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Forget Gen Z. This Is Generation Surveillance.
The defining experience for generations to come will be knowing what it feels like to be constantly watched
What does it mean to have an unforgettable childhood — or an unforgettable life?
“First memories, forever.” That’s the promise of Babeyes, a product unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. The idea is simple: Attach the Babeyes camera to your newborn or infant, and it will gather footage of the world from a baby’s point of view. “Thanks to Babeyes, all these moments, filled with love, will be watched later by the grown child, as if he remembered the scene,” the Babeyes site explains. Online reaction, however, was far less charitable. “Sci-fi dystopias are warnings not development road maps,” one Twitter user tweeted in response to an ad. “This is fucking creepy!” another declared.
But if a baby body camera feels like it’s a step too far now, will that always be the case?
From being the early test subjects of “sharenting”—the modern parental propensity for putting every moment of their child’s life on social media — to having smartphone apps that follow their every movement, Generation Z is the first to come of age in a world of total surveillance. Every generation that follows will inevitably know what it feels like to be constantly watched. Fundamentally, they will be linked by a logic of their era that they have no choice but to accept: Every aspect of their lives must be documented and tracked.
Recently, Haley Sharpe, a 16-year-old midlevel TikTok star, spoke to Vox’s Rebecca Jennings about achieving the height of minicelebrity that many in her generation crave. “To be a very online young person in 2019 is to share the same goal: have the kind of social media following wherein performing your life online becomes a paying job.”
But it comes at a cost that Sharpe said she never anticipated. “It’s cool, but it’s also weird to think I’m sitting here and somebody out there — more than somebody — is watching my videos right now. Constantly somebody is watching one,” she said. “That’s so weird for me.”
Sharpe may be part of a shrinking subset of young people who can still remember that it once felt weird to…
