The Surveillance Bargain Nobody Agreed To

The conceptual frame that makes current AI privacy concerns legible comes from a Bluesky post citing James C. Scott's analysis of state legibility: digital records make institutions — states, corporations, AIs — sighted where they were once blind . What was once a critique of bureaucratic state power now describes the operational reality of every platform that runs a recommendation engine, a content moderation pipeline, or a behavioral prediction model. The insight is not that surveillance has increased. It is that the infrastructure required for total visibility has been normalized…