Why Surveillance Is Bad (And It's Not Because It's 'Dystopian')
Vitalik Buterin recently wrote a thread on X about why surveillance is bad — and why calling it "dystopian" isn't enough. He pointed to a powerful article on Iran's surveillance state and argued that we need to be precise about why this stuff matters. Below are reflections on his post, with a few reactions to the lines that stuck with me.
The Semantic Stop Sign Problem
Vitalik's opener: freedom advocates often use "dystopian" as a semantic stop sign. We know it means "bad," we nod, and we don't go further. He put it like this:
When we criticize various companies and countries for being "dystopian" and stop there, then to someone who's not already in the same memeplex, it sounds like we're basically criticizing companies and countries for not complying with our culture's aesthetic preferences. Which is ... duh, companies and countries are supposed to not comply with each other's aesthetic preferences, that's the whole point of the "pluralism" thing.
Reflection: He's right. "Dystopian" shuts down the conversation instead of advancing it. If we don't spell out the mechanism — what surveillance actually does to power, to coalitions, to the possibility of dissent — we're just signaling to our in-group. I've caught myself using the word that way. The fix isn't to stop caring; it's to name the concrete harm.
What Surveillance Actually Does
The Iran piece, Vitalik says, makes the mechanism clear: the problem isn't the vibe, it's the power balance between individual and state. Surveillance lets a regime stay in power indefinitely by ensuring that everyone other than police and security forces has no real chance to challenge the status quo without being punished — and the guns (and drones) stay with the regime.
Reflection: Once you put it that way, "dystopian" feels like a euphemism. The harm is legible: fewer degrees of freedom, no credible exit from a small coalition's grip. That's why infrastructure that resists single-point surveillance isn't a lifestyle choice; it's a precondition for the possibility of political change in a lot of places.
The Dictator's Handbook Logic
Vitalik brings in The Dictator's Handbook: large-coalition governments have to keep more people happy, so they tend to be less brutal. Small-coalition regimes are the nasty ones. Then he drops this:
Here is the near-term dark outcome of dictatorship + automated warfare + surveillance: a regime can literally survive with a coalition of size 1, because an army of all-seeing eyes and robots can defeat the entire populace in battle if needed.
In Iran we already see dictatorship + surveillance; add automated police and you get what he calls the unholy trifecta.
Reflection: "Coalition of size 1" is the phrase I can't unsee. We're used to thinking of tyranny as needing at least an army, a party, a bureaucracy. The possibility that it could narrow to one actor plus machines plus total visibility is a different kind of threat. It makes privacy and censorship resistance feel less like preferences and more like structural constraints on whether opposition is even possible.
Two Flavors of Surveillance
Vitalik pushes back on the Iran article's implicit frame: Iran, Russia, and China as the main antagonists. They do awful things. But, he says, Israeli and other Western tech companies also do a lot of dystopian shit. He distinguishes two patterns:
| Flavor | Pattern |
|---|---|
| Iran / Russia / China | Great control over a medium area: you can see everything, but it requires the government of that territory to be in the game. |
| Israel / West | Medium control over a great area: more limits on what they can do, but their surveillance is global — they can see activity in places they don't even operate. |
He's careful: the line isn't clean. Israeli surveillance enables abuse in Palestine; other Western surveillance has been used to target dissidents and protesters. Still, on average the pattern holds. The second flavor is scary in a different way — global projection of power: officials in one country can be blackmailed, droned, or targeted by another. Powerful states have gone after EU officials, ICC officials, and others. So we'll need to figure out what "democratic accountability" even means when a civil servant must answer to the public but not to foreign intelligence.
Reflection: I hadn't framed it as "deep control, medium area" vs. "medium control, global area" before. Both are dangerous; they optimize for different kinds of dominance. The Western variant is easy to overlook when you live inside it, because the control feels less total day to day — but "we can see you everywhere, just not always act on it" is still a massive power gradient. Vitalik's point about democratic governments eventually wanting more privacy for themselves is sharp: even states that believe in oversight will want protection from other states' spooks.
Privacy Helps the Weak
Vitalik's closing thesis:
Privacy generally helps whoever is weaker. "Weaker" does not mean "moral": sometimes the weaker side is criminal. But in the 21st century we are at serious risk of stronger factions using modern technologies to establish unbreakable lock-in to power. And so on average, reducing the gradient of power, giving the weak a fighting chance, is something that the world desperately needs.
Reflection: I'd sign that. Privacy isn't inherently good or bad; it rebalances. Criminals benefit too, and we have to live with that tradeoff. The question is whether we accept a world where the strong can lock in power with eyes and robots, or we build and protect ways for the weak to have a fighting chance. On average, I want the latter.
What Can Be Done?
Vitalik is honest: he doesn't know of a full solution. Privacy technology and censorship-resistant internet — including something like a 1 Mbps floor as a global human right, outside pure nation-state sovereignty — can reduce the possibility of total control. Then he asks: But what else?
Reflection: I don't have a clean answer either. What I do know is that these concerns — power balance, surveillance-resistant communication, infrastructure that doesn't depend on a single state or company — are part of why we architected Spritz the way we did: decentralized messaging without phone numbers, censorship-resistant protocols, and identity that doesn't hand a central party a ready-made graph of who talks to whom. No single product fixes the gradient of power, but we try to build in that direction.
Further reading
- The Digital Iron Curtain: How Iran Built the World's Most Invasive Surveillance State — myprivacy.blog
- The Dictator's Handbook — Wikipedia