The Weight of Being Seen

How tracking, AI, and the search for witnesses are reshaping our sense of self.

The other morning, I left my phone at home. It wasn’t intentional—not some experiment, just an accident. I was heading out to grab coffee in Rhode Island, a ten-minute drive I’ve done a hundred times. Halfway there, I reached toward the passenger seat to put on some Joni Mitchell music and realized it was missing.

For a second, I thought about turning back. But I didn’t. I was already halfway there.

I kept driving, past the water, past the boats docked along the edge of town. With no music to put on, no one to call, I just watched the scenery slip by. The curve of the road, the way the light hit the bay, the quiet rhythm of the morning. It was just me, the car, the road.

And somewhere in that quiet, I realized: so much of life now runs through a kind of invisible record—the pings, the signals, the traces we leave behind. Without it, things feel lighter, but also a little less there.

We live in a world where almost every movement leaves a trace. Steps logged, purchases timestamped, faces captured, thoughts posted, locations pinned, restaurants saved. Not always because we’re forced to—but because we’ve learned to offer ourselves up. We check in, tag, record, share, choosing to fold these systems into daily life until they feel less like surveillance and more like routine. The machinery of tracking has moved from something we opt into to something ambient, unavoidable, even invisible.

And now, as artificial intelligence steps in—cameras that don’t just record but analyze, systems that don’t just store but anticipate—we’re drifting toward a world where unrecorded moments don’t simply slip by; they stand out.

What does it mean to live under the eye? What does it mean when life, untracked, starts to feel like it never happened at all?

We like to think we’re the ones holding the controls—that we decide which moments to post, which photos to keep, which parts of ourselves to reveal. But the truth is, the architecture of tracking has already been built around us—and increasingly, without us.

Social media was the first gentle conditioning: we shared for connection, for memory, for fear of being left out or left behind. As writer and technologist Eugene Wei puts it, platforms don’t just connect us; they offer us a stage, a scorecard—a system in which we operate with “status as a service.” We become, in his words, “status-seeking monkeys,” trained to perform.

But as Wei points out, it’s not just vanity—it’s strategy. Platforms reward what spreads, what signals, what earns status. We learn to craft not just ourselves, but the version of ourselves that travels best. I catch myself doing it too: glancing at which of my Substack posts or notes get the most views, wondering what made them work, trying—sometimes without even realizing it—to echo those shapes again. Over time, the performance becomes second nature.

And it’s not only status we’re chasing. It’s something older, stickier, harder to name: the need to be witnessed. To leave a mark. To prove, maybe just to ourselves, that we were here.

Cameras on the street don’t just capture movement; they detect patterns. Facial recognition software doesn’t just identify; it flags, profiles, and predicts. Your devices don’t just listen for commands; they harvest mood, tone, and context. You never know when you’re being watched, but you act as if you are.

With AI, the eye is always on, and the machine doesn’t sleep

It’s easy to think of this as a political or technological problem—and it is—but it’s also intimate, psychological, almost existential. If a conversation isn’t recorded, if a face isn’t tagged, if a moment isn’t captured, does it fade faster? Does it count less? When we go unrecorded, do we risk disappearing from the world—or just from ourselves?

I catch myself sometimes, thinking back on nights where no photos were taken, no texts were sent. They feel blurry—unsharable, unpromoted—almost like they slipped out of the timeline altogether. And yet, sometimes those are the moments that feel the most real. Maybe that’s the real shift: not just that we’re being tracked, but that we’re starting to internalize the logic of tracking—starting to believe that what’s visible, archived, and legible is what matters most.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault described the panopticon as the perfect system of control—a circular prison with a central but opaque watchtower, where prisoners never know if they’re being watched, so they act as if they always are. The brilliance wasn’t in the guard’s gaze; it was in the prisoner’s mind. You internalize the eye. You discipline yourself—and, crucially, you start policing each other, because everyone can see everyone else.

For a long time, that felt like an abstract metaphor. But today, it’s less metaphor, more infrastructure. Surveillance cameras are always watching, and soon, they will feed into AI systems designed to detect “suspicious activity.” Your online searches don’t just sit in history; they train models that predict your next move, your next desire, your next weakness. Every street, every app, every device becomes a node in a network of permanent observation.

Here’s the twist, though: you can’t see the tower. There’s no single center of control, no guard in the booth. It’s everywhere and nowhere—algorithmic, automated, ambient. And the effect is the same as Foucault warned: you begin to pre-correct yourself. You act, post, speak, and even think in ways shaped by the sense that you are never fully alone.

You don’t need a person watching you anymore. You just need the possibility—or the certainty—that the system is.

There’s a quiet shift that happens once you live long enough inside these systems: unrecorded moments start to feel lighter. Less solid.

You meet someone on a night out; you never exchange numbers. You have a conversation that no one overhears, no one documents. You visit a place and take no photos, post no proof. It should feel freeing. Sometimes it does. But sometimes, if you’re honest, it leaves a strange aftertaste—like the moment is already slipping, like it barely counted.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a social media problem, but it’s older and deeper. Surveillance isn’t just external—it sinks into the psyche. The systems shape us before we even know we’re shaped. We live under the gaze not just of others, or machines, but of the versions of ourselves we imagine watching us: the one we might post, the one we might regret, the one we’re already rehearsing in our heads.

Wei argues that in these status systems, we become both the performer and the audience—we’re not just watched, we’re watching ourselves, anticipating how we’ll be seen, tweaking our moves before anyone else does.

And in Wei’s view, that internal doubling—performer and audience—is what locks us into the loop. We become fluent in metrics, in optics, in the little reflexes of display, even when no one’s explicitly measuring.

What dies in an unrecorded moment? Maybe nothing. Maybe the opposite—maybe it’s where something truly alive still slips through, unpolished, unclaimed. But in a world of perfect mirrors, we’re forgetting how to see without one.

What’s most unnerving about AI isn’t just that it watches—it’s that it anticipates.

It doesn’t wait for you to act; it learns from what you’ve done to shape what you will do next. It nudges, suggests, and completes. Have you ever talked about wanting to buy something and then, boom, there is a popup ad on your screen while you read the news? It predicts the thing you’ll want before you know you’re wanting it.

And once that happens, something subtle collapses: the space where desire used to live, the space where you got to be unpredictable—even to yourself.

We think of freedom as the ability to choose, but what happens when the machine is already narrowing the field, pruning the options, and curating the paths? What happens when the most efficient version of you—the most profitable, the most optimized—becomes the only version the system knows how to engage?

It’s not just surveillance; it’s containment. Not just being seen, but being folded into a piece of origami so tight you stop noticing the exits.

And here’s the hardest part: you may start wanting it. The comfort of being known, suggested, streamlined. The relief of not having to reach into the blank space of your own unpredictability.

Sometimes I wonder what it would mean to slip through—to live unrecorded, untracked, outside the loops. Not as a weekend detox or a performative escape, but for real: no devices, no archive, no mirrors reflecting who I’m supposed to be.

But then comes the flicker of panic. If no one knows where I am, am I still here? If I leave no trace, what holds me in place?

This is the paradox we carry now: the craving to disappear and the terror of erasure. The dream of freedom and the ache to be seen. We want to move beyond the eye, but we want someone—or something—to notice we’re gone.

In Wei’s framing, we’re trapped in status loops. But beyond status is something lonelier: the fear that without the signal, there’s no self. We don’t just want to be ranked. We want to be real.

Maybe that’s the final trap of the status game, as Wei sketches it—the way it collapses our longing for recognition and our longing for existence into the same thing. Visibility as being.

In a world where AI watches without sleeping, where systems log without end, maybe the most radical thing left isn’t to break the machine. Maybe it’s to reclaim the quiet places inside ourselves that don’t need to be known.

The moments that slip, the thoughts that pass unspoken, the days no one else will remember—maybe that’s where we’re most alive.