The abandoned Presidio Modelo complex in 1995 Photograph: The Guardian

We have resurrected an ancient power structure.

No, not that one. Or that one. And certainly not that one.

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes a more familiar but no less destructive power, one that is derived from knowing everything about the subject while the subject knows nothing about the watcher. This asymmetry mirrors the age-old patterns of monarchs and subjects, where the “King” — or in our case, the algorithm — uses surveillance to predict, nudge, and control behavior. But history suggests that this is not the only way humans organize themselves. For thousands of years, egalitarian societies maintained equality not by ignoring power, but by aggressively monitoring it.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls this the Inverse Dominance Hierarchy. In these paleolithic societies, the group does not serve the alpha; the group works to prevent the emergence of alphas. If an individual attempts to hoard resources or dominate others, the community enacts a predictable trajectory of sanctions: gossip, ridicule, shunning, and eventually, exile or execution.

The question facing us is whether we can replicate this dynamic in a modern, digital economy. Can we build an Inverse Surveillance Capitalism?

From Panopticon to Sousveillance

The current model relies on the Panopticon—the few watching the many. To invert this, we need Sousveillance—the many watching the few. This doesn’t require dismantling technology but reorienting it. The fundamental rule of this new economy would be simple: privacy is a right for the individual, but transparency is an obligation for power.

Imagine a system where the “gossip” of the tribe is replaced by data. Currently, high-frequency trading firms and hedge funds operate in black boxes. In an inverse system, we would enact legislation requiring a “Glass Vault” for capital at scale. Once an entity’s assets exceed a certain threshold—say, $10 million—their transaction metadata would enter a public, read-only ledger. This isn’t about exposing what a billionaire buys for dinner, but about revealing where capital flows. Is it moving into R&D and wages, or into stock buybacks and political lobbying?

This radical transparency transforms the market. Just as a hunter-gatherer tribe uses ridicule to humble a braggart, we could use browser overlays to attach a “social cost” to every transaction. Imagine visiting a corporate website and seeing not just the price of a product, but an “Extraction Score” overlay—a verifiable metric showing the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker, or the company’s carbon footprint in real-time. The “brand value” that corporations spend billions to cultivate would become tethered to their actual behavior, monitored by the very people they serve.

Financial Exile and the Decay of Hoarded Wealth

When shame and ridicule fail to curb authoritarian behavior, egalitarian tribes move to shunning. In a digitized economy, shunning is financial. If we treat our collective purchasing power as a form of voting, we currently vote blindly and inefficiently. But with open banking APIs and “programmable consumerism,” we could organize “swarm strikes.” Instead of a slow, disorganized boycott, millions of users could authorize an app to pause their subscriptions or divert their purchases the moment a corporation violates a community standard. The liquidity that sustains the “King” would evaporate instantly.

In the most extreme cases, where capital is hoarded to the detriment of the public good, we might look to the concept of Demurrage, or “decaying money.” Proposed by economist Silvio Gesell, this principle suggests that money should lose value over time if it is not circulated. In our Glass Vault model, stagnant pools of excessive wealth could be subject to a high-velocity negative interest rate. This forces the “alpha” to recirculate resources back into the community—hiring, building, investing—rather than letting them sit as a war chest for dominance. It is the economic equivalent of execution: it kills the accumulation of power before it becomes absolute.

Guarding the Guards

There is a weakness though. If the tools we use to monitor the powerful—the dashboards, the public ledgers, the swarm apps—are themselves owned by private corporations, we have accomplished nothing. We would simply be trading one master for another.

For this system to work, the infrastructure of Inverse Surveillance must be radically open. The code for the public ledger and the algorithms that calculate “reputation scores” must be open-source and auditable by anyone. We cannot rely on a “black box” to tell us who the bad actors are. This requires a digital commons where the verification logic is decentralized. If a developer builds a tool to track corporate pollution, the methodology must be transparent so that it cannot be bought or tweaked by the very companies it is meant to monitor. Trust must be established through verification, not authority.

A Call to Action

Building this immune system for our democracy is not a task for a single group; it is something that only a community can do.

To the Developers and Data Scientists: We need you to build the “eyes” of the tribe. Stop optimizing ad-click algorithms and start building the scrapers, the open APIs, and the browser extensions that make the invisible flows of power visible. Create the “shaming” overlays that empower the consumer.

To the Storytellers and Artists: We need you to change the narrative. For decades, we have celebrated the “genius founder” and the accumulation of unlimited wealth. We need stories that revive the egalitarian ethos—narratives where hoarding is seen as a pathology and transparency is a badge of honor. You must make the Glass Vault culturally desirable before it can become politically feasible.

To the Legislators: We need a “Public Ledger Act.” We do not need you to break up companies; we need you to turn the lights on. Mandate that capital at scale must be transparent. Grant the public the right to audit the institutions that shape their lives.

To the Citizens: You are the tribe. Your attention and your money are the resources the “Kings” of surveillance capitalism crave. By demanding transparency and using tools that organize your economic power, you can reassert the ancient social contract.

We do not need to destroy the market, nor do we need to abandon technology. We simply need to remember that in healthy communities, the hierarchy is inverted.

The leaders do not watch the tribe.

The tribe watches the leaders.