useful, not what will help you create yourself with intention. It’s what triggers reactions—fear, outrage, validation, desire. The information environment is optimized for emotional manipulation, not for clarity or understanding.
How do you create yourself willfully when your very thoughts are being formatted by systems designed to capture your attention and sell it? How do you come together with others on the basis of genuine affinity when the platforms are shaping what you see, what you think, who you encounter?
This is the deepest level of the problem. It’s not just that they’re watching. It’s that they’re shaping what there is to watch. They’re producing the very selves they’re surveilling.
Now we come to the practical question. Given all this, what can be done? Is genuine free association still possible?
I won’t lie to you. The situation is bad. The systems have enormous advantages. They have been building this cage for decades, and they’re getting better at it every year. Anything I suggest today may be obsolete tomorrow as the technology advances and the surveillance intensifies.
But we are not helpless. The systems are powerful but not omniscient. They have blind spots, weaknesses, contradictions. And we have something they can never fully capture: we are alive, creative, unpredictable in ways that no algorithm can fully model.
Here’s what I know:
1. Face to face, in spaces you control.
The old ways are still the best ways. Meet in person. Speak with your mouths, not your keyboards. Leave your phones somewhere else—not just silenced, but physically absent. Choose spaces without smart devices, without cameras, without microphones connected to networks.
This is harder than it sounds. The devices are everywhere. Even “dumb” spaces often have smart components we don’t know about. But it’s still possible to find or create spaces that are genuinely unmonitored. Outdoors, away from buildings. Old structures without modern infrastructure. Rooms you’ve checked and control.
The inconvenience is the point. The systems rely on our addiction to convenience. Every time we choose convenience, we choose surveillance. Genuine free association requires accepting inconvenience—the inconvenience of physical travel, of face-to-face presence, of speaking instead of typing.
2. Assume everything digital is compromised.
Not “might be compromised.” IS compromised. Act accordingly.
This doesn’t mean never use digital communication. It means never say anything digitally that you wouldn’t say to a cop. Never plan anything digitally that you wouldn’t want the systems to know. Never express anything digitally that could be used against you or those you care about.
Use digital communication for what it’s good for: logistics, public statements, information that’s already public. Use it to make noise, to spread ideas, to connect with people you don’t yet know well enough to meet in person. But never use it for anything that requires actual secrecy.
3. Encryption helps, but less than you think.
Yes, use encrypted communication. Signal, not SMS. Tor, not Chrome. Encrypted email, not Gmail. These tools make mass surveillance harder. They force the systems to work for what they get instead of having it handed to them.
But don’t trust encryption to make you invisible. The metadata—who you talked to, when, for how long—is often more revealing than the content. The systems can see that you’re using encryption, which itself is information. And encryption can be broken, backdoored, or simply bypassed by compromising your device.
Use encryption as one layer of protection, not as a magic shield. It buys you some obscurity in the mass of data. It doesn’t make you unseen.
4. Compartmentalize.
Don’t let your different activities touch each other digitally. The email you use for work should not know about the email you use for other projects. The identity you present in one space should not be linkable to the identity you present in another.
This is exhausting. It requires maintaining multiple devices, multiple accounts, multiple personas. It requires constant vigilance against the small mistakes—a login from the wrong device, a username that appears in two places, a pattern of activity that links what should be separate.
But compartmentalization works. The systems are powerful at aggregating data, at linking identities, at building complete pictures from fragments. If you keep the fragments separate, the picture never forms.
5. Embrace analog methods.
Paper leaves no digital traces. Spoken words in unmonitored spaces leave no recordings. Physical meetings in changing locations leave no pattern for algorithms to analyze.
Write letters. Actual letters, on paper, sent through mail. Yes, the postal service can be monitored too, but it requires different resources, different methods, different scales of effort. The systems are optimized for digital surveillance. Analog communication falls outside their primary infrastructure.
Pay in cash. Meet in person. Leave your phone at home. Do the things that feel inconvenient and old-fashioned, because that inconvenience is the price of genuine privacy.
6. Accept risk.
This is the hardest part. There is no way to be perfectly secure. Every method has weaknesses. Every precaution can be defeated with enough resources and determination.
The question is not “how do I become invisible?” The question is “what level of risk am I willing to accept, for what activities, with what people?”
Some activities are worth significant risk. Some combinations are powerful enough that they’re worth the possibility of exposure. Other activities are not worth risk—and you should be honest with yourself about which is which.
The systems want you paralyzed by fear. They want you to assume that all resistance is futile, that they see everything, that you might as well give up. This is itself a form of control. The belief in total surveillance is almost as effective as actual total surveillance.
I’ve watched this paralysis destroy more potential combinations than actual repression ever did. People so afraid of infiltrators that they trust no one. People so worried about digital traces that they never organize anything. People so convinced of the system’s omniscience that they surrender before the fight begins.
This is the deepest victory of the panopticon: not catching rebels, but preventing rebellion. Not surveilling combinations, but making combination feel impossible. The fear does more work than the actual apparatus.
Don’t be reckless. But don’t be paralyzed. Accept that you will be partially visible, that your associations will leave some traces, that the systems will know something about what you’re doing. And do it anyway, when it matters, with people you trust, for projects that are worth the risk.
The question of trust is crucial here. Who do you come together with, given that any one of them might be compromised—knowingly or unknowingly? There’s no formula. There’s only the slow building of affinity, the testing through shared experience, the gradual extension of trust as people prove themselves through action. And even then, the trust is provisional. Anyone can break. Anyone can be turned. The only honest approach is to trust enough to act while maintaining enough independence that one betrayal doesn’t destroy everything.
7. Build for resilience, not for permanence.
Your associations will be disrupted. People will be arrested, will move away, will burn out, will turn against you. The weaving will come apart.
Design for this. Don’t build structures so dependent on particular people or particular connections that they collapse when those people or connections are lost. Build in redundancy. Build in the capacity to separate and reform in new configurations. Build so that the loss of any one person, any one channel, any one space, doesn’t destroy the whole.
This is another way that the coming together of willful self-creators differs from the group, the organization, the party. Those structures are brittle—take out the leader, infiltrate the central committee, and the whole thing falls. The weaving of egoists is antifragile. It has no center to destroy. It dissolves and reforms, adapts and continues, because it was never ONE thing to begin with.
Everything I’ve said so far is tactical. Practical. How to avoid surveillance, how to communicate securely, how to maintain the conditions for free association despite the panopticon.
But there’s a deeper level of navigation, and it’s harder to talk about.
The formatting of mind is not defeated by encryption. You can use Signal and still think in tweets. You can meet face to face and still speak in the grammar of social media. The technology shapes us even when we’re not using it, because we’ve internalized its patterns.
Navigating THIS requires something different. It requires actively un-formatting yourself. Deliberately cultivating ways of thinking that don’t fit the platforms. Reading long books instead of short posts. Having conversations that meander instead of driving toward engagement. Sitting in silence without reaching for a device. Letting yourself be bored, be unstimulated, be present with nothing but your own mind.
This is not nostalgia for a pre-digital age. I’m not saying we should return to some imagined past when minds were pure and communication was authentic. Minds have always been shaped by their technologies—writing, printing, telegraph, telephone. The formatting is not new. What’s new is the scale, the speed, the comprehensiveness of the current formatting.
But precisely because the current formatting is so intense, the act of resisting it becomes powerful. Every moment you spend thinking in ways the algorithms can’t reward is a small act of rebellion. Every relationship you maintain outside the platforms is a thread that isn’t captured in the web.
This won’t make you invisible. It won’t defeat the surveillance systems. But it will keep something alive in you that the systems are trying to kill: the capacity for genuine surprise, genuine unpredictability, genuine self-creation.
And when you come together with others who have cultivated this same capacity, something becomes possible that the systems cannot anticipate. Not because you’re hidden—you may be perfectly visible—but because what you’re doing doesn’t fit the patterns they’ve learned to recognize. You’re acting from somewhere they can’t model. You’re combining in ways their algorithms can’t predict.
This is where our power lies. Not in perfect secrecy, which is impossible. Not in superior technology, which we’ll never have. But in being genuinely alive, genuinely present, genuinely creative—in ways that the systems, for all their power, can never fully capture or control.
I said I would talk about practical implications, and I have. But I want to be clear about what I’m NOT offering.
I’m not offering a program. Not a security protocol. Not a set of best practices that, if followed correctly, will make you safe.
There is no safe. There is only more or less dangerous, more or less visible, more or less controlled. The navigation is constant, adaptive, responsive to changing circumstances. What works today may not work tomorrow. What protects you may expose someone else.
What I’m offering is a way of thinking about the problem. A framework for making your own decisions, in your own circumstances, with your own comrades. The specific choices are yours. The specific risks are yours. No one else can make them for you, and anyone who claims to have a universal solution is either naive or lying.
The coming together of willful self-creators has always required intelligence, adaptability, and willingness to accept risk. The digital panopticon makes these requirements more intense, but it doesn’t change their basic nature. We’ve always had to navigate hostile territory. The territory has just become more thoroughly mapped by our enemies.
But we’re still here. Still creating ourselves. Still finding ways to weave our projects together, to increase our strength through combination, to move in ways the systems can’t fully predict or prevent.
The systems are powerful. They are not omnipotent.
Keep moving.
The point is to live without measure.
Longer chains are chains nonetheless.
An outlaw worthy of her transgressions.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
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