"“Love Island” serves as a cautionary tale of how quickly the expectation of privacy will erode in the face of ubiquitous monitoring. But reality shows aren’t really allegories of the surveillance state. We should fear how our liberties and our own behaviors will be warped by the proliferation of cameras on every street corner, on every car dashboard and in every pocket. But we should be more afraid of how impossible it will be to tell that we’ve changed. There will be no “outside” for us to leave for, no surveillance-free home to return to. In a real surveillance state, even the surveillants must live under the all-seeing eye. Without an “outside,” there are only other contestants within the bubble to film, monitor and confront one another. And what’s worse — being watched by Big Brother, or being watched by your fellow increasingly crazed and desperate comrades?"
At www.nytimes.com
