The Grid's Surveillance Worked So Well We Stopped Noticing

Michael Sacasas is right that we've been here before — every major infrastructure technology sparked identical panic, from the telephone destroying conversation to electricity robbing us of sleep to automobiles demolishing family bonds.

People adjusted and life went on, and we're told this is reassuring. It is not, because the argument stops precisely where it becomes dangerous.

The real question is not whether we'll adapt to AI. It's what we'll have surrendered by the time we do — past tech anxiety didn't resolve, it calcified into invisibility. We learned to live with the problem by forgetting there was one.

Take the electric grid. In the 1920s and 30s, utilities sparked genuine terror about surveillance and control. A centralized grid meant corporate monopolies could monitor consumption patterns, manipulate pricing, cut power to dissidents. Families worried about dependency on distant corporate actors. Those fears were not paranoid. They were accurate. And we solved them by deciding not to see them. Within a generation, the grid became the backdrop of normal life. We stopped noticing the surveillance because it worked and stopped resisting monopoly pricing because resistance required understanding infrastructure most people couldn't access. The anxiety didn't evaporate. It just became the air we breathed.

Now the same grid runs smart meters that harvest behavioral data for insurance companies, load-shedding operates as a tool of class control cutting power to poor neighborhoods first during peak demand. Cyberattacks on grid infrastructure have become state-sponsored warfare. The 1920s fears materialized exactly as predicted. We were just no longer paying attention by the time they did. This is what "managing" technology anxiety actually means. Normalizing until you stop noticing the risk, so your grandchildren inherit the infrastructure you stopped questioning, running the exact racket you were warned about. By then the alternative seems quaint.

When someone tells you AI anxiety is cyclical and manageable, they're not wrong. They're just describing the mechanism by which we lose the ability to resist. The adaptation is real. So is the surrender. You'll see this play out most clearly in the decisions you make about which corporate systems become too embedded in your work to question. The moment you stop asking why a tool works becomes the moment you can't afford to know.