It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...
Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.
I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.