We love Big Brother

From Orwellian fears to a participatory willingness, we have fallen in love with being watched

George Orwell’s book, 1984, ends with its protagonist’s submission to the monolithic forces of the surveillance state. It concludes, in chilling simplicity, with Winston’s admission that “he loved Big Brother.”

Reading as a middle schooler with no social media other than a parent-monitored Facebook account, I was confused by this final line. Now, after having been on social media for almost a decade, I recognise both its poignance and its prescience.

It is Winston’s profession of love, rather than his surrender and betrayal, that signals his final vanquishment. To surrender is to submit to an external force. But to love is to internalise its power such that one no longer recognises their own submission. It is to devote oneself fervently—to even take pleasure in one’s submission. Now, as I scroll through TikTok—past a dancer gyrating lustfully on the screen, past yet another ‘chef’ making bedroom eyes at his camera—I fear that we, too, have fallen in love with Big Brother. 

Unlike Winston, however, this isn’t capitulation after the gradual erosion of one’s will. Instead, it is an active participation in a system that thrives on surveillance. Far from fearing the omnipresence of surveilling eyes, we now embrace, and even desire, being watched. We love Big Brother. We have done so from the moment we felt the rush of that first ‘like,’ and we continue to do so each time we hit that throbbing ‘post’ button.

In his book entitled Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, American critical theorist Bernard E. Harcourt identifies pleasure and desire as central forces in our digital subjugation. He writes, “we are not so much being coerced, surveilled, or secured today as we are exposing or exhibiting ourselves knowingly, many of us willingly, with all our love, lust, passion.” Harcourt refers to our present condition as the “expository society.” Within the expository society, we are “enmeshed in a constant digital pulse,” and have thereby “become dulled to the perils of digital transparence.” 

Indeed, from the carefully curated casual Instagram story of a friend’s meal to the real-time updates from an ongoing TikTok multi-series documenting some stranger’s personal drama, it seems that we offer up our lives as content for public consumption. From the Kardashians to the D’Amelios, it seems that those who divulge their lives for our consumption benefit the most. 

How, then, to resist the inevitable pull? Indeed, to eschew social media entirely might feel like becoming an “unperson,” one whose traces have been erased completely. Yet, in the pursuit of visibility, we risk the unbecoming of our person as well. We risk losing control over how we are perceived, and more dangerously, who we are. We become “dulled,” writes Harcourt, “by the mortification of the analog self that the loss of privacy, autonomy, and anonymity have brought upon us.”  I believe that it is ultimately our interpellation into digital subjects, and, above all, our unawareness of the insidious forces that urge us to crave always being seen; these forces—when unchecked—might drive us to instinctively reach for the camera to film what should otherwise be a private moment. Perhaps the answer lies not in rejecting these platforms entirely, but in reevaluating our relationship with them. In recognising this expository power, we might grasp how it has shaped us into marketised subjects who do nothing more than watch and be watched. Only then, might we begin to interrogate the motivations and stakes of our ‘voluntary’ exposure.