Today’s young people have become both informers and self-exposers. If we’re not careful, their snitch culture will threaten privacy and freedom.
Today’s young people have become both informers and self-exposers. If we’re not careful, their snitch culture will threaten privacy and freedom.
I n 2018, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student reported a professor who used the term “sacred cow” to the school’s administration, claiming the term was offensive to people who indeed worshipped cows. The same year, a Michigan State University student reported his dorm roommate to the school for watching a Ben Shapiro video in their room, calling the video “hate speech.” Shortly thereafter, a female Arizona State University student reported a male acting partner for performing too intensely during a final exam during their acting class.
Generation Z has been called spoiled, overly sensitive, and lazy. (I mean, “Gen Z” is just a reformulation of “Gen X” — come up with your own name!) But there is one thing for which they have truly shown a passion: demanding surveillance of other people and accepting the loss of privacy that comes with being constantly watched.
Members of Gen Z barely remember a world in which everyone walked around without high-quality phones in their pockets. Not only are they used to the idea of being photographed or recorded at all times, they sometimes demand it. Not churning out a daily supply of TikTok-ready videos is for dullards; the world needs to see you both at your highest points and at your lowest. We have all become streaming versions of ourselves.
This disturbing trend shocked the national conscience earlier this month when the Cato Institute (full disclosure: my employer) released a poll indicating that 30 percent of people under the age of 30 support allowing the government to install video cameras in peoples’ homes to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”
The openness to being constantly watched by the government was clearly a generational phenomenon. The poll showed fewer than 6 percent of Americans over the age of 45 supported the home-surveillance idea, although a disturbing 20 percent of respondents between the ages of 30 and 44 liked the hypothetical proposal.
There was also a racial component to the results. Even though only 14 percent of all respondents favored the idea, over 33 percent of black Americans and 25 percent of Hispanic Americans supported it. (This statistic isn’t entirely distinct from the breakout by age, as 48 percent of Gen Zers are members of racial or ethnic minorities, a much higher proportion than among older Americans.)
Giving Donald Trump or Joe Biden — or, worse, a junior West Wing staffer or a congressional aide in a windowless office — the legal ability to watch a live video of you in your home is a horrifying idea for all the obvious reasons. Imagine what might follow from sitting in your kitchen and saying something you haven’t quite workshopped enough for public consumption. (A declaration that Taylor Swift is overrated, for instance, could land you in a Gen Z gulag.)
But part of the reason Gen Z has an unquenchable thirst for surveillance is what they are being taught at their colleges and universities. All the above examples were reports filed with campus “Bias Response Teams” — programs set up by institutions of higher education that incentivize students to narc on each other for expressing unpopular opinions or engaging in disfavored behavior.
Decades ago, courts threw out college “speech codes,” finding that public universities banning language was impermissible under the First Amendment. So when the internet grew as a tool, schools crafted a workaround: What if, instead of the schools targeting students for unpopular speech, it was the students themselves doing the targeting? And thus a majority of public colleges and universities began crowdsourcing their speech codes.
In fact, bias-response teams are actually worse than the traditional speech codes, which outlawed specific words: The new standard for determining whether speech is forbidden is simply anything that offends someone. Any oversensitive campus resident now has the power to log on and anonymously report a fellow student or professor.
Not to be outdone by its elite competitors, Stanford University implemented its own Orwellian system in which the school offered students a cash bounty if they reported insensitive speech on campus. In April, the school backtracked on the plan after an ensuing episode of national outrage.
These types of harm-reduction-by-snitch programs turned students into informers, creating a power structure in which the theatrically woke could hand down punishments against their less-enlightened classmates. Even something said during a private conversation can now get a college student hauled before a campus diversity counselor. Or a professor’s misunderstood remark or challenge to students to think differently can lead to a letter in her personnel file.
Of course, not all (not even most) young people go to college, but the surveillance state is crowbarring its way into our everyday lives more often. Digital transactions guarantee we are always on the grid (with many people posting their Venmo transactions in their public feed, for all to see). We now all just take for granted that there are video cameras in every business and on every street corner. (As a friend remarked about a recent shopping trip to a big-box retailer recently: “I got spooked by seeing myself on a little screen at the self-checkout. That takes self-checkout a little too far.”)
And, famously, China is perfecting facial-recognition software (with the help of American universities) to be able to locate where every resident is at all times. Some stores in Great Britain are now banning people from entering their premises if facial-recognition software recognizes them as a previous shoplifter. New York Knicks owner James Dolan is facing a lawsuit after using facial-recognition technology to ban his business enemies and critics from Madison Square Garden.
But cameras are what young people now seek, hoping to parlay their everyday goings-on into a Kardashian-like media empire. One poll found that nearly one-quarter of Gen Zers planned on becoming internet influencers, making their living filming videos for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. According to the poll, only 7 percent of the respondents said they would not want to be an influencer, despite the intense scrutiny that those who pursue such a career path face both in their public and private lives.
Further, it has been well documented that today’s young people equate unpopular speech with actual violence, so it makes sense that they’ll do what it takes to eliminate it. If we have the technological tools to promote “safety,” then why not use them? (For instance, in the above example in which a professor used the term “sacred cow,” the complaint said the student would “not feel safe around him” any longer.)
But such government surveillance programs do not promote safety (in the sense in which Gen Zers understand it), they endanger it. Historically, information culled by governments through illicit means was often used to punish political opponents, crushing dissent and ruining lives. At no point did people flee the United States to go live under the East German Stasi, for example.
And as more young people move into government roles, what future controls on our behavior are they going to implement in order to make the world safer? The technology already exists, for example, to limit how fast cars can go or to automatically send a speeding ticket to any vehicle that exceeds the posted limit. In the interest of preserving the planet’s climate, the government could use the internet to cap how warm your house can be in the winter or how cool it can be in the summer. And the U.S. Treasury Department is already discussing plans to issue a “digital dollar,” which would eliminate anonymous transactions made with cash. We would all be under the watchful eye of the federal government at all times.
The way to avert this horror show is to stop rewarding those who portray having cameras on you at all times as a healthy and productive way to lead your life. Or who think they deserve plaudits for engaging in snitch culture, which both punishes unpopular thought and seeks to elevate the person doing the calling-out by demonstrating their more enlightened sensibilities.
America would be a much better place if it simply heeded the advice of Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson: “The less I know about other people’s affairs, the happier I am. I’m not interested in caring about people. I once worked with a guy for three years and never learned his name. Best friend I ever had. We still never talk sometimes.”