When we consider how attention is ordinarily intermingled with both perception and judgment, it’s easier to understand why the gaze of the machine may become unsettling. In the case of applications designed to take our measure, to assess our creditworthiness, say, or our fit with a prospective employer or how well we are performing, we are not... See more

It’s like some sort of Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we are being watched, but we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as big brother, looking in at a projected image of everyone’s life, which isn’t that real but we, for some reason, pretend it is.

Panoptic surveillance, whether state or private, makes us intensely conscious that every public action is potentially recorded, screenshotted and data-harvested.