Big Brother Is All of Us
In the novel 1984, published in 1949, George Orwell imagined a society where power needed to directly monitor the population. The telescreen brought the State inside every home, turning every word, every gesture, and even every involuntary expression into a potential proof of deviation. Big Brother watched from above. On one side stood the observer; on the other, a population forced to live under the suspicion of being watched.
The image retains its power. It still serves to think about state surveillance, massive data accumulation, commercial tracking, or the ability of governments and companies to reconstruct our movements. But it proves insufficient to describe the kind of control that has developed around social networks and, more broadly, digital content organized through recommendation systems. Contemporary power does not need to personally observe every behavior, explicitly formulate every rule, or punish every deviation one by one. It can intervene more efficiently: it retains control over infrastructure and visibility, but externalizes a part of the disciplinary work onto the population.
The word discipline here does not refer solely to prohibition or punishment. Michel Foucault showed in Discipline and Punish (1975) that disciplinary power also acts by producing habits, ordering behaviors, and defining what can be considered normal. Its effectiveness does not depend only on sanctioning the individual after a transgression. It consists of getting them to anticipate the gaze under which they will be evaluated and to adapt their behavior before intervention becomes necessary. The subject ends up supervising themselves because they have incorporated the conditions under which they can occupy a legitimate position within social space.
In the digital environment, this operation is distributed among agents who do not possess the same power. Platforms design channels, establish formats, and set general circulation conditions. Recommendation systems select which representations will achieve visibility and which will remain outside the flow before reaching an audience. Users observe what has been selected, reward it, imitate it, ridicule it, or condemn it. Over time, each subject learns from both operations and begins to self-correct before attempting to appear.
Big Brother is all of us because surveillance has ceased to be a function reserved for a clearly recognizable institution and has been incorporated into our daily relationships. However, we do not all participate from the same position. The multitude intervenes on what it sees, but it does not solely determine what it will see. Platforms retain the ability to organize the scene, decide which fragments of the world will be submitted to collective judgment, and establish the ways in which they can be perceived.
The result is not necessarily a society where everyone adopts the same opinions, tastes, or identities. The digital environment can multiply lifestyles, intensify conflicts, and offer an enormous variety of positions from which to present oneself. Its deepest effect operates at another level: it reduces the ways in which these differences can acquire public existence. Diversity remains, but it must adapt to a shared grammar of visibility, recognition, and reaction.
Masks and Their Borders
Long before the advent of social networks, daily life already demanded playing different roles. In 1956, Erving Goffman developed this idea in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life through a dramaturgical metaphor: each situation establishes a scene, an audience, expectations, and a series of resources with which a person tries to produce a certain impression on others. The social mask, understood as the form the individual adopts within each performance, allows this approach to be condensed.
The mask does not have to be a lie or a disguise intended to hide a true self that would remain intact underneath. It can be a way of selecting, ordering, and containing one's own behavior to make a specific relationship possible. We do not speak in the same way with our parents as with our friends. We do not present ourselves the same way in a job interview, during a family celebration, in front of a partner, or within a group of strangers. Each bond allows certain dimensions of the person to appear and keeps others in the background. Identity does not present itself completely in each encounter, but rather is distributed among the different relationships that make up a life.
This does not mean that masks were always liberating. They could also impose rigid roles, sustain hierarchies, enforce silence, or confine a person within expectations from which they could barely escape. The mask of the obedient employee, the submissive wife, the man unable to show fragility, or the loyal member of a community could limit subjectivity as much as protect it. The difference does not lie in the fact that old masks were benign, but in that their demands were linked to more delimited spheres. A person could find themselves subjected within one scene and retain, outside of it, other spaces where relationships, language, and behavior obeyed different rules.
This separation protected the plurality of the subject. It allowed a person to be several things without having to immediately gather them into a single, perfectly coherent identity. Trust, formality, desire, authority, vulnerability, or humor could appear differently depending on the relationship in which they occurred. None of these versions had to claim the status of a definitive face on its own.
Plurality depended on the existence of borders between contexts. The coworker was not present during private jokes among friends. Parents did not necessarily attend intimate conversations. An opinion expressed in a moment of confidence was not stored for someone who did not know the circumstances in which it appeared to examine years later. Within these relatively separate spaces, particular ways of speaking, feeling, and relating could develop. An incomprehensible expression for society as a whole could retain meaning within a specific community, and inappropriate conduct in one sphere could be legitimate in another. Upon leaving the scene, the individual could change masks, and any error or transgression was limited, at least in principle, by the place, time, and those who had witnessed it.
The digital environment precisely modifies this separation. Family, friendship, work, politics, desire, consumption, and entertainment coincide within the same infrastructure. A post initially addressed to one group can reach another. A joke can be separated from the context that gave it meaning. A photograph can circulate among unknown audiences. An opinion can reappear years later and be read as stable evidence of the identity of the person who formulated it.
The scene no longer closes when the performance ends. The subject does not just present themselves to those in front of them, but to an indeterminate audience composed of family, friends, colleagues, strangers, political adversaries, potential employers, and automatic classification systems. Audiences that previously remained separate observe a common representation and interpret it from expectations that are not always compatible.
The different masks a person used in different spheres must now be integrated into an accumulative profile. They do not disappear completely, but they are no longer protected by clear boundaries. The family, professional, political, emotional, and recreational versions overlap in the same public archive. The individual can no longer change roles without the previous ones remaining available to be retrieved and compared.
The profile emerges from this integration. Each publication becomes part of an image that must maintain a certain coherence over time. What in a face-to-face interaction would have been a circumstantial gesture can become permanent proof of who a person is. The individual no longer manages only how they appear in a specific situation but begins to manage what general version of themselves will be recognized as their identity. But they cannot even freely present that version to others. Between the subject trying to show themselves and the audience, there is an earlier instance that decides which representations deserve to circulate.
The First Discipline: The Algorithmic Filter
We might assume that the algorithm merely distributes content and that discipline begins afterwards, when the audience reacts. According to this interpretation, the platform would decide who reaches the stage and users would determine whether their performance deserves approval or rejection. However, algorithmic selection is not a merely logistical operation. The possibility of being seen already contains a form of evaluation.
When a person publishes something and it barely reaches an audience, they do not encounter a multitude that contradicts their position, questions their sensitivity, or rejects their way of life. They encounter absence. They do not know precisely whether what they wanted to show lacked interest, whether it was expressed inappropriately, whether it appeared at an unfavorable moment, or whether the system decided not to distribute it. The cause remains opaque, but the result is unequivocal: what was published failed to enter the space where content circulates and gains relevance.
It may remain available on the profile of the person who produced it. It has not been prohibited or deleted, but it barely reaches other people, does not generate conversation, and does not intervene in the public image of the world. A discussed idea has at least managed to appear before someone and provoke a response. Content that the system barely distributes does not even achieve that possibility. It exists technically, but lacks social presence.
This invisibility constitutes a form of correction without an interlocutor. Faced with an audience's rejection, the subject can respond, discuss, or attribute the reaction to an identifiable conflict. Faced with a lack of distribution, they can only modify their behavior and try again. They change the tone, format, duration, topic, image, or intensity. They learn which representations manage to pass through the filter and which remain confined to a profile that almost no one gets to see.
The algorithm doesn't need to explain what a person should be. It is enough for it to show them which versions of themselves succeed. This learning also occurs under conditions of uncertainty. Recommendation criteria are not completely visible or stable. The user builds hypotheses based on the results: certain words seem to work better, a sharp opinion circulates more than a doubt, an intense emotion receives more attention than an ambiguous state, an ordinary experience needs to take on the appearance of something exceptional.
It is not necessary to technically understand the system to incorporate its demands. The user observes which of their own posts get more reach, which generate responses, and what types of content repeatedly appear among what they receive. From these signals, they build a practical idea of what works. The platform then ceases to be an external medium. Its logic enters the very process by which expression is prepared.
Before writing, what seems too complex is eliminated. Before posting a photograph, the most easily understandable image is sought. Before expressing a doubt, it is calculated whether the ambiguity will arouse interest or disappear without a trace. Before showing an emotion, an attempt is made to turn it into a sufficiently recognizable gesture. The profile must first adjust to a distribution mechanism to reach any audience. The first question is no longer just how it will be interpreted, but whether it will manage to appear before anyone.
Experience thus begins to be organized according to its possibilities of visibility. It is framed, intensified, and becomes a unit capable of competing within the flow. The person begins to choose which parts of themselves are worth showing, which need to be simplified, and which probably will not find a place within the digital public space.
The characteristic sanction of this first discipline is not condemnation, but the lack of public existence. What does not circulate does not participate in the shared world through which a society learns what deserves attention. By rewarding some forms of expression with reach and relegating others to invisibility, the system intervenes before the message is fully constituted, at the moment a person decides what is worth expressing.
Over time, the user stops producing what they have learned will not reach. Selection no longer needs to be applied to each content because it has been incorporated into the moment before its creation. The subject anticipates the filter and discards on their own what they assume will be omitted. The first disciplinary work of the network consists of making certain expressions stop being attempted before an audience can come to reject them.
The Selection of the Visible World
The power of algorithmically organized content is not exhausted by deciding which publication will achieve greater reach. It also intervenes in the composition of the world on which it will be possible to comment. The audience does not receive a complete representation of social life to then decide what it considers valuable, but rather an ordered, hierarchical, and repeated selection. Certain practices appear constantly; others do so occasionally; many remain outside the perceptive field.
This selection does not only come from users' previous reactions. Recommendation systems belong to large technology companies with commercial objectives, editorial criteria, strategic interests, moderation policies, and their own positions on what should be promoted, limited, or excluded. They can use our behavior to calculate what to show, but this operation does not constitute a neutral sum of collective preferences. Companies design the system, choose what data they consider relevant, establish their objectives, and modify the conditions under which content gains visibility.
It is not necessary for this agenda to take the form of an explicit doctrine. The platform does not have to declare that one way of life is superior to another. It can produce a hierarchy through unequal repetition. What appears again and again begins to seem frequent; what is frequent begins to seem normal; and what is normal gradually acquires the appearance of what is desirable, inevitable, or the only thing that exists.
If a system concentrates visibility on expensive restaurants, exceptional trips, spectacular homes, and easily recognizable brands, it does not merely promote specific goods. It constructs an image of enjoyment in which a few forms of consumption occupy a disproportionate part of the social horizon.
Other ways of meeting, celebrating, or resting may continue to exist. A conversation in a kitchen, a aimless walk, a visit to a friend, or any experience that does not produce a spectacular image do not need to be censored to lose presence within the imaginary. It is enough for them to receive fewer opportunities to circulate. The concentration of consumption begins before the audience contemplates certain objects and decides to desire them, because the system has already restricted the repertoire on which that desire can be formed. The person compares their life with a selected sample and ends up interpreting the intensity of that sample as a description of reality.
The same mechanism can act on politics. If recommendation systems privilege the sharpest, most conflictive, or emotionally intense expressions, the public scene takes on the appearance of a permanent confrontation. Doubts, partial agreements, nuances, and conversations that do not provoke an immediate response can continue to exist, but they cease to participate in the image through which society views itself.
They have not been defeated in the debate, but shown less frequently. Polarization therefore begins before users react aggressively to opposing positions. It begins in the selection of the political repertoire that will reach them. The audience is called upon to judge a society previously cut according to its most divisive expressions. Afterwards, the responses obtained confirm the ability of these expressions to generate activity and provide the system with new reasons to continue showing them.
The algorithm doesn't invent conflict on its own, but it can turn it into the dominant way a community recognizes itself. It doesn't need to eliminate intermediate positions. It can make them secondary, hard to find, or unsuitable for becoming public events. In this way, the extreme not only receives more attention: it begins to represent the whole.
The same reduction affects emotionality. Human emotions do not appear in the digital environment with all their duration, ambiguity, and contradiction. They must adopt visible, legible, and circulating forms. Diffuse states, prolonged doubts, and contradictory feelings find greater difficulty in entering the flow. They do not have to be expressly rejected. Their complexity offers fewer possibilities of being selected, quickly understood, and reproduced. Visible emotionality is impoverished not because people have stopped feeling in complex ways, but because only certain versions of that complexity easily pass through the channel.
The network thus does not merely show a portion of the world. It participates in the formation of the categories with which it will later be interpreted. By repeating certain forms of success, beauty, conflict, or suffering, it provides the material from which judgments about what is normal will be constructed.
The Second Discipline: The Crowd
Once the visible world is selected, the audience's work begins. Users interpret the representations they receive, reward some behaviors, punish others, turn some into imitable models, and present others as ridiculous, offensive, shameful, or insignificant. Each reaction helps to indicate what can be shown without risk and what should be hidden, corrected, or reformulated.
The platform does not need to write all the rules because it can allow the subjects themselves to produce and apply them. It retains control over visibility and externalizes a part of daily surveillance onto the crowd. This externalization is not equivalent to a democratization of power. Users only judge what has managed to reach them. Before being approved or condemned, content must have become sufficiently visible, immediate, and recognizable to pass the first selection.
The reactions then return to the system. What gets attention finds more opportunities to be shown; what is shown frequently accumulates more possibilities of being imitated; and what is imitated produces new examples that confirm its apparent relevance. The platform does not select first to then withdraw. It uses the collective response to continuously reorganize the next selection.
Each user tries to appear, observes those who have succeeded, receives approval or rejection from others, and helps to correct those who appear before them. Surveillance ceases to be presented as a specialized activity and is integrated into entertainment, friendship, desire, political discussion, and daily conversation. We do not feel we are applying a general rule when we react to a publication. We believe we are expressing a specific opinion about a person or behavior. However, the accumulation of these responses produces a system of rewards and sanctions that teaches others how they should present themselves.
Social correction also does not need to take the form of a mass condemnation. It can consist of a succession of small signals: an emotion celebrated as authentic, another interpreted as feigned; a silence turned into proof of indifference; a doubt treated as weakness; a contradiction used to invalidate the person expressing it. Each judgment refers to a repertoire of behaviors that the audience has learned to recognize as normal. And they recognize them as normal because they are the ones the system has repeatedly allowed them to see.
It is in emotional expression that this discipline becomes especially intimate. Faced with certain events, the absence of a publication can be interpreted as indifference. A late reaction can seem opportunistic. An overly intense expression can be read as a search for attention. A less emphatic formulation can raise doubts about the authenticity of the commitment. The person is not evaluated solely by what they do, but by the correspondence between their emotional representation and the code that the audience considers appropriate.
Emotional surveillance does not need to discover what we truly feel. It is enough for it to control the public form through which a feeling can be recognized. Sadness must look like sadness. Indignation must reach a sufficient intensity. Joy must provide visible evidence of fulfillment. Solidarity must use shared gestures and words. Grief must acquire a communicable form and a socially understandable duration.
This emotional corset does not necessarily determine what a person feels in intimacy. It limits the ways in which that feeling can gain public recognition. In doing so, it forces complex inner states to be translated into a reduced set of easily recognizable expressions. The subject learns to anticipate these interpretations, discards a phrase, modifies an image, eliminates a doubt, or adopts the tone that seems safest.
But the audience also does not create the codes it applies from scratch. Before it can judge an emotion, the system has already determined which expressions it will see most often. Immediately understandable forms, capable of provoking a quick reaction and compatible with available formats, have more opportunities to circulate. The viewer becomes familiar with them and ends up using them as a measure for others. The platform restricts visible emotionality; the audience transforms that restriction into a criterion of authenticity.
Internalized Normality: The Third Discipline
Discipline achieves its greatest effectiveness when it ceases to be felt as an external demand. The adaptations made to achieve visibility then become criteria with which others are evaluated. He who has learned that an ambiguous opinion barely circulates may end up distrusting the ambiguity of others. He who has had to intensify his expression to be recognized may interpret a more contained form as a lack of authenticity. He who has been forced to construct a clear and easily classifiable identity may suspect one who does not offer a stable definition of themselves.
The discipline received does not disappear. It transforms into a value judgment. The renunciations necessary to enter the scene cease to be perceived as renunciations and begin to be presented as natural requirements for any legitimate behavior.
There is no need for a conscious will to impose on others the price one has paid oneself. The mechanism is deeper. When a person manages to remain in the public space without adopting the forms that others had to learn, it reveals that those adaptations were perhaps not as natural or as inevitable as they seemed. It reminds others that they had to simplify, expose themselves, or become recognizable to occupy a similar position.
The disciplinary reaction then protects not only the platform's rules, but also the image each subject retains of their own adaptation. Turning what one had to do into a universal obligation avoids recognizing it as a concession. Correcting someone who behaves differently allows one to interpret one's own sacrifice not as a loss, but as the reasonable way anyone should present themselves.
Orwell's image must be complemented here with that of Aldous Huxley. In Brave New World, hypnopedia is a procedure by which children listen to phrases repeated over and over again during sleep. The slogans do not seek to convince them through arguments. They aim to install associations and preferences that, upon awakening, will be experienced as spontaneous thoughts. The norm is more effective because the individual does not recognize it as something received from outside.
Algorithmically organized digital content does not literally reproduce this mechanism, but it performs a comparable operation. It does not necessarily repeat the same phrase: it repeats the same type of world. For years, it shows certain ways of life, emotions, and conflicts much more frequently than others. Repetition turns selection into familiarity; familiarity acquires the appearance of normality; and normality ends up functioning as a moral criterion.
What constantly appears ceases to be perceived as the result of a selection. It simply seems like reality. We do not discipline others because we know the algorithm's rules and have decided to apply them, but because their results have been incorporated into our perception of what is reasonable. No one needs to state that an emotion must adopt the format that circulates best. It is enough to consider that, if it were authentic, it would know how to show itself. No one needs to recognize that a way of life has been privileged by the recommendation system. It is enough to interpret it as the natural form of success or enjoyment.
Algorithmic selection disappears behind its own results. This concealment allows social discipline to present itself as a spontaneous reaction. The audience believes it is defending norms that existed before the platform, although many have been amplified, reorganized, or produced by its visibility regime. The system does not need to give each user a code of conduct. It is enough to repeat certain behaviors until users build their own moral codes from them. Normalization is not experienced as an order. It is lived as common sense.
As this normality is incorporated into the profile, the accumulated representation also begins to condition the future. Each recognized trait generates expectations of continuity, and the subject must justify changes that contradict the identity under which they have been classified. The profile thus becomes a kind of informal contract: it does not prevent change, but it makes each transformation have to negotiate with the public image constructed until then.
This can be recognized in everyday decisions that, separately, seem minor. An experience is also valued by the image it will allow one to obtain; an opinion is withheld because it could contradict the position that others attribute to the person expressing it; a change of taste, appearance, or thought needs to be explained because the profile preserves evidence of an earlier version. The issue is not simply that people pretend on the internet, but that representation ends up intervening in what they can become. The scene ceases to be only the place where life is shown and gradually becomes one of the places from which life is organized.
The Normalization of Difference
The integration of old masks into a common profile allows us to understand a broader effect. When spheres remained more separate, a person could express themselves in one way at work, in another among friends, and in another within a political or cultural community. Each mask corresponded to a different audience and could retain its own logic. The profile brings these representations together and subjects them to a demand for continuity before overlapping audiences.
The subject needs to produce a version capable of traversing different contexts. What they show to their friends can reach their coworkers; a political opinion can modify the way a family photograph is interpreted; a circumstantial publication can be incorporated into the general image through which strangers and automatic systems try to classify them. Difference no longer needs to be understood only within the sphere in which it arose. It must survive its transfer to other audiences.
When this process is repeated among millions of users, it ceases to affect only each profile separately. Different ways of presenting oneself begin to pass through the same channels, the same formats, and the same recommendation systems. The variety of identities can grow, but all must compete under similar conditions of legibility and circulation.
This does not necessarily lead to universal consensus. The system can intensify ideological differences, multiply identities, and divide the population into seemingly irreconcilable communities. Normalization does not always consist of everyone adopting the same opinions. It can act on the way those opinions are expressed.
Two opposing political groups can share the need to produce indignation, simplify their adversary, and react immediately. Two lifestyles presented as opposite can equally need to become aspirational images, stories of personal transformation, or public demonstrations of success, enjoyment, or authenticity. Even those who intend to escape a dominant culture can end up building their difference through the same formats, metrics, and emotional codes used by those against whom they define themselves.
Polarization does not contradict this homogenization. It can be one of its manifestations. Diversity remains in what is affirmed, while modes of presence concentrate on a relatively limited repertoire: the sharp declaration, the public confession, the exemplary image, visible indignation, immediate rebuttal, and easily classifiable identity.
To gain presence, difference must be made recognizable. It needs to become a form that can be quickly identified, compared with others, incorporated into a category, and communicated without too much context. A political position must be condensed into a declaration. A way of life must be translated into images. A sensibility needs shared codes. A personal experience must acquire a narrative structure.
The more the subject tries to differentiate themselves, the more they need to resort to common repertoires. To show that they do not belong to one way of life, they adopt the visual codes of another. To demonstrate their political opposition, they use structures of indignation similar to those of their adversaries. To present their identity as their own and unique, they resort to labels, aesthetics, and narratives already used by thousands of people.
Difference becomes publicly visible at the cost of becoming formally predictable.
This does not mean that every identity is false or that any belonging constitutes an imposture. Differences can be real, profound, and even irreconcilable. What happens is that not all have the same value within the attention economy. Platforms do not need to show diversity in all its complexity, but rather select those forms capable of capturing attention, provoking a reaction, and keeping the user within the flow.
The limit does not appear, therefore, because the system is incapable of recognizing other ways of being different. It appears because many of them are not very profitable. An ambiguous identity, an opinion that does not allow immediate adherence, an experience that requires time, or a way of life that does not arouse admiration, rejection, desire, or indignation offer fewer possibilities of becoming measurable attention. They may exist, but they find fewer opportunities to occupy the scene.
Contemporary normalization does not eliminate diversity, but rather subjects it to the same demand for performance. Singularity must become an image capable of captivating attention; conviction, a statement that provokes adherence or rejection; experience, a story that can be consumed; belonging, a recognizable aesthetic; disagreement, a conflict that invites reaction.
The consequence is not that we all end up being identical. It is that we learn to be different in increasingly similar ways.
Big Brother Is All of Us
The image of Big Brother changes when surveillance no longer depends exclusively on a power that observes from above and instead becomes organized through a circuit in which algorithmic selection, collective judgment, and self-correction reinforce each other. Platforms determine which behaviors achieve public existence, which ways of life are repeated, and which emotions seem to dominate the present; the multitude interprets this repertoire and turns it into examples of what is desirable, shameful, authentic, or insufficient.
This mechanism achieves its reach because a small number of large platforms constantly mediate a considerable part of the communication, entertainment, information, and public presentation of millions of people. These are not occasional spaces, separate from daily life, but channels used every day, massively and simultaneously, to observe others, to present oneself to them, and to learn what deserves to be observed. The global repetition of the same conditions of visibility allows the criteria of a few companies to cross very different social contexts and end up being incorporated into the everyday perception of their users.
These criteria do not solely respond to a technical ability to organize content. They also respond to an economic logic. Platforms compete to capture and retain attention, and therefore grant greater opportunities for circulation to what can grab attention, provoke a reaction, and prolong presence within the flow. The complex, the ambiguous, or what requires time is not necessarily excluded because the system is incapable of recognizing it, but because it offers less performance within an economy organized around immediate response.
Power thus retains control over the scene and externalizes a part of the disciplinary work. It does not need to directly sanction every deviation because it has turned subjects into reciprocal spectators and spontaneous defenders of the forms to which they themselves had to adapt. The multitude actively participates in surveillance, but it does so on a previously selected world and within channels whose conditions it does not control.
Big Brother is all of us not because power has been equally distributed, but because those who retain the ability to organize visibility have managed to distribute among us the task of turning it into a norm. Surveillance is thus incorporated into our relationships, our emotions, and our ideas about what a person should be, until the correction of others ceases to seem like a function of power and is confused with a spontaneous reaction to what we consider inappropriate, insufficient, or strange.
The subject first learns what they must do to gain the attention of others. Then they discover what parts of themselves can survive collective judgment. Finally, they stop perceiving these modifications as adaptations imposed by the environment and begin to experience them as the natural way to express themselves, relate, and occupy a place in front of others. What began as a response to the algorithm and the audience ends up becoming common sense, and from that common sense, those who have not yet made the same renunciations are judged.
Big Brother no longer needs a single face because its work is distributed throughout the circuit. The platform selects according to what can generate attention; the flow makes almost nonexistent what does not offer that performance; the audience transforms what is visible into approval, rejection, or suspicion; and the individual anticipates both filters, modifies their behavior, and then demands from others the adaptations they themselves have internalized.
Differences do not disappear. The possibility of being different in a way that cannot be converted into profitable attention disappears.