Do you feel[act] watched?
I just finished Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. It made me feel things. First there was a growing unease about millennial parenting norms (my cohort). The second was a sinking feeling about the true cost of consumption in the streaming age.
The first part of the novel follows a writer who visits his mentor to interview him for a magazine. He drops his phone in a sink full of water just beforehand and it breaks, meaning he has no way to record the conversation. Through a series of awkward moments, he finds himself unable to tell his mentor the phone is broken. He conducts the interview with no recording device, and is forced to reconstruct it later from memory.
This literally happened to me at work the other day. I managed to get through an entire 30 minute interview without realising Gemini wasn’t listening. The sinking feeling when it hit me. It was as if I’d lost all faith in my brain’s capacity to remember and reconstruct. Terrifying.
The rest of the story details the interpersonal consequences of the missed transcription. The philosophical space it takes up is much broader than that, though. It made me think about humans as observers, and the role of technology in our proclivity for observation. It was most disturbing, for me, in the parts where the characters talked about their children — because they were crazy and I saw a little too much of myself in them.
After finishing the novel I had this sense that the way in which our generation is screwing up our offspring is by watching them too closely. Leaving them no room to live unobserved. It starts with baby monitors but it continues with an almost forensic knowledge of their diets, their sleep inclinations (or lack thereof), their friendships, their academic potential, their behavioural quirks etc.
It’s because we care so much, right? My childhood featured a lot more benign neglect. There was so much freedom to fossick and fuck up without a hovering parent to bear witness. When I was 7 (the age my son is now), I used to walk home from primary school with my twin. It took us an hour. Can you imagine — an hour without an adult at that age? Crossing busy roads. Wandering through parks. Walking along waterways. How did it only take one generation for something so simple to go from sounding relatively normal to genuinely insane?
The residual thought I’ve carried with me since finishing Transcription is about how our behaviour changes when we suspect we’re being watched, either by a person or a device. This seems obvious, but surely it’s worth considering in more depth when it comes to our kids? The idea that our constant vigilance is shaping their behaviour. Even repressing their freedom.
One of my favourite physics experiments (because it’s a bit woo woo), is known as the double slit experiment. It’s about the behaviour of photons, but for ease of imagining, let’s pretend they’re paintballs. Imagine you've got a paintball gun aimed at a wall with two skinny slits cut into it, and a big blank canvas behind to catch the paint splats. If paintballs were just paintballs, you'd expect two lines of colour splattered on the canvas — each lined up behind a slit. In reality, when you fire a paintball [photon] gun at the two slits, you get a zebra-striped pattern of lines, as if each paintball is somehow flying through both slits at the same time, and crashing into itself multiple times on the way to the canvas.
The crazy part of the experiment is that if you set up a camera to capture the paintball going through the slit, the stripes disappear and you get the two lines you were initially expecting. It’s as if the paintballs know they're being observed and start acting predictably.
So when there’s no process of information capture in place, photons act like a wave of possibility (being in many places at once), but when recording of their movement is introduced, that behaviour narrows down to one possibility.
This sounds spooky, and plenty of pseudo scientists have made a bunch of money saying that it is. In reality, the introduction of a recording device (e.g. camera) is another object for the photon to interact with, and that interaction is what causes the behaviour change — it’s not like the electron has consciousness — but I think the experiment offers an interesting lens to think about human behaviour in a technology saturated world.
There’s a new startup here in Aotearoa called Lume. It launched a few weeks ago. Lume is a new musical format designed to revive the ‘album’ in the age of streaming. The idea is you buy a digital version of an album that comes with the ‘world’ that surrounds it — images, demos, music videos etc. all bundled together in one digital package. You buy it once and own it forever, and 80% of the revenue goes to the artist.
I’m into this idea on many levels — a digital experience built for music lovers, designed to pay artists fairly whilst giving their biggest fans a unique engagement experience? Sign me up. I downloaded it the minute it hit the app store, and bought my first Lume album within ten minutes. The artist was a Kiwi singer songwriter called Erny Belle. Listening to my first Lume felt transformative in a way I didn’t expect. I mean, the album is wonderful, but I also sat on my couch and listened to it end-to-end like a meditation. It felt like I was alone in the universe. It felt like freedom. It was the first time I’d felt that way about a music discovery experience since the last time I went to a record store. I’ve been trying to pin down what it is about Lume that makes music feel different. From a practical perspective, the music player within the app is virtually identical to a streaming platform.
The first difference is in the transaction. I paid NZ$25 for my Lume, knowing that Erny Belle would receive a fair chunk of that, and also that I now owned a real thing in exchange. The transaction was complete, leaving the listening experience free from labour. I think this sense of listening labour in music streaming is something I’m more conscious of than most because I’m ARMY. Within the BTS fandom (and most other organised pop fandoms tbh), streaming is seen as a way for fans to communicate their love to the artist. Streaming numbers and charts are evidence of how much we care. This sense of ‘doing my job’ is never far from my mind when I’m streaming BTS. Implicit in this is the awareness that my listening habits are being digitally watched.
I assume Lume has some analytics in place, but I think it’s there to record my engagement with the app, not the music itself. That distinction seems to matter (to me).
The second difference is in the value I place upon the music. Because I paid for it up front, because it’s a ‘thing’ that I now own forever, I want to justify my financial choice by giving it all my attention. The design of the Lume user experience means you have the opportunity to “go deeper”, and pore over the notes, the images, the video, the sheet music, and any other extra odds and ends the artist has thrown into their Lume. Going deeper is almost always rewarding when it comes to art, don’t you think?
One of my favourite Kiwi photographers, Si Moore, likes to say “you are what you eat” when it comes to the creative process — I think his actual words were, “want to change your output? Change your input.” Basically: if you only eat candy floss, that’s all you can make. He was talking about taste more than engagement, because he’s speaking as an artist and creator, not a consumer. For an audience, I think engagement is the equivalent idea: the quality of your listening dictates the quantity of your inspiration. I don’t think the age of streaming rewards deep engagement. We don’t have to sacrifice anything to engage with art these days — our money goes to the platforms, and that creates a level of separation between audience and artist that makes series, albums, and films feel free. In 2026, we don’t have to show up at a certain time or even watch an ad to consume anything we want. All the art and content of the world is at our fingertips, for as long as we can handle it. What’s more, there’s an avalanche of it. Everyday, more. Most of us engage with content only as long as the discourse lasts. Which is never long.
What do we lose, when our every move is being watched and quantified by our digital overlords? Privacy is the obvious answer. But these reflections are making me wonder if the presence of a perpetual observer in our lives might be even more sinister than that. I suspect that by handing over our behavioural data so thoughtlessly, we may be giving up a piece of our freedom.
What does it mean for kids to grow up in a world where they assume every moment is being observed, recorded, or captured in some way? Are we turning their brains into little panopticons, until they self-police their own behaviour, smoothing out the edges of their uniqueness, suppressing their creativity? Becoming particles of predictability, instead of waves of possibility?
What happens to our brains when art is served to us in an endless waterfall that feels free? I suspect that by erasing its value, we may be sacrificing the unique flow state that’s born in the space between intention and attention, and the creativity that follows.
You know what, since I’ve had these thoughts, I’ve stopped wearing my Apple watch and tried to pay less attention to what my kids are doing at any given moment. It’s not much, but it’s a start. See also: books, Lumes, cinema, vinyl.