In a panopticon state, we're all cam girls

I saw a t-shirt that read that title, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

It perfectly captures a fundamental shift in how surveillance works in modern culture. In Bentham's original prison design, you were a passive prisoner hiding from a guard. Today, on social media, we're active performers seeking an audience.

The cam girl metaphor stuck with me because it highlights that our self-surveillance is actually about labour as opposed to avoiding trouble.

It’s about performance and visibility as a commodity.

We've internalised the gaze so thoroughly that we treat our own lives like 24/7 broadcasts for brands. And it’s kind of sick and twisted if you think about it a little too long.

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From prisoner to performer

In the traditional panopticon, the goal was invisibility to avoid punishment. You wanted the guard to forget you existed, because being watched meant being disciplined. The power dynamic was clear; watcher above, watched below, fear as the organising principle.

Today, we reverse it: invisibility is social death. We've traded the fear of being watched for the fear of not being seen and being ignored is now the punishment. So, we curate our lives, our meals, our workouts, our aesthetic, precisely because we want to be monitored by likes and followers.

We perform, constantly. GRWM videos, day-in-the-life content, outfit checks, unboxings, reviews. Every aspect of daily existence becomes material for the broadcast. And unlike the prisoner who wanted to hide, we're devastated when the algorithm decides nobody's watching.

Deny it all you want, but you know it’s true.

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The commercialisation of the gaze

The cam girl part of that quote is key.

It implies we aren't just being watched by Big Brother state surveillance. We're being watched by Big Merchant. Every time we post a get-ready-with-me or a product review, we're performing digital labour that companies use for data and advertising.

This is where it gets truly f*cked: we're not even getting paid, baby.

Cam girls at least monetise their visibility. We're giving brands our attention, our data, our unpaid labour while they profit from our performance.

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We've become both the product and the worker simultaneously.

Remember the Easter pivot article about AI-powered digital egg hunts harvesting zero-party data? That's this.

Remember the signal economy turning every app interaction into behavioural signals for AI optimisation? Also this. We're performing for surveillance systems that extract value from our visibility while we compete for scraps of engagement.

Remember when I said sick and twisted?

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The horizontal panopticon

Let’s add another tier to this.

Instead of one guard in a central tower, we're all guards for each other. We police our peers through call-out culture, compare our lives to others' highlight reels. We internalise social norms by watching what gets engagement and what gets ignored.

The state has moved past government entity and morphed into a collective social pressure to conform to digital norms. Did your outfit get enough likes? Is your aesthetic cohesive enough? Are you posting at optimal times? The surveillance is peer-to-peer, constant, and completely internalised.

This horizontal panopticon is more effective than any central authority could be. We don't need a guard tower when we've all become guards. And we don't need top-down enforcement when we've built bottom-up compliance through fear of irrelevance. It’s embarrassing, that in the end this is what motivates us.

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At its core, this is about the monetisation of attention.

Our visibility has been transformed into commodity and our daily lives have been transformed into content.

Brands don't need to force us to advertise their products. We do it voluntarily because performance requires props, recognisable props, that other people have and want too.

We don't need to be coerced into sharing our data. We broadcast it freely!! Because invisibility feels like failure. We've internalised the surveillance so completely that we surveil ourselves.

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The genius of this system is that it feels like choice.

Nobody's making you post or forcing you to perform. You're just participating in normal social behaviour. Except normal social behaviour now means treating your entire existence as content for platforms that profit from your unpaid labour while you compete for likes.

Cam girls are explicitly performing for an audience in exchange for money. The transaction is clear and labour acknowledged. The commodification of their image and attention is the entire business model.

We're doing the same performance labour; curating our image, broadcasting our lives, maintaining audience engagement but pretending it's just authentic self-expression.

The metaphor exposes the absurdity.

In a panopticon state, we're all cam girls. Except cam girls get paid. We just get likes, data harvesting, and the constant anxiety that maybe nobody's watching. Or everybody is. Which one’s scarier? I couldn’t tell you. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

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