In The Power of Observation: Surveillance and Sousveillance, I briefly introduced surveillance versus sousveillance. I talked about surveillance in the workplace, who surveillance is structured to benefit, touched on the power dynamics in such systems, and explored how being watched changes behaviour.

This post wasn’t just about filming cops—though that’s part of it—but recognising that in a world where everything is watched, recorded, and catalogued, the question isn’t whether surveillance exists. The question is: who gets to do the watching? It’s a matter of power and authority.

Back in the 1990s, Steve Mann started wearing a camera on his face everywhere he went. Not to document his breakfast or his commute, but to flip the script on surveillance. If they’re going to watch me, he reasoned, I’m going to watch them watching me. He called it “sousveillance”—surveillance from below.

At the time, it required specialised equipment, custom-built eyeglasses, and a certain tolerance for looking like a cyborg. Today, everyone—from teenagers to retirees with a smartphone—has more surveillance power than many governments had thirty years ago.

But this shift revealed something fundamental about how power works. When ordinary people can suddenly document what authority figures do, those authority figures get very uncomfortable very quickly.

A seventeen-year-old girl with a phone sparked a change in the world. Darnella Frazier didn’t set out to become a symbol of citizen journalism when she started recording Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. She just saw something happening and thought: someone needs to see this.

That nine-minute video did what decades of police reform advocacy couldn’t do. It made denial impossible. It cut through every official narrative, every carefully worded press release, every attempt to frame murder as “medical emergency.” It was just truth, recorded in real time, impossible to spin or explain away.

But how many similar incidents happened before everyone had cameras? How many George Floyds died while the only witnesses were the people who killed them?

Labour organisers figured this out quickly, too. When Amazon warehouse workers started documenting their working conditions, suddenly the company’s claims about employee satisfaction became a lot harder to maintain. When gig workers began recording how the algorithm really works—which rides get assigned to whom, how surge pricing actually functions—the myth of the “neutral” platform began to crumble.

The pattern is always the same: institutions insist they operate fairly and transparently right up until someone produces evidence that they don’t.

But this isn’t a level playing field. When a police officer wears a body camera, they control when it turns on, what it records, and who gets to see the footage. When we record a police officer, we risk arrest, assault, or worse. They have qualified immunity; we have whatever legal defence we can afford.

This is the cruel irony of our surveillance society. The people with the most power to abuse others have the most protection from observation, while the people most vulnerable to abuse have the least protection when they try to document it.

When a corporate executive makes decisions that will impact thousands of workers, those deliberations happen behind closed doors. When those workers try to organise in response, their every move is monitored, recorded, and analysed. When a politician takes money from lobbyists, it might get reported in a filing somewhere. When we jaywalk, it gets captured by a dozen cameras and fed into facial recognition algorithms.

We’re getting really good at documenting injustice and really bad at preventing it. Many police murders get filmed now. Many environmental disasters gets documented. Many labour violations get exposed. And yet, somehow, these systems keep grinding on.

Because documentation without action is just entertainment. Outrage without organisation is just therapy. We’ve created a society where witnessing suffering has become a form of participation, where sharing a video feels like activism, where being informed substitutes for being involved.

The platforms that host our resistance footage make money from our rage. They optimise for engagement, which means they reward the most shocking content, the most polarising takes, the most dramatic confrontations. Our tools of liberation become their instruments of profit.

Imagine if police departments had to livestream all their operations. Imagine if corporate board meetings were public by default. Imagine if government surveillance programmes had to justify themselves in open court rather than secret tribunals.

Imagine if the algorithm that decides whether we get hired, approved for a loan, or flagged as suspicious had to explain its reasoning. Imagine if the data being collected about us was visible to us in real time. Imagine if consent meant something more than clicking “accept” on a terms of service document we’ll never read.

Perfect transparency would be its own form of oppression, but power-sensitive transparency could change the world. The more power we have over others, the more our actions should be visible to those we have power over. The less power we have, the more our privacy should be protected.

Every video of police violence, every leaked internal memo, every whistleblower document, every community-collected air quality reading becomes part of what can be thought of as a counter-archive. The unofficial record of how things really work, as opposed to how they supposedly work.

This counter-archive is fragile. Servers crash. Accounts get suspended. Evidence disappears. But it’s also resilient in ways that official records aren’t, because it’s distributed across millions of devices, backed up in countless places, embedded in collective memory.

But then, what do we do with this counter-archive? How do we transform documentation into structural change? How do we move from witnessing to intervening?

These are the conversations we need to have: When does documentation help? When does it hurt? Who gets to decide? Who bears the risk? How do we balance the need for evidence with the need for dignity, for privacy, for the right to exist without performing our oppression for an audience?

The tools are evolving faster than our ethics. Facial recognition that can identify us in a crowd. Algorithms can predict our behaviour. Biometric scanners can read our emotions. All of this surveillance power is being developed by the people who already have the most power, for their own purposes.

But the same technologies that enable oppression can enable resistance, if we’re smart about how we use them. Encrypted communications. Anonymous networks. Verification systems that can prove authenticity without revealing identity. Community-owned platforms.

We already live in a surveilled society, but will such surveillance serve the many or the few? Will it protect the vulnerable or entrench the powerful? Will it create accountability or eliminate privacy?

Every time we pull out our phones to record something, we’re making a choice. Not just about whether to document that particular moment, but about what kind of society we want to live in. A society where power operates in darkness, or one where it operates in light. A society where authority is unquestionable, or one where it’s constantly questioned.

What are you going to watch? What are you going to ignore? What are you going to do with what you see?