Today, Big Brother is better known as a reality show where a group of people live together in a large house, isolated from the outside world, and they are continuously monitored by television cameras and watched by countless viewers. It is the viewers who decide who can stay in the house and who must go.

Big Brother on TV is but one of the many distractions that keep us from watching Orwell’s Big Brother, which is becoming more and more of a problem in today’s world. The passive tolerance that we have developed for the growing 24/7 surveillance of peaceful law-abiding citizens by the government, the endless interference of nanny-state zealots in our personal lives, and the gradual erosion of our personal sphere by regulators and bureaucrats, are among the most serious problems of our Western society. They will not be happy until we become a society of sheeple. I don’t want to be a sheeple, and I don’t want our children and their children to live as sheeple.

This modest reality politics proposal combines the two definitions of Big Brother: complete surveillance must have a place in politics, but it is we-the-people of the 99% who should be watching _our_ government, instead of the other way around. Let’s put all politicians and administrators in a large glasshouse full with television cameras, and let’s watch them 24/7.



There are many good people in the world, and many of them choose to go into politics and administration. But I am afraid the current system weeds them out and leaves only the bad guys, those who have always considered politics as a make-money-fast scheme, in positions of power.

With this new system, as soon as two bad guys exchange votes for bribes or do just one thing that they shouldn’t do, viewers see / share / tweet / youtube everything and kick their ass out. The system will also show us all the bureaucrats who play Sudoku, Angry Birds, watch porn on the web, or polish their nails all day, handsomely paid with our tax money, and we will kick their ass out too.

For the system to work, the surveillance must be really complete: all that they say to each other, and all their communications with the external world, must be watched. Everything they do, everything they say in official meetings and behind the scenes, everything they write, every wink and every smile, every fart and every belch, must be captured by cameras and microphones, streamed to the world, and recorded.

Of course, the devil is in the details: our politicians and administrators will try to fool the system, for example using special codes to exchange secret messages with each other and with their friends outside. But I am sure we can devise appropriate countermeasures, and I believe reality politics would be a very interesting experiment to try.