One night, a friend of mine went out for dinner with her husband and toddler. The toddler, who sometimes had trouble swallowing, choked on his food — and threw up, repeatedly, in the restaurant. People around them were laughing while my friend and her family were in distress, adding to their embarrassment. But that wasn’t the worst part, she told me. She thought someone might have been filming. What if a video of her child being sick went viral? What if the awful laughter at the restaurant never ended?
Social media has long been a game of roulette with fame at one end and public disgrace at the other. But if I am posting under my government name on Bluesky (or Facebook, or X, or Nextdoor, or whatever), at least I know I am rolling the dice on becoming the next unwitting bean dad, Brienne of Snarth, or Justine Sacco. Now all it takes to become the internet’s main character is to appear in public, where people film each other to perform the dual task of policing behavior and creating potential viral content.
The consequences of the funny internet video were very real
Look, it’s easy to see why that Coldplay couple went viral. The exaggerated response to being on camera — and trying to duck an arena’s kiss cam — is funny. The couple is possibly cheating (immoral, loathed by TikTok) and Chris Martin (the man who knowingly married Gwyneth Paltrow and then consciously uncoupled!) gets a good dunk in. All someone had to do was identify them, and they had one of the world’s most powerful accelerants: the bad behavior of a CEO with one of his employees. It was perfect internet content.
The fact that it’s perfect internet content is also what encourages us to surveil each other. And the consequences of the funny internet video were very real. The CEO resigned. His former subordinate is getting a divorce, which I know because People and E! News reported on the filing as news. The humiliation didn’t end with the viral video — it’s still ongoing, and by writing about it, I am in some sense participating.
This is all possible because our society built a panopticon that any of us can use against any other at will. And while virality isn’t new, TikTok’s algorithm makes it easier than ever for videos to take off unexpectedly, because users don’t even have to share the video to make it go wide. You don’t even have to get caught on a kiss cam at a concert.
“TikTok, help me find him,” the user pleads. In one instance, a woman asked TikTok to help her find a man she’d met at a Chris Stapleton concert because she couldn’t stop thinking about him. (He was married.) Another woman drew a stick figure of a hot firefighter who’d helped a sick friend of hers, and got an identity. (He was also married.) A third woman asked TikTok to help her find her dream man after she lost his phone number. (Yes, he too was married.)
It is nearly impossible to exist in public without your face
Mercifully, the men in question in these examples aren’t named in the news articles. But their identities have been blasted out to the internet all the same. Other people have been doxxed for even more minor behavior, like attending a Taylor Swift concert. The identities of the people in question are often in the comments of viral videos, sending internet hordes to their Instagram accounts, their LinkedIn pages, and other social media sites. In some really egregious cases, sites such as Polymarket open bets on what the consequences of sudden virality will be: divorce, job loss, both. Brands may even get in on the fun.
It is possible for me, in text, to obscure the identity of my friend and her toddler. But it is nearly impossible to exist in public without your face. And facial identification software such as PimEyes makes it trivial to get from a face to an actual identity. None of us can count on being anonymous in public anymore.
Of course, none of this is possible without the smartphones that have made the surveillance state participatory. There are legitimate reasons to film people — as secret police snatch people off the streets, documenting their behavior may be useful for future prosecutions. (At The Hague, ideally.) In a state-governed surveillance apparatus, this is arguably an act of resistance, a way of making sure that the record doesn’t just reflect what people in power want it to say.
But at the same time, the tools used to keep power in check are also being turned against regular people who aren’t doing anything illegal and who don’t have the same kind of protections an ICE officer enjoys. Videos of cops misbehaving often lead to a slap on the wrist, if that — but normal people’s lives can be upended. Just like government surveillance, sousveillance hurts the powerless most of all.
Living in the panopticon means every person you meet is also someone who can ruin your life
The question of what should be filmed and uploaded is, ultimately, a judgment call, one that every user of TikTok or Instagram now gets to make. A man who threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer probably would have been caught without the viral video of the altercation. Screenshots of the video showed up in the criminal complaint against him; the man, though now something of a folk hero in DC, was fired from his Justice Department job. Whether the widely viewed video helped him or harmed him is an open question — sure, it’s evidence that he hurled the sandwich, but it may have saved him from a felony charge, after grand jurors refused to indict him.
But people are also identified for less savory reasons. A man named Matthew, who was doxxed on TikTok after appearing in a video chatting with an influencer, told 404 Media that he got more than 2,000 follow requests on Instagram, that someone emailed him at his work account, and that he received “dozens of DMs asking me things like ‘what is my OnlyFans.’” Matthew, who was on his honeymoon at the time, said he couldn’t relax and that he “felt a bit violated.” Perhaps a ruined honeymoon is not on par with a divorce or the loss of a job, but it’s not nothing.
Living in the panopticon means every person you meet is also someone who can ruin your life. Take “West Elm Caleb,” a guy who went viral for… dating. Apparently, he met women on dating apps, was briefly enthusiastic, and then ghosted them. (Not great behavior, but hardly uncommon.) Of course he was immediately doxxed. As the internet has increasingly traded on dating app screenshots for content, people have begun writing responses to each other with the assumption that the conversation won’t remain private. That does seem counter to, you know, dating, since a successful relationship requires vulnerability, the exact thing online daters now avoid.
What happened to Matthew and Caleb isn’t illegal — it’s just gross and invasive. Once upon a time, public anonymity protected us; now, it seems, the panopticon’s guards surround you. Everyone is one bad day away from going viral and suffering the fallout. All you have to do is leave your house.
