On Lateral Surveillance

ibrahim khazzaka
Feb 16
18 min read

Updated: Feb 24

I. THE BODY

At work, we are increasingly finding ourselves copying and pasting every email. We copy it to ourselves, every conversation summarized in writing, every decision documented in Slack threads we screenshot. This forecloses relaxing into collaboration. Every exchange becomes potential evidence, just in case.

In our messages, we keep saved threads from three years ago. Things our friends said when they were angry, and things our exes said when they were toxic. We probably don't plan to use them. Probably. But having them means they can't rewrite history, can't claim they never said what they said. This is what trust looks like now: mutual assured documentation.

At clubs, if we still go, we don't dance like we used to. Part of us stays aware of phones out, cameras recording, the possibility that unguarded joy becomes tomorrow's content. Gen Z knows this very well. They're dancing less, or not going at all, because joy has become evidence against them.

The price of digital connection. A structural violence that reorganizes our nervous systems, our relationships, our sense of what bodies are permitted to experience. Violation without consent, surveillance, and enforcement. Watching, recording, archiving. And we are all doing the same.

II. SURVEILLANCE THEORY

The crucial insight that shifts the analysis: Lateral surveillance is not separate from institutional power. It's how institutional power operates when distributed through subjects who identify with their aggressors. When someone records us, they're not acting outside the panopticon; they're becoming the panopticon. They've internalized patriarchal norms, shame-honor codes, and the logic that documentation equals responsibility. They identify with institutional authority even when that authority has failed or disappeared.

The potential partner demanding nudes has internalized surveillance capitalism's verification logic: trust through data extraction, relationship security through evidence. They identify with corporate surveillance ("I need proof to believe you") and redeploy it intimately. We become dividual, fragmented into data points where our bodies equal proof of location, our texts equal evidence of loyalty, our photos equal verification of fidelity, and God forbid, ownership.

For Black and brown bodies, this doubling intensifies. We are surveilled by the state and by peers who have not questioned anti-Black, anti-brown logics to conserve relational power. When a brown person surveys another brown person, they often identify with colonial respectability politics, proximity to whiteness, "good immigrant" versus "bad immigrant" hierarchies. Colonialism's surveillance legacy doesn't just descend from above; it reproduces horizontally as colonized subjects police each other on behalf of the colonial order, decades post-independence.

Lateral surveillance represents distributed panopticism: everyone becomes a deputy of the system, enforcing norms sideways. The goal shifts from producing docile subjects to gathering leverage against equals. This is surveillance as mutual assured documentation; it's today's infrastructure.

III. ON CONSENT

Consent requires the possibility of refusal without penalty. Under lateral surveillance, this possibility evaporates. Here are some overlapping modes:

Coerced Consent: Care's Mask

"Send a photo so I know you're safe." The demand frames itself as a concern. I'm worried, I care, I want to trust you, but refusal gets interpreted as betrayal evidence. If we don't send the photo, we're hiding something. If we're hiding something, we must be guilty. The request structures itself such that our "no" confirms suspicion, so we never actually had refusal as an option. We comply, and because compliance appears voluntary (we pressed send), the photo later gets treated as legitimate evidence. We "gave" it willingly, we upheld the system.

Consent under duress, but the duress is relational rather than physical. The threat is interpretation: our privacy will be read as betrayal. We consent not because we want to, but because the alternative is relationally untenable. The person demanding proof has identified with corporate verification culture: "If you're innocent, you have nothing to hide." They believe they're being responsible, protective, and rational. We're being surveilled by someone who thinks surveillance is care.

Consent Foreclosed: Social Legibility

In environments of generalized mutual surveillance, tight kinship networks where everyone knows everyone's family, digital contexts where social media presence equals social existence, opting out is not neutral. It marks us. If we refuse to participate (no Instagram, no location sharing, no screenshots shared in group chats), we become socially illegible: suspicious, antisocial, fragile.

This is conscription. The infrastructure doesn't permit refusal without penalty.

Participation accrues social capital. The person who shares their location is "transparent." The person who screenshots conversations is "protecting themselves." To refuse any of this is to refuse the terms of contemporary relationality.

Survival Surveillance: Wounding Ourselves

We're identifying with institutional authority (property law, legal process, state enforcement) even as that authority has abandoned us. Someone must uphold the rules, so we become the enforcer. But enforcement between peers is violence.

We must choose between survival and relational integrity, and we are choosing survival because grief in recent years has been unbearable.

The person we are recording is making the same calculation about us. We're both right to protect ourselves, and we are pulling witnesses to stand by our side. We're both reproducing the system that made protection necessary. We're both victims and aggressors. The violence became structural: it forces us to surveil those we love or risk more losses.

What these three modes produce are subjects who can no longer experience spontaneity, privacy, or trust as anything but tactical errors. Consent hasn't been violated; we didn't know that we needed to redefine it, and the technological shift took us by surprise.

IV. IDENTIFICATION AS SUBJECT-FORMATION

Lateral surveillance is producing a new kind of subject whose psychic architecture is organized around anticipatory self-surveillance and whose rationality is paranoia.

Three losses define this subject:

Loss of Spontaneity

Acts are performed for potential documentation. We don't dance at clubs because we might become viral content. We don't cry during arguments because our partner might be recording. We don't text vulnerable thoughts because screenshots are permanent. The capacity to act without calculation becomes inaccessible. Our selves are pre-edited before they emerge. We become our own first audience, our own first censor, our own first prosecutor.

Loss of Privacy

The capacity to exist without being archived for future leverage. Under lateral surveillance, even solitude is haunted: nudes sent in 2019 are weaponized years after; things said in confidence are saved and waiting. Privacy collapses; there's no statute of limitations on digital evidence. Our past self is always retrievable, always deployable against our present self. We cannot shed prior versions of ourselves because someone else holds them in their archive, ready to produce them when strategically useful.

Loss of Trust

Believing the other person won't archive us for future use, will let vulnerable moments dissolve rather than crystallize into evidence. But when everyone has internalized institutional enforcement logics, our partner identifies with verification culture, our colleague identifies with corporate liability management, and trust becomes structurally foreclosed. To trust someone is to believe they won't enforce systems against us. But we've internalized those systems. We believe surveillance is responsible, protective, and necessary. The rational stance is paranoia.

We cannot exit this because we're also identifying with the aggressor. We also screenshot messages. We also document disputes. We also gather evidence. We believe we're protecting ourselves, and we are, but we're also reproducing the violence.

The Pace Variable: Post-Pandemic Acceleration

This transformation is happening within a single generation and across generations simultaneously. Gen Z has no memory of unsurveilled adolescence; they're the first generation born into an infrastructure where every public moment might become permanent content.

The pandemic's physical separation meant digital presence became verifiable presence. People who couldn't see each other turned to location sharing as proof of loyalty and safety. Isolation plus digital dependency created perfect conditions for surveillance to become love's language.

And crucially: UX design matters. App interfaces make surveillance frictionless, read receipts, "last seen" timestamps, location tags, screenshot notifications (which just tell us to be more careful). These are design choices by tech companies that aggravated pre-existing power dynamics: mistrust, control, verification compulsion, and the demand for proof. These tools made them effortless, normalized, and expected. When our partner can see we read their message three hours ago but haven't responded, "I was busy" sounds like a lie. The apps have already testified against us.

This is the new subject: fragmented, hypervigilant, unable to rest into presence, rationally paranoid, identifying with systems that harm them. Adaptation, but to what convenience? The violence is that adaptation to violence, which is participatory, can become our only option.

V. MULTI-SCALAR VIOLENCE

(a) The Distortion of Self-Knowledge

Under constant surveillance, we lose access to our own interior. The question "who am I when no one is watching?" becomes unanswerable because we're always being watched, or might be later via archived evidence, or have internalized the watching so thoroughly that we cannot distinguish our thoughts from our defense of those thoughts.

Indeed, everyone is our potential judge. We're constantly justifying ourselves to an imagined crowd of followers.

This is perpetual self-prosecution, knowing ourselves only as we would defend ourselves. Our interior becomes a courtroom where we're the defendant, prosecutor, and judge, trying to anticipate what evidence might surface. We pre-justify every thought, pre-explain every feeling, pre-defend every choice. And it's exhausting. It also means that we cannot actually know ourselves; we only know the version of ourselves that survives interrogation, by ourselves.

Phenomenologically, what does this feel like moment to moment? We think a thought, I'm angry at my mother, and before we can explore why, our mind jumps to: How would that sound if I said it out loud? What if she recorded our last conversation? The thought cannot develop. It's immediately subjected to strategic assessment. An interior space becomes a public defense.

Sara Ahmed writes about how we're oriented toward objects in our environment, how some things are within reach, and others aren't. Under surveillance, we're oriented away from our own interior. We cannot reach our own thoughts before they're instrumentalized. The violence isn't that others distort our self-knowledge; it's that self-knowledge as a category becomes inaccessible. We're opaque to ourselves because transparency is too dangerous. We might think of something that could be used against us. Safer to narrate ourselves only in ways that hold up under scrutiny.

Result: a subject who cannot distinguish between who I am and who I can afford to be caught being. These collapse into one. Epistemological violence is the foreclosure of interior life.

(b) Erosion of Trust and Object Permanence

Two interlocking dynamics shatter relational possibility:

i. Eroded Object Permanence

Chronic hypervigilance keeps us in emotional crisis mode. When our nervous system is scanning for threats, who might be recording this? What will they do with it? How do I protect myself? We cannot hold the fullness of who the person in front of us is. We react to the threat they represent (their capacity to document and weaponize), not the person they are (their stated care, our shared history, their intentions).

The person becomes all-threatening or all-safe, a bad object or a good object, with no integration. We cannot hold both "my sibling loves me" and "my sibling recorded me" in the same psychic space. They become two different people in our minds. When we're with them, we don't remember the love because we're reacting to the threat. Object permanence erodes; the person in front of us isn't continuous with who they were yesterday or who they might be tomorrow. They're only what they might do to us right now.

ii. Mistrust of Care

The skills required to hold space for someone, deep listening, sustained attention, careful memory, and empathic witnessing, are identical to the skills required for surveillance. To pay close attention is to gather data. To remember what someone said is to possess evidence. To witness vulnerability is to hold leverage.

We then become wary of anyone capable of care. We cannot tell the difference between "they're listening because they love me" and "they're listening because they're building a case" until it's too late, until the evidence surfaces, until care reveals itself as collection. So we mistrust intimacy itself. The person most capable of holding us is also the person most capable of achieving us.

To survive relational encounters, we must divide into:

The person trying to be present (who wants connection, who wants to trust, who wants to be held)
The crisis mediator monitoring for threats (who scans for red flags, calculates risk, prepares exit strategies, and withholds full presence)

We're never whole in any encounter. And the person across from us is split the same way. We're two divided people trying to relate, which means we're actually four partial selves in conversation, none of whom can fully trust the others.

What makes this costly is that someone must become the mediator and regulator of this dynamic, usually the person with less power, usually the person who has more to lose, or the person who has given up and feels like there is nothing left to lose. This role demands we manage our own split and navigate theirs, trying to be present while managing crises neither of us can name. We're simultaneously participants in the relationship and traffic controllers for it. This doubling is exhausting and ultimately unsustainable.

The violence: We cannot show up whole to anyone, and no one can show up whole to us. Relationship becomes risk management.

(c) Hypervigilance as Rationality

The chronic hyperarousal of living under lateral surveillance produces what appear to be trauma responses but are adaptive strategies to hostile environmental conditions.

These are:

Hypervigilance

We're constantly scanning: Who has their phone out? Is that camera pointed at me? Did they just screenshot something? What's being said about me in chats I'm not in? This doesn't start as paranoia. Paranoia implies irrationality, excess, and distortion. This is a reasonable threat assessment in an environment where everyone is potentially documenting everyone. Our vigilance is appropriate. The violence is that appropriate vigilance becomes our baseline state.

Hypervigilance is a defense mechanism: we're perpetually anticipating danger to feel a sense of control. If we can see it coming, maybe we can prevent it, or at least prepare. But perpetual anticipation is exhausting. We never rest. Our system never downregulates. It often shows difficulty falling asleep.

The cost compounds over time. Attachment theory tells us humans need secure bases, people or places where we can let our guard down. Under lateral surveillance, there are no secure bases. Everywhere is a potential threat. Everyone is a potential watcher. We're relationally homeless; nowhere feels safe enough to simply be.

Paranoia as Rationality

The violence is that reality has shifted such that what was once considered psychological pathology (paranoid ideation) is now a rational adaptation. We're not sick for being suspicious; we're paying attention to, hopefully, the system. But living in permanent suspicion corrodes us. We become what we defend against. The hypervigilance that protects us also isolates us, because we cannot relax into connection when we're always scanning for threat.

Dissociation from Vulnerable Moments

Orgasms, grief, joy, and even rage, any affective state where we lose control, where our face is unguarded, where our body moves without self-monitoring, becomes dangerous.

We split conscious awareness from overwhelming experience. But under surveillance, we're dissociating from presence. We cannot afford to be fully here because being fully here means being fully documentable. We hover slightly outside ourselves, watching ourselves, ready to intervene if we start to lose control.

The cost: we never fully experience anything. Joy is muted because we're managing it. Grief is truncated because we're monitoring it. Intimacy is partial because we're defending it. We're also phenomenologically homeless, never fully inhabiting our own experience.

The IQ Accusation as Structural Violence

Recent trends accuse Gen Z of having lower IQs than previous generations. Another violence masquerading as data. I'd like to think that Gen Z might process more slowly because they're processing multiple simultaneous layers: what's happening right now, plus who might be documenting it, plus how it could be weaponized later, plus what their documented response should be, plus how to appear spontaneous while being strategic.

This is an increased cognitive load that not all previous generations have experienced or experienced to this level. Processing speed slows under hypervigilance because more variables must be tracked. When we're solving for the problem itself, plus anticipating who's watching us solve it, plus preparing a defense of our solution, of course, we process more slowly than someone who only needs to solve the problem.

Pathologizing this as an intellectual deficit serves existing power structures: if Gen Z is "less smart," their critiques of surveillance culture, their refusal to perform constant availability, and their withdrawal from surveilled spaces can all be dismissed as generational weakness rather than rational responses to structural violence. This is disrespectful. The deficit framing forecloses solidarity and justifies further dismissal.

Living defensively has become most people's only option, and then we're pathologized for the effects of living defensively. The system produces the condition, then blames us for displaying symptoms of the condition it produced.

(d) Flesh as Evidence

The body becomes an evidence vault and a liability.

This is our bodies that we inhabit: sensation, pleasure, pain, movement, hunger, exhaustion. This body that knows things before our mind articulates them, our gut feeling, our clenched jaw, our held breath.

Surveillance colonizes this experiencing body. We cannot inhabit our flesh unselfconsciously because it's always potentially being archived. When we have sex, part of us stays aware: Is he recording this? Is my face going to end up somewhere I can't control? We cannot lose ourselves in pleasure because losing control means losing the ability to monitor what evidence is being created. Our orgasm might become revenge porn or ridicule. Our vulnerability might become leverage. So we stay dissociated in a split, even in ecstasy. The body that should be the site of unmediated experience becomes the site of strategic self-management.

At the gym, our bodies are hypervisible. We're in the background of someone's amateur gym influencer videos. Someone films our form to mock it online. Our bodies at work, lifting, sweating, straining, become content without our consent. We start to move differently. We monitor how we look from all angles. We perform exercise rather than simply exercising. The lived body, which should move according to its own needs and pleasures, becomes body-as-image, body-as-spectacle, body-as-data.

The phenomenological loss here is inhabitation. We cannot simply be in our bodies. We must always be managing our body's visibility, its documentability, and its potential to become evidence. This is exhausting in ways that are difficult to articulate because the exhaustion isn't from physical exertion, it's from that constant hovering beside us.

VI. THE LOSS OF SPONTANEOUS PUBLIC JOY

Dancing requires surrendering control: our face unselfconscious, our body moving without calculation, our affect unmanaged. But that surrender means we cannot monitor how we're being perceived or documented. Someone films us mid-laugh, mid-movement, mid-sweat, and suddenly our private joy is public property. It's remixed, mocked, or celebrated without our consent or context. Either outcome is a violation; our body in its most unguarded state becomes a spectacle we didn't agree to.

Intergenerational Violence

The generational responses to Gen Z's withdrawal reveal how lateral surveillance operates across age cohorts, and here's where identification with the aggressor shows up intergenerationally:

Millennials' dismissiveness stems from forgetting their own privilege: unsurveilled adolescence. Millennials had MySpace, early Facebook, flip phones, but also a full decade (late 90s, early 2000s) where stupid mistakes, bad dancing, embarrassing fashion dissolved into memory rather than crystallizing into searchable archives. We got to be idiots in public and then move on. We forget this grace when we frame Gen Z's hesitance as "social anxiety" or "phone addiction." This is identification with bootstraps mythology: we figured it out, why can't you? They've internalized neoliberal resilience narratives and now enforce them on the generation below.

Gen X's "tough love," we didn't have this problem, just get over it, ignore the cameras, is structurally violent because it denies the reality of Gen Z's environment. Gen X's response identifies with conservative boomer resilience culture: individual grit as a solution to systemic problems. This is shattering intergenerational dialogue. Gen Z stops asking for understanding; they want to see it all fall, rightfully so. Gen X dismisses their concerns as a weakness of character.

The violence compounds: not only is Gen Z living under surveillance, but their elders refuse to acknowledge the changed terrain. They have lost their witnesses; their cultural allies abandoned them.

Gen Z's self-surveillance is itself identification with content culture: metrics, performance, and personal brand management. They anxiously police themselves before others can. They curate even their spontaneity. They're not escaping the system; they're becoming its most efficient enforcers, monitoring themselves so thoroughly that external surveillance becomes redundant. They've internalized the logic that they should monetize visibility as currency, otherwise, what a waste that would be, "I post therefore I am, but I really don't care about it much, so I will embrace sloppy presentation and make a whole aesthetic out of it, I will call it anti-design, and I will measure it, and document it, to be able to define it and live by it and monetize it."

None of these generations is to blame individually, but together they reproduce the system: Gen X enforces resilience narratives, Millennials forget their unsurveilled grace period, Gen Z internalizes surveillance as ontology. The intergenerational break this creates is itself violence, each generation isolated in its experience, unable to extend understanding or solidarity across the divide.

VII. EVERYONE IS HARMED

Lateral surveillance harms everyone in the power dynamic, including those who surveil. When we record our sibling, demand nudes from our partner, screenshot our colleague's messages, we're participating in our own dehumanization.

Capacity for Trust

If we always need evidence to believe someone, we've lost the ability to trust. Trust is belief without immediate proof. Surveillance is proof with bias. Once we start requiring documentation, screenshots, recordings, and location data, we've foreclosed trust as a possibility. We can verify, but we cannot trust.

Verification in this case is transactional: I check claims against evidence and determine if they align. Trust is relational: I believe because of who the person is to me, regardless of evidence. When we move from trust to verification, we fundamentally change the relationship. We're no longer in relation to a person anymore, but in relation to an investigation process. And once we get caught in the evidence loop, we cannot easily go back to trust; we've trained ourselves out of the capacity, out of faith, and out of object permanence..

Relational Presence

We cannot be fully present with someone we're documenting, much like not being able to enjoy a concert when we are busy filming. Part of us stays calculating in a meta-cognitive state: Is this evidence? Will I need this later? How can I frame this if it becomes necessary? We're split between being-with and gathering-against. Even if we never use the evidence we gather, the act of gathering changes how we relate. We're always partially elsewhere, in the future where the evidence might be needed, in the strategic mindset of case-building.

This is about what surveillance does to attention. When part of our attention is devoted to monitoring and documenting, less attention is available for actual presence. Over time, we lose that presence muscle. We forget how to simply be with someone without the mediating and self-righteous reporting layer of documentation.

Moral Coherence

Surveillance can easily become a violation, yet we do it anyway because we must(?). This produces moral injury since we betray our own values to survive. Over time, we either rationalize (surveillance is responsible, protective, necessary, it's care, actually) or dissociate from our actions (I had no choice, I was forced, I'm not really the kind of person who does this). Either way, we lose integration. We cannot hold ourselves as a whole.

The rationalization path: We start to believe our own justifications. Surveillance becomes care. Documentation becomes responsibility. Verification becomes trust. The words mean their opposite now, but we don't notice because noticing would require confronting what we've become. This is how good people do terrible things; they redefine the terms until terrible becomes good.

The dissociation path: We split off the part of ourselves that surveys from the part that wants to be good. Over time, the split widens.

We become strangers to ourselves.

Humanity

To surveil someone we love is to treat them as a potential liability, to reduce them from a full person to a risk factor. This is dehumanization. And we cannot dehumanize others without dehumanizing ourselves. The violence returns to us. We become the kind of person who documents loved ones. We become the kind of person who needs proof of care. We become the kind of person who cannot be trusted. That person is not who we wanted to be. But that person is what surveillance infrastructure produces.

The loss of humanity is incremental. Until we become surveillance's instrument. We enforce the system without thinking because the system is now our baseline reality.

Here's what makes this particularly tragic: the aggressor often cannot recognize what they've lost. They believe they're being rational, protective, and responsible. They don't see that they've lost capacity for trust, presence, moral coherence, humanity itself. They don't see because seeing would require acknowledging that their protective measures destroyed what they were trying to protect. Easier not to see. Easier to keep documenting, keep gathering evidence, keep believing this is care.

Why This Matters

The people surveilling and the one being surveilled experience acute violation: their privacy is invaded, their body is documented, their words are archived without relational consent. The harm might not be immediate and obvious, but the person surveilling experiences chronic erosion: their capacity for relationality slowly destroyed, their humanity incrementally lost.

Both are harmed. The system damages everyone it touches differently, but thoroughly. Understanding this doesn't excuse the violence. It clarifies how violence reproduces itself: people harm others while losing themselves, then raise children in this environment, who learn that documentation is care, surveillance is love, verification is trust. The system perpetuates because its victims become its enforcers, its enforcers become its next generation of victims, and no one can see outside the logic which has become infrastructure.

VIII. MECHANISMS MAPPED: THE ARCHITECTURE OF LATERAL SURVEILLANCE

Here's what we've traced across this diagnosis:

Mechanism	How It Operates	Effect on Subject	Who Benefits
Identification with the aggressor	Subjects internalize institutional logics (state, corporate, colonial) and enforce peer-to-peer	Everyone becomes a deputy of systems that harm them	Existing power structures are reproduced without institutional cost
Frictionless technology	Screenshots, cloud storage, and location sharing require zero effort	Surveillance normalized at an accelerated pace	Tech companies profit from engagement and data extraction
Consent foreclosure	Participation is mandatory for social legibility; refusal equals suspicion	Cannot opt out without penalty	Patriarchal structures, neoliberal precarity logic, and naturalized
Digital permanence	Evidence doesn't decay; it exists indefinitely in clouds and archives	No statute of limitations on violation; the past is always retrievable	Those who control archives control narratives
Horizontal structure	Peer-to-peer enforcement with no institutional hierarchy	No authority to appeal to; everyone watcher and watched simultaneously	Diffuses responsibility so no one is accountable
UX design aggravation	Read receipts, "last seen," and location tags are designed for compulsive checking	Pre-existing mistrust and control dynamics escalate rapidly	Tech companies maximize engagement addiction
Bodily extraction	Nudes as proof, bodies as evidence, movement as content	Flesh becomes data; inhabiting the body fundamentally changes	Surveillance capitalism, patriarchy, and content platforms
Generational acceleration	Gen Z born into surveillance infrastructure; Millennials navigate without memory of alternative; Gen X enforces resilience narratives	Intergenerational dialogue breaks; each cohort is isolated in experience	System reproduces across generations without resistance

Ibrahim Khazzaka