CHAPTER THREE

Growing up Observed

Long before his many years on stage and screen, Alan Cumming was the survivor of a rough childhood on the Scottish moors. In his recent memoir, Not My Father’s Son, the actor recounts the years in which he was on a constant lookout for his volatile father, the head forester on a once-grand estate in eastern Scotland. A former military man with a taste for drink and ill-disguised extramarital affairs, his father lorded over his wife and sons with an unpredictable rage that required perpetual vigilance from a boy hoping to avoid a beating, a cursing, or the bloody application of sheep’s shears on his young head. As a young boy, Cumming learned that anything could set off the “pure violent rage” born of alcohol, depression, and anger. Like a prisoner in a domestic Panopticon, Cumming lived with a permanent awareness that his father might be watching him, an awareness that was often accompanied by vicious self-scrutiny. In a sudden “flash,” when he knew he was being monitored, Cumming could feel the “myriad of anxieties about my flaws and failures [whirring] across my mind.” The only relief was escape from his father’s gaze. Even during a family meal, Cumming remembered, “all I could think of was getting to the end of this meal and upstairs to my homework, or better yet far into the woods with my dog to hide.”1

Notice how the young actor learned to watch the watchman: Was his father home? On the phone? In a foul mood? Had he been drinking? How had his day been? At the same time, Cumming learned to watch himself with equal precision: “I prayed that my hair was combed the way he liked it, my school bag was hanging on my shoulder at the right angle, and my shoes were shiny enough.” Scrutiny was damnation, but also a salvation of sorts—if only he could gauge his father’s moods, predict his responses, present just the right face, the young boy could short-circuit his father’s obsessive need to control. “I had learned from a very young age to interpret the tone of every word he uttered, his body language, the energy he brought into a room,” Cumming recalls, before musing about the long-term impact of living with this never-ending inspection of his behavior and appearance. “It has not been pleasant as an adult to realize that dealing with my father’s violence was the beginning of my studies of acting.”2 In other words, he took his experience with constant monitoring, his urgent need to control his effect on an unpredictable authority figure, and channeled it into the delicate art of impression management that we call acting.

If his grim experiences with domestic surveillance don’t seem to have tainted his sense of the world in general or left him with crippling self-consciousness, anxiety, or other maladies, Cumming does not seem entirely unscathed—even his positive childhood memories are now inseparable from his experience of brutal parental monitoring. “We remember happy times with our mum. Safe, quiet times,” he writes, before noting that “honestly there is not one memory from our childhoods that is not clouded by fear or humiliation or pain.”³ That is the insidious nature of surveillance in its subtler forms: it does soft-tissue damage that is easy to overlook in discussions that focus on Big Data and the NSA to the exclusion of all else. Nowhere is this more apparent, to my mind, than in childhood and adolescence, where we have our first experiences with surveillance, often in formative ways. Surveillance, it turns out, can be a very intimate business.

Broadening our sense of what counts as “surveillance”—and how we get our first taste of it—is essential to understanding the subtle flows of surveillance culture in the contemporary world. Indeed, going beyond the state and corporate modes of surveillance to something like a family dinner table makes particular sense on an emotional level. After all, no one entity has exclusive control over the emotional landscape of surveillance, no matter how much the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, or the hidden architects of Big Data might want to mold our experience of the world, and no matter how much someone wants us to feel compliant, covetous, relaxed, anxious, or alert at a particular moment of citizenship or consumption. While governments and corporations are acknowledged as the dominant forces in the realm of security and insecurity, they are rarely acting in isolation—our feelings about various kinds of monitoring are shaped much earlier in life, in far more intimate settings. Surveillance begins at home, in our first exposure to the culture of invasive monitoring that can color our relationships to our parents, teachers, and other authority figures, something that we can see in certain memoirs.4 In ways that have been generally underappreciated, childhood might be a crucial time in the formation of “surveillance consciousness,” which we bring into our adult roles as citizens and consumers, parents and neighbors, friends and lovers.⁵

In order to visualize the biographical roots of surveillance consciousness—the awareness of and occasional wariness about being monitored at home as much as in the public sphere—I am blending psychology, sociology, and memoir in this chapter. The stories are about childhood, social class, anxiety and depression, immigration, shame, and anger—and most of all, feelings of security and insecurity, watching and being watched. Nothing here would surprise someone who has internalized the lessons of modern therapeutic culture: when it comes to our lived experience of securitization, so much depends on our family of origin.

In the 1960s, the social critic Paul Goodman struck a nerve when he published Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, a bleak look at the homogenous mass culture, with little space for rebels and dreamers that grew up during the Eisenhower years. Now our children are reared with an additional layer of absurdity: the controlling gaze of the parent, school, and state are fused into a culture of almost constant monitoring. Rather than growing up absurd, we are growing up observed, with an unprecedented level of precision and permanence. And this constant emphasis on control, predictability, and security can have a perverse byproduct: the more we press for a deep and lasting sense of security, the more we are miserably insecure. Childhood surveillance has its own paradoxes: what often begins with love, care, and protectiveness thrives equally well on judgment, uncertainty, and apprehension. In early 2015, the British government asked preschool teachers to report on toddlers who seemed like future terrorists. “Turning our teachers and childminders into an army of involuntary spies will not stop the terrorist threat,” said one disgusted human rights worker. “Far from bringing those at the margins back into mainstream society, it will sow seeds of mistrust, division and alienation from an early age.”6 Whether the seeds are sown at home, at school, or in the highest levels of government, their eventual development is what is important here. Do these early experiences help to form a lifelong pattern of acceptance or resistance, nonchalance or irritation, in the face of CCTV, dataveillance, drones, and other aspects of the surveillance infrastructure?

Yet we know relatively little about surveillance and the young.⁷ As sociologists have lamented, the child’s experience of surveillance has been the subject of very few studies, even as surveillance technologies and practices have increasingly colonized previously unmonitored aspects of childhood. Imagining the modern child as a potential “victim who must be placed under surveillance for protection” or “an anti-social threat who must be placed under surveillance to protect society” is limiting, if not distorting. “From either perspective,” scholars have argued, “the richness of the child’s lived experience is lost.”8 I want to hint at something of that “lost” lived experience in the pages ahead.

Watching Children

Let me start with two quick sketches. First, imagine a calm and loving home where being watched feels like nurturance. Even wearing an RFID-chipped jacket while sleeping under a CCTV-equipped Elf on the Shelf seems like a form of loving protection that swaddles the child in a network of concern.⁹ Feeling incorporated into a system of interconnected care that seems nonthreatening and rational, the child might look at her parents, teachers, and even local police and think: thanks for watching!

But imagine a different sort of childhood, one vibrating with emotional volatility of the sort Alan Cumming describes, one in which the child is a cringing vassal subjected to the feudalism of a domineering parent. “Everyone in a walking-on-eggshells family loses some degree of dignity and autonomy,” writes one psychologist. “It seems that you become unable to decide your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior, because you are living in a defensive-reactive pattern that runs largely on automatic pilot.” As we might imagine from the brief account of Cumming’s childhood above, surveillance simply feels bad to children struggling against parental domination at home. Indeed, for someone growing up in a dysfunctional family obsessed with monitoring, controlling, and judging its young, external surveillance might even feel like a form of emotional abuse. (“Emotional abuse is an assault on the child’s psyche, just as physical abuse is an assault on the child’s body.”)10 In this context, the child might look at her domineering parents and other authority figures and recoil from the experience of being watched and judged in any form. From their earliest years, such children endure the humiliation of parental surveillance in ways that surely bleed into a dark view of educational, consumer, and state monitoring practices as an adult.

No doubt, surveillance is an essential aspect of childhood. “In a sense, to be a child is to be under surveillance,” Valerie Steeves and Owain Jones have written in a special issue of Surveillance and Society devoted to the subject, one of the few academic publications to focus on childhood experiences of surveillance.¹¹ When familial life appears in discussions of surveillance, parents, not children, often take center stage. For instance, scholars have argued that media depictions of unrealistically idealized families have turned motherhood into a “psychological police state” that requires constant scrutiny of self, child, and peer to make sure that one is measuring up—but what about the kids who are also trying to “measure up”?¹²

Strangely enough, this absence also exists among creative writers and filmmakers who have spent so much energy exploring the dramas of surveillance culture. Consider the best-known films devoted to surveillance: Caché, Rear Window, Blow Up, Blow Out, Parallax View, The Conversation, Enemy of the State, Eagle Eye, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Red Road, Brazil, The Lives of Others, A Scanner Darkly, and Minority Report. All of these movies focus on adults struggling with surveillance, while children barely register as minor characters.

Perhaps this exclusion is less surprising if we recall that our grim surveillance paradigms, the essential texts of surveillance studies, are built around the brutalization of adults, not kids. Bentham imagined recalcitrant adult prisoners in his eighteenth-century Panopticon, while middle-aged Orwell’s 1984 gave us the decrepitly middle-aged Winston Smith at war with a vigorously middle-aged O’Brien, not to mention a middle-aged Big Brother at odds with a middle-aged Goldstein. Orwell did provide some chilling glimpses of children in a surveillance culture in his brief but significant depiction of the Parsons kids keeping tabs on Winston from next door. Orwell writes about these monstrous beings who from birth have been subsumed into the machinery of surveillance. “Nearly all children nowadays were horrible,” Orwell writes, before explaining:

What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. . . . All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.13

Such exceptional moments stand out in a vast surveillance literature devoted to adult experience—and most tend to be quite recent. The teenage hackers in Cory Doctorow’s 2008 novel Little Brother are another exception, even if the seventeen-year-old protagonist is on the verge of adulthood. The same could be said of sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen’s experience on a homicidal reality program in The Hunger Games (even though she’s depicted by twenty-year-old Jennifer Lawrence in the film adaptation).¹⁴

The fifteen-year-old protagonist of Jenni Fagan’s 2013 debut novel The Panopticon provides another rare glimpse of the youthful burden of surveillance. Having endured the Scottish foster-care system for most of her girlhood, Fagan sets her first novel in a literal Panopticon that has been converted into a residential care facility for troubled children.15 The pain of being monitored overwhelms her main character, a working-class Scottish girl who has had serious run-ins with the law and sexual abuse at home. “They watch me,” the narrator explains about growing up under surveillance both literal and symbolic,

not just in school or social-work reviews, court or police cells—they watch everywhere. . . . They watch me sing, and joyride, and start riots with only the smallest of sparks; they even watch me in the bath. . . . They watch me not cry. They watch me lie like an angel, hiding my dirty feet. They watch me, I know it, and I can’t find anywhere anymore—where they can’t see.¹⁶

Fagan is touching upon something crucial to the youthful experience of surveillance, when the literal and figurative bump up against one another in unsettling ways. If most of us avoid the literal experience of a Panopticon during our childhood, we still endure its abstract pressures enough to appreciate the metaphor for constant scrutiny. Even if we don’t literally witness the NSA recording our text messages or the marketing firm squirreling away our data, even if we don’t see a cop on the corner or a snooping neighbor in our window, we can have a gnawing sense that it is happening just the same. For this reason, one of the subplots of this chapter on early surveillance dramas is the way in which surveillance operates on a symbolic level as much as a literal one: it is mythic and imagined as much as it is real and observable. In some ways this mythic quality is more damaging: we can debate the reality of the technological and social processes that invade our privacy, but it may not hit us with the visceral force of the symbolism involved. In other words, the mere idea of surveillance can affect us, most especially the surveillance-averse, as much as the practice. The sheer notion that someone or something might be watching, might feel the need to watch, or might have the right to judge, is enough to unhinge some people, while others remain blissfully unconcerned, perhaps feeling protected by the magical words “I have nothing to hide.”

Perhaps these feelings are acquired early in life, long before we are brought to account by advertisers and governments invested in the endless scrutiny of human possibility. Perhaps they begin, like so much else, with our early experiences of parental monitoring, which is itself shaped by the constant pressures of race, class, capital, nation, gender, and sexuality. Because a “surveillance memoir” (mine or anyone else’s) cannot make sense if it doesn’t take into account the sociological realities in which we are raised, I want to look first at the fusion of class, memoir, and gender that marks the work of Richard Hoggart, Carolyn Steedman, and other scholars who might not seem to take up surveillance, at first glance.

Working-Class Surveillance

The writing world lost a giant with the death of Richard Hoggart in 2014. One of the first scholars to take popular culture seriously, Hoggart was a self-described “scholarship boy” whose fusion of literary and sociological analysis made him an intellectual star in postwar Britain. His most influential book, The Uses of Literacy (1957), explored the impact of mass media on English working-class life, using many of his own experiences as fodder for an innovative and sensitive reckoning with the impacts of tabloids, pulp fiction, and popular songs on the organic folk culture of ordinary Brits. In order to allow readers to grasp the world that produced him, Hoggart crafted a two-part text that remains vividly appealing. Alongside what anthropologist Richard Handler has called “a beautifully evocative, generalizing portrayal of working class neighborhood life” was a thoughtful consideration of how external forces were reshaping older ways of being and feeling, something that translates quite well to the rise of contemporary surveillance culture.17 As a child, Hoggart learned the need to keep up appearances, to placate the controlling gaze of authority figures visiting the family flat, even if this meant hiding a decent teapot so a social worker wouldn’t think the family was wasting public support on inessentials.

Remaining impressively free of bitterness, Hoggart details how he sprang from circumstances both meager and mean. An impoverished child, he grew up in the grimness and want of northern England between the wars, a monochromatic time of privation if ever there was one. His humble upbringing might seem an unlikely beginning for a founding figure in the establishment of cultural studies—he was the first director of the influential Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964—but it was an ideal preparation for understanding the intersection of class, culture, and mass media that would transform postwar Britain. Until his death in 2014 at the age of ninety-five, he was that rare organic intellectual, an endless autodidact, a poetic sociologist, and a person for whom the personal was indelibly, inevitably political—an autobiographical fact that he never set forth clumsily. His was a more subtle form of cultural critique, one that appeals to me through and through. Well known in England and Australia to this day, Hoggart is out of fashion in the American academy beyond particular qualitative sociology circles. While he is acknowledged as an early influence in the development of cultural studies, he often receives little more than a quick nod from scholars who have moved on to other enthusiasms. I’m not ready to move on—we still have much to learn from Hoggart’s infusion of the personal into the academic.

Others have made a similar case in recent years, especially about his radical unwillingness to maintain an unscalable wall between scholarship and personal writing. In an essay on Hoggart’s empathetic mode of writing, the Australian scholar Melissa Gregg defends the use of personal recollection as a tool for cultural studies. “That experience or memory may be used as a means to base an argument is assumed to be troublesome due to its inevitable bias, its rose-coloured lens,” she writes. “Cultural studies’ development has been characterized, however, precisely by this kind of writing of the self, the voicing of one’s formative environment to provide the material for pressing critical inquiry.”18 Hoggart’s other explicators have suggested that his autobiographical writing “constructs his experience as a critical resource, rather than as an impediment to ‘objective’ analysis.” In this sense, Hoggart’s best work “demonstrates that social analysis is not just a matter of collecting, sifting, and interpreting a safely distanced body of material using a neutral, accepted set of techniques but is a more active, engaged, essentially political process.”¹⁹

I admire that blurring of professional and personal ways of knowing, in part because it honors the vast swath of personal experience that is roped off as “unprofessional.” And, like Hoggart, I want to respect the distinctive qualities of the world that made me, in no small measure because the world of 1970s blue-collar striving often goes unnoticed and unappreciated in contemporary scholarship. Hoggart’s gift was his ability to look back at his own life without anger, placing his memories in a larger expanse of cultural transformation, toggling between the personal and the sociological. To his credit, he wrestled with the question of how to accomplish this task well into later life. “How do I find a tone of voice which is neither too distant nor too close?” he wondered in his memoirs, in 1994. “How to avoid self-justification—or that kind of admission of weakness which is really only another form of self-praise?” And perhaps trickiest of all, he realized with novelistic insight, is the question of what is emblematic in an individual life. “Is this incident really ‘representative’ or merely a quaint happening I am hung up on, but one without ‘resonance’ beyond itself?”20 These are good questions for us all, but especially for me as I pull at the roots of my own surveillance consciousness.²¹

So the uses of Hoggart are threefold for me. First, he combined memoir and traditional scholarship in a manner that I want to emulate here. Second, his work has a deep personal resonance for me: he wrote about the precise places and cultural attitudes that shaped and scarred my own path in this world. Third, although he did not write about security per se, he wrote about childhood, class, place, technology, culture, and consciousness in a literary manner that remains an inspiration to those of us wrestling with the subtleties of surveillance culture. I suspect he would understand the inegalitarian application of surveillance in class terms, as well as its awkward intrusions into human consciousness, its uncomfortable shaping of our sense of place, and its imposition onto an older way of being in the world. In short, his way of thinking is worth trying on.

Surveillance often felt like something that “they” did to “us,” a fact that Hoggart writes about at great length. The Uses of Literacy describes a basic worldview of “us” versus “them,” the latter of which is regarded more with “mistrust” than fear.²² The local policeman, for instance, was understood “primarily as someone who is watching them, who represents the authority which has its eye on them, rather than as a member of the public services whose job it is to help and protect them.”²³ For working-class people, and even those who fled to a different life but retained an older sense of the world, surveillance often aggravates the hidden wounds of class, the sense that the authorities don’t trust us and we don’t trust them.

What Hoggart helps us realize is how much the class-infused experience of surveillance is emotional in nature: it often makes the world feel bad. Especially when you are young, surveillance is something that happens to you, something that reminds you that you are a small cog in someone else’s machine, something that intrudes on your life. For this reason, it undermines the intimacy and dignity of working-class life, which was already under threat in the mid–twentieth-century world that Hoggart describes. Surveillance, I would argue from this Hoggartian perspective, undermines the pride of “Ah keep meself to meself,” the autonomous sense of “live yer own life,” the “insistence on the privacy of the home” that Hoggart found under threat from mass media and commercial culture in midcentury northern England.24 Later research has added to what Hoggart was discovering.

In a study of surveillance and social class in a northern English high school, two scholars identified the “chilling effect” that working-class students felt in response to being monitored—which “led them to change ‘legitimate’ forms of behaviour or activities due to a concern that their actions could be misinterpreted by the ‘surveyors.’” Some boys were “nervy” in response to the gaze of the school security system, while others were burdened by its presence (and its disproportionate focus on working-class bodies). Fearing that CCTV operators would misinterpret even harmless behaviors, students sometimes altered their behavior to appear more docile on screen.²⁵

The literary scholar Rita Felski has described the culture of shaming in the working class, using the work of academic memoirists such as Carolyn Steedman to explore “how class-based attitudes of fatalism, resentment, envy, and shame are inexorably transmitted from the working-class mother to her child.”26 Steedman’s book Landscape for a Good Woman is an essential counterpart to Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. In her account of her mother’s life in midcentury England, Steedman writes about how class-consciousness is acquired in a maelstrom of shame, envy, isolation, and uncertainty during childhood. It is a look at the “bits and pieces” of which “psychological selfhood” is made in our earliest years, one that filled a gap in the literature on class, gender, and childhood: “people’s history and working-class autobiography are relatively innocent of psychological theory,” she lamented, “and there has been little space within them to discuss the development of class-consciousness (as opposed to its expression), nor for understanding of it as a learned position, learned in childhood, and often through the exigencies of difficult and lonely lives.”²⁷ With its vividly anguished portrait of growing up poor and exposed to the cruelties of English society, the book helped some readers understand why they felt the way they felt about the world. “Reading Landscape for a Good Woman let me see that my story, too, had slipped through the net of other people’s interpretations,” wrote one admirer.²⁸ Such autobiographical stories that have “slipped through the net” may help us understand surveillance culture in a new light, broadening our sense of what counts as surveillance and what might shape our experience of it. None of these stories—mine included—represents some universal experience of childhood surveillance. My point is quite the opposite: I’m interested in particular kinds of early experiences that might increase adult sensitivity to CCTV, drones, Snowden, cyberstalking, Big Data, TSA scanners, and facial recognition software.

Not everyone has these sensitivities, of course, and some of them may be generational in nature. Is it different for young people today, growing up immersed in social media and other forms of monitoring? Will they experience surveillance more positively, more naturally, than a transitional generation like mine, which came of age long before drones, smartphones, and GPS were commonplace? We don’t really know yet (researchers are working on that question). But I suspect that young people today, just like previous generations, will experience surveillance in ways that are profoundly colored by parenting styles, class and racial identity, immigration status, gender, and other biographical factors that I explore in the pages ahead. Indeed, the following surveillance memoir is primarily an invitation for readers to think about the autobiographical roots of their own surveillance sensitivities, or lack thereof, and to wonder how their own attitudes about monitoring, insecurity, and connectivity were shaped in their earliest years. Looking at these early experiences, I suggest, is one way of understanding why some people are so aggrieved, some are blasé, and some are quite enthusiastic about the latest manifestations of surveillance culture. Are you comfortable with a home security drone hovering over your house? Do you want your child’s school to monitor her social media posts? Do you mind if Yahoo! is scanning all of your personal emails for keywords provided by the NSA or FBI?29 Do you bristle at the idea of someone looking down at you from a CCTV camera? The answer may lie in your biography, particularly in aspects of your identity that make you feel empowered or not, autonomous or not, respected or not, vulnerable or not.

A Surveillance Memoir

That won’t do at all. You must remember your place.

—ANTON CHEKOV

Perhaps it would be no surprise if the black seeds of insecurity could grow into something unhealthy in an adult, or if the youthful experience of surveillance could breed certain kinds of mental and emotional distress. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least, but I would prefer to have some hard evidence in academic journals. Unfortunately, very little work has been done on the psychological impact of living under surveillance in its contemporary form.30 To start a conversation about the ways in which youthful experiences of surveillance remain with us, often problematically so, as we grow older and encounter new modes of monitoring, I want to look through the same lens I’ve used elsewhere in this chapter: personal experience combined with cultural analysis.

No doubt, some of my own sense of being watched was utterly normal for a boy of my time and place, a fact simply woven into the fabric of 1970s America, where paranoia was an understandable response to the strange times in which we lived as well as a sometimes overblown reaction to bits of nothing that somehow seemed like something.³¹ One writer has described her own Cold War childhood as filled with needless paranoia and spy games. “My anti-surveillance measures were all out of proportion to any threat I was likely to encounter,” she recalls sheepishly. “A quiet middle class girl, in a boring Maryland suburb? I was never on any kind of Russian super-spy watch-list, even if my father did work for the government.”³² With such sentiments in mind, I’m open to the possibility that I may be confused about what was really happening in my childhood, that memory is often fraudulent, that feelings surge in inexplicable ways that we can never quite comprehend. Yet I think a personal approach can help us to get at the strange tonality of surveillance culture, its shifting moods and textures, its long roots and tendrils, which seem to reach into unexpected parts of our lives far beyond what normally counts as surveillance.

Certainly, I felt it long before I started worrying about Google and the NSA, long before I had read Orwell, and even before I got suspended from school for unaccountable wildness (looking back it seems more like mildness) that wasn’t so uncommon in my place and time. I grew up on the Jersey shore in the 1970s, during those prehistoric days before reality TV stars J-Wow, Paulie, and Snookie arrived with Jell-O shots and string bikinis. Back then the shore wasn’t much of anything except a punch line (“You from Jersey? What exit?”)—just a sleepy place to ride out stagflation, disco, and Catholic school on the way to somewhere else. Ninety minutes from Manhattan on the train, it was somehow as provincial and lonesome as a Midwestern farm town, if not quite as repressive as the small hamlets in East Texas where my mother’s family was stuck. Back then the locals on the shore prided themselves on looking and thinking alike, and even small differences could cause serious problems. I remember the ubiquitous insult of faggot echoing in the hallways as boys monitored one another’s sexuality with a perverse vigilance. I remember the FBI arresting an eighth-grade classmate who unsuccessfully pipe-bombed our only Jewish teacher’s car. I remember the utter absence of black or brown faces in a town filled with flag-waving European Americans who loved sports and beer and, to a lesser extent, church.

We were not the dignified and interwoven working class of Richard Hoggart’s youth: we were something else, something far less cinematically intriguing, something more awkward. Working-class culture had a different face here than in pre-hipster Brooklyn where I was born, but it was still all around us, morphing into something lonely, cheap, and disconnected, just as Hoggart had feared. I saw it on the walls of my pleasant little house, where bullfighter paintings hung over simulated tinfoil wallpaper. I saw it on my dinner table, where canned peas rolled around chopped steak on Pathmark plates. I saw it outside our bay window, as I looked up and down a short street bookended by a funeral parlor and a cemetery. Next door was a tiny weeping bartender, who performed a midnight exorcism on his dying infant (did I hallucinate that? No, I didn’t), and a grown woman who sat by herself in a kiddie pool on summer days with a ceaseless grin that made us wonder about her sanity. Across the street was a pipe-smoking car mechanic, the father of my best friend. A bow-hunting factory worker was two doors down, his tiny house flanked by retirees and used-car salesmen, and finally, in the simplest house, a little rectangle the size of a mobile home, the person with the most education: a historian who commuted to the city three days a week. At the other end of the street were two sullen poster boys for blue-collar lethargy: a pair of scabby brothers obsessed with stockcar racing. Their open-air garage was a grimy temple to speed in which they roared their engines, much to the despair of everyone else. A few retirees in their eighties rounded out the scene in a dull and disjointed neighborhood where no one really knew anyone else, though it still managed to feel strangely coercive. As children, we felt the weight of social expectation, of being monitored and judged, even if we were unable to name it.

Like most teens, I was watchful at home as well. While I was lucky to have a home with loving parents, I was unlucky to have experienced certain kinds of humiliation that continue to shape my experience of surveillance. I know there are many ways to learn the power of watching and being watched, many of them far more degrading than what I’m detailing here. But small-town living exacts its own psychological price. The fathers we knew ran their houses like mercurial wardens, alternately jocular and menacing, exerting influence over the smallest detail. If these working-class men couldn’t control life outside the house, they often made up for it in their own private Panopticons.

I say this with the realization that I came of age before the most insidious surveillance technologies were ready for parental deployment. I learned to drive decades before the Drive Pulse dongle could plug a parent’s gaze into my car, automatically texting them whenever I drove over a certain speed or into a predetermined “bad neighborhood.”33 My Catholic high school didn’t have biometric access control to keep out maleficia; the all-knowing, all-seeing Brother Andrew was more than adequate to secure the perimeter. But surveillance can thrive without the latest technology; it can move in subtle ways. What I have been calling “surveillance consciousness” is not simply a matter of CCTV and TSA scanners. It also has mundane sources in our schools, churches, and homes. It’s about parenting styles, all-seeing teachers, and nosy neighbors as much as it’s about homeland security and law enforcement.

Every day, in a million tiny ways, we learned that invisibility was freedom (it was a perfect childhood for surveillance studies). You learned to conceal and dissemble. You learned to separate the surface from the depths. You learned to watch for authority figures (parent, teacher, coach, priest, cop). Like most of my teenage friends (and perhaps teenagers just about everywhere), I waged a passive-aggressive guerrilla war against parental rule. We hid our forbidden orange soda in brown bags at the bottom of the fridge, slid Hydrox cookies into the nether regions of the lazy Susan, concealed the spots that Wiffle Ball wore into the lawn where we had been warned not to play. A few years later we were hiding bottles of crème de menthe pinched from liquor cabinets and illicit magazines fished out of the convenience-store dumpster. More important, we hid our opinions, tastes, and desires from the adults who monitored everything from our posture to our attitude. We hid our feelings, our dreams, even our hatred of being watched, second-guessed, scrutinized, corrected. On the list of things subject to constant monitoring: how we ate, how we stood, what we said, where we went, what we wore, what we thought. It was the same in many other houses, I’m sure.

The impact on social capital, that sense of the world as a trustworthy place, was profound—and it shaped my understanding of surveillance in pretty much any form. At every turn, we were taught that our small towns were conformist enclaves, big cities were sewers of danger, neighbors were voyeurs, strangers were perverts, charity was for suckers, and no one could help you except yourself. Maybe this is why, in my impressionable young mind, I identified with the mythic criminals who adopted a noir sense of life as violent and unknowable. My friends and I learned to escape into masculine fantasies of control from 1970s and 1980s cinema: Magnum Force, The Dogs of War, The Wild Geese, each a tale of an outsider who survived to break a corrupt, authoritarian system. Above all my brother and I worshiped at the altar of the original Mad Max, that dark Aussie fable of a cop driven into a stylish rampage against the world that had hunted down his family and caged his soul. My friends and I embraced the paranoid scripts of these films because they resonated with what we already knew as boys staggering into puberty with low self-esteem and alcoholic tendencies. We loved macho fantasies that were the opposite of our reality: ultimately, we were soft boys, pawns without dignity, constantly pushed one way or another by parents, teachers, coaches, and clergy, the aspirational white-collar children of blue-collar parents. Some of this is particular, some universal. Grubby New Jersey in the late 1970s had the unique texture of the Carter administration, though in some ways its challenges were not unusual. To be a child is to be watched and controlled, often with a mixture of love and anger, hope and hostility.

Where this often leads is the therapist’s couch, the pharmacist’s bottle, the liquor cabinet, the self-help manual, the loneliness of exodus, or an academic career. It’s no worse than any other battle with anxiety and depression that the agony of self-consciousness invites. (“In my experience of treating nearly 6,000 family members who walk on eggshells,” writes one psychologist, “no fewer than half suffer from clinical anxiety and/or depression.”)34 And it’s no worse than any other childhood, each of which has its own raw spots. I certainly don’t have a new chapter to contribute to the “misery lit” shelf, because my upbringing was a festival of privilege compared to many childhoods. Able-bodied, straight, white, and male, I didn’t have to deal with the gawking and gendered power games that the young women around me on my street were enduring, or the structural racism that marred the experiences of people of color. Mine was simply a tense childhood on the blurry line between blue-collar America and lower-middle-class strivers in a time of big ugly cars and itchy polyester shirts. In short, I was just another well-meaning white kid getting his feelings bent out of shape while much more painful forms of immiseration churned in the distance. Yet whatever happened in my formative years was stressful enough to instill a lifelong sensitivity to surveillance, an enduring sense that watching and being watched is an anxiety-producing labor required of the weak and vulnerable in the presence of the strong, that the rituals of Homeland Security evoke a kind of bodily trauma (paradoxically in the name of bodily safety). That watching can be an act of domination. That being watched can be humiliating. That surveillance sucks.

Surveillance was woven into our family life, a symptom of collective dysfunction and immigrant fears. Tell lies, put up walls, bar the door—anything to keep out the inquisitive gaze of strangers who might judge us before we could judge them. My Scottish grandmother, the daughter of Irish diaspora from Glasgow, spent half my childhood peering out her window, wondering if the authorities were coming to deport her to the old country. Meanwhile, one of my uncles, a sociopath with a banana-yellow Eldorado and a bad perm, installed a special water meter to make sure his wife and kids didn’t shower too long. (This was just before the divorce. And just before a carnie punched his teeth out for mouthing off at a cut-rate circus.) The underlying lesson to all this: always watch out (especially for carnies).

What gave this monitoring its real teeth was violence. These working-class men made no secret of their potential for it: they had suffered and inflicted pain in equal measure, and they told stories that were designed to intimidate and impress. From an early age I knew my grandfather had fought on the Brooklyn docks with a razor blade snapped into the brim of his cap, pulling other men’s faces into it with his longshoreman’s biceps. I knew he was found in the street, drunk and bloodied, with a loading hook protruding from his backside. And I knew my other grandfather, an illiterate rancher with missing fingers, had killed a man while fighting in the East Texas logging woods. I knew someone else in my family kept a ball-peen hammer under the front seat of his car and used it to chase kids who threw snowballs at him. I knew an uncle had bribed someone to get a drug-dealing cousin out of jail in the middle of the night, when his son was held as an accessory to murder. I knew family members had threatened to kill other family members, and for very good reason. I knew all of these stories by the time I was twelve, and it was part of the regime of enforcement in which we operated: we knew there were rules and we knew there were penalties—and we knew people were watching us closely.

Rage, anxiety, insecurity, self-consciousness—these are the gendered underpinnings of surveillance culture as I knew it. The hardness of working-class New York masculinity in the 1970s had the sweat and feel of Scorsese: Raging Bull wife-beaters, Mean Streets swagger, Taxi Driver resentments. Some of this was unique to families such as mine: the uncles had all come out of the rougher parts of midcentury New York City and strutted like Bowery Boys well into their middle age. As small-town boys in the 1970 s, we certainly wondered how they could have spawned us. After all, we were a transitional generation with a very different trajectory. We didn’t grow up in the city, we didn’t get shot at, we never went hungry—and as a result we were lost somewhere between old and new, hard and soft, clarity and fuzziness. The hard face we put on for one another (and for our dads) was always an awkward performance, marked by hollow aggression, a guilty sense of our shortcomings, and constant confusion for boys more suited to video games than the aggression of the mythic street. We felt our existential softness but couldn’t put a name to it: it was as forbidden as another softness, that queer masculinity with which we had more in common than we could admit back then. That would have required real bravery, a real freedom from crippling self-consciousness about our status and identity, a liberating sense that we could tune out the constant policing of our masculinity and our very essence. None of my friends knew how to do that back then. The weight of surveillance was too much.

If the small-town culture of monitoring was toxic for me, it was generally harder on the women around me. As scholars such as Hille Koskela have demonstrated, surveillance is tougher on women than on men—from CCTV in parking garages to ogling security guards, it is something that men do to women, often in a sexualized and demeaning manner.35 I’m sure it was worse, but I only saw hints, such as maternal relationships infused with crippling self-consciousness that inspired its own form of surveillance vigilance. Working-class women, especially immigrants from rural poverty like my mother, often found themselves overwhelmed by shame and uncertainty in the strange new world of TV dinners, plastic plates, and gleaming shopping malls of the postwar United States. Recent arrivals to the American dream in some modest form, these women often modeled a fearful trepidation about the outside world, a sense that the institutions of modern life were designed and run for people very different than themselves, that school systems and insurance companies and government agencies and law offices were places where they were not welcome, where they could not understand the language being spoken. It is a narrow mind-set of anxious skepticism and uncertainty about how the world works and how it’s set against them. And in this sense, surveillance compounded the ways in which we were socially and emotionally fragile: we couldn’t afford mistakes because the shame hurt so much. We couldn’t stand the constant monitoring of our shortcomings that we felt at the mall, at school, at work, when the people in control looked our way.

Even a regular childhood as just another white boy made me allergic to the culture of invasive monitoring that has intensified around me in the past fifty years. How much more sensitive would I be if had I grown up with a different skin color or sexual orientation? Even as a big sullen teenager in a hoodie, my white privilege meant that no one followed me in department stores, that I didn’t get much attention from the police, that I didn’t activate the “see something, say something” imperative of the New York City subway signs. I didn’t know very much about the “prison” of homophobia that José Esteban Muñoz describes in Cruising Utopia.36 I didn’t know anything about the burden of what sociologist Tina P. Patel calls “browning,” the racialized social sorting in which “terror-related surveillance over-focuses on all those of middle Eastern appearance, or of South Asian or Arabic heritage and of the Muslim faith,” color-coding these brown bodies as suspicious “despite the lack of any actual evidence of criminal wrongdoing.”³⁷ I didn’t experience the “enhanced, discriminatory and unnecessary surveillance” to which American Muslims have been subjected since 9/11.³⁸ Consequently, I also didn’t feel the elevated anxiety levels in response to state surveillance that they have reported, resulting in “longstanding emotional and behavioral consequences.”³⁹ I had a different sort of monitoring to endure, yet it was still damaging to my sense of the social. That is to say, even if we escape the worst slights of history and sociology that befall certain categories of human beings at certain times, we can still grow up raw about surveillance, we can still chafe under its pressure. I still experienced it as a kind of abjection, a disquieting force in my life, a simmering misery that always threatened to get much worse. As Alan Cumming points out in his memoir of growing up with an unpredictable parent, things were not always “that bad,” but the threat was always lurking. At any second, things could go wrong if he was seen taking the wrong step, making the wrong face, sitting in the wrong chair. Only constant vigilance could save him from his father’s volatility. Perhaps in this sense, scholars need to look more closely at the overlapping terrains of memoir and psychology to get at the experiences and recollections of everyday life, especially among children, who have often escaped their attention.

Even now, some forty years later, I sometimes shift my expression, my posture, my path, to conform to the expectations of some real or imagined observer. I still bristle when I spot a security camera, a supervisor, a cop. I’m even allergic to the abstract idea of surveillance, and even if I don’t see it in my surroundings, I always know it’s deep in the machinery of the world. I can hear it grinding away, like an old-fashioned tape recorder hidden inside a desk, and I feel myself subtly deferring to its powers of observation. I suspect I’m not alone in this response to a vast technological system in our lives, even in a “nation of rebels” that has enshrined rugged individualism and personal autonomy as its guiding myth. Surveillance is inscribed on our bodies whether we register its presence or not.40

Status offers some protection from constant monitoring. During my seemingly interminable years of teenage grubbiness, I aspired to the professional middle class not simply because people went on proper vacations and ate better food, but because it seemed like a paradise of autonomous living where a person could roam free from observation (I was naïve). I wanted to get somewhere I wouldn’t be watched, where I would be free from the weight of surveillance, where I might be implicitly trusted. If that youthful fantasy seemed plausible in 1982 as I pondered the life ahead of me, it seems absurd in 2017 as I look back on the times in which I’ve lived. After a very long slog, I did make it into the comforts of the professional middle class, but the old surveillance anxieties have come along to the present day, taking on new forms. Even in the relative safety of adulthood, I know these childhood sensations have followed me into an academic career now approaching the two-decade mark.

Like most people, I suspect, I still carry my childhood resentments into other realms. I wince when I see CCTV on the wall or hear about the latest Facebook privacy breach; I feel an ache, a sense of disappointment and anger and imprisonment when I hear about Edward Snowden’s revelations. I don’t even like the sense that someone in a café is watching these words being composed. And to this day I still experience surveillance in class terms, as if the CCTV camera is asking me to go hat in hand, like an orphan in a poorhouse. In other words, my response to the implicit deference of surveillance culture is weirdly visceral and perhaps irrational; it surges through me with an overwhelming heaviness, flooding my body with an external force that I can’t wait to shake off. It’s a kind of violence to the spirit that I want to minimize in my life—and in public life generally. I know that such intense reactions are not simply the product of mature conversations about security, privacy, and autonomy. As much as those are very real factors, the template for my response to surveillance was set much earlier, in ways that are unique to me but that are shared by many other people with similar stories (and probably not shared by people with different childhood experiences). What I feel about the NSA and Big Data was what I felt about priests and parents several decades ago. That’s why it behooves us to wonder about the psychological impact of surveillance that starts early and never quite leaves us—even if that is something we can only address anecdotally at this point. I started with an artist in Alan Cumming, so I’ll end with another artist.

Torment Saint

“My childhood made me feel like I didn’t exist,” the musician Elliot Smith said near the end of his life. “I was nothing.” A gifted songwriter and mesmerizing performer who pulled together disparate elements of punk and folk, Smith is often cast as a tragic hero from the alternative culture of the Pacific Northwest, a disheveled young singer-guitarist who committed suicide at the apex of his success—in other words, another mythic modern who lived and died like Kurt Cobain, the central figure of the early 1990s grunge movement. But Smith’s story really begins in sunny Texas, in the conservative Dallas suburbs where he was born and spent his early years in simmering conflict with a controlling stepfather. Smith’s biographer hints at the likelihood of sexual and emotional abuse, but the musician was reticent about the subject, only making vague allusions in his song lyrics to the pains of his youth. What his biographer pieces together is a childhood in which “any imperfection, trivial or not, was noticed and commented on,” resulting in a sensitive boy driven to distraction by the obsessive monitoring of his behavior. His biography suggests that the pressures of living with a controlling, raging parent resulted in bitter self-loathing, endless paranoia, and epic drug abuse. Eventually becoming “intensely fearful of imaginary spying” and toting around books on sexual abuse alongside Kafka, Dostoevsky, and other works that fed his suspicions, Smith grew into a hypersensitive human being whom his biographer dubbed a “torment saint.”41

What is the linkage between a controlling parent and a tormented adult with a driving fear of surveillance? Perhaps Smith was paranoid because he was taking too many drugs, prescription and otherwise—or perhaps his relationship with his stepfather set him on this course toward feeling ill at ease in the world, feeling wracked with uncertainty about what was being said and who was taking note. No one knows what was in the thirty-four-year-old’s mind when he plunged a knife into his own chest in 2003. But I wonder if his painful self-consciousness, even paranoia, reflects something more than his individual psychology—if he provides, even anecdotally, one small reflection of the psychic cost of growing up in the crosshairs of surveillance.

If anything, the real burden of childhood surveillance is only beginning to be felt. New surveillance technologies are monitoring children with an unprecedented intensity and thoroughness. Beginning with webcams and CCTV cameras in the home and school, one researcher has listed “tracking devices including GPS locators fitted in a range of children’s accessories such as clothing items, backpacks and mobile phones; biometric ID and fingerprinting systems for school roll-calls and borrowing library books; online ‘spyware’; drug testing kits for parents; and an expanding range of other devices and database tools that provide new ways to track, monitor and control children’s activities.”⁴² Horton Hears a You, Charlotte’s Webcam, Where the Wild Things Are Under Surveillance, even Everybody Snoops—parodists have had a field day in recent years with the NSA’s books and websites aimed at teaching kids about the joys of spying.⁴³ If nothing else, such spoofs are a welcome distraction from a sobering fact: we are all children of surveillance now.

Of course, these various monitoring technologies are not inherently oppressive for either children or adults. They become problematic when they are employed in relationships based on hierarchy, control, intimidation, and secrecy, whether between parent and child, school and student, corporation and consumer, or government and citizen. Yet even when surveillance practices are well-intentioned and thoughtfully administered, they can still feel unpleasant and invasive to those of us with heightened sensitivities caused by early wounds in a culture of monitoring. For reasons that may stem from our childhoods in ways that I have outlined in the preceding pages, some of us feel the implicit distrust inherent in being watched in a way that is difficult to endure. While people with happier childhood experiences might feel safe and pleased with the latest surveillance technology, we resent having to check ourselves, to wonder once again, as we did in our youth, “Is this space private? Am I under scrutiny? Am I measuring up?” Years later, we might loathe the nauseating sense of being sorted, judged, and archived for unknown reasons related to the institutions in which we live: school, family, corporation, nation. “Growing up observed” in ways that were psychologically and emotionally draining, we resent living that way as adults. No matter how much we are told that it is for our own good, that the seamless functioning of nations, businesses, and schools depends on careful monitoring of our behavior, we know, often from painful experience, that the truth is more complicated.