I’ve been mulling over something that’s been doing the rounds online lately, and it’s gotten under my skin more than most things do. It’s about Amazon Ring, Flock Safety, and how we’ve somehow collectively sleepwalked into a surveillance apparatus that would make George Orwell take notes. The frustrating bit? We paid for it ourselves.

Here’s the thing that really gets me: we’re living through this bizarre inversion of totalitarianism. We used to worry about governments forcing surveillance on us, right? That was the whole China-versus-the-West narrative. But nobody talks about the fact that America has arguably built something far more insidious—and we voluntarily installed it in our homes. We bought the cameras. We connected them to the internet. We gave corporations and law enforcement the keys to our front doors, all for the convenience of checking if a parcel arrived while we’re at work.