Many people don’t care about protecting their privacy, but actually demand the right to show off their private lives, to exhibit them. For some time there have been signs that this behaviour — an inextricable mixture of voyeurism and exhibitionism, surveillance and submission — was bound to happen.

There’s an early example in Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window, in which a photojournalist (James Stewart), stuck at home with his leg in plaster, passes the time watching the neighbours in the building opposite. Talking to François Truffaut, Hitchcock said: “Sure, he’s a snooper, but aren’t we all?” Truffaut replied: “We’re all voyeurs to some extent, if only when we see an intimate film. And James Stewart is exactly in the position of a spectator looking at a movie.” Hitchcock said: “I’ll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away and says, ‘It’s none of my business.’ They could pull down their blinds, but they never do; they stand there and look out”.

This urge to look, to watch, to spy, is matched by the opposite — a shameless desire to exhibit, which has exploded with the rise of the Internet, and especially since 1996, because of webcams. At the start of the webcam boom, five male and female students exhibited themselves online (www.hereandnow.net) 24 hours a day, every day, as they moved about their two-storey house in Oberlin, Ohio. Their lives were monitored by 40 cameras carefully placed all over the house. Since then thousands — singles, married couples and families — have invited Internet users around the world to share their private lives, virtually without taboos.

In another online first, when a young estate agent from Shanghai, Lu Youqing, learned he was dying of stomach cancer, he decided to share his fight against the disease. His Diary of Death became a global electronic sensation, following his progress through to his dying words: “I’m going now. I love you.”

In the early 2000s, there was a proliferation of “trash TV” shows on ordinary US channels, where people unashamedly aired their most intimate problems and secret passions. On the most famous of these, the Jerry Springer Show, invited guests revealed scandalous details of their private lives before a laughing audience. The show was watched by more than eight million viewers and received thousands of calls every week from Americans ready to tell all for 15 minutes of fame.

Even murderers eagerly confessed every detail of their criminal lives. US cable channel Court TV specialised in the confessions of murderers and was first in the world to present, with sordid realism, “the confessions of Steven Smith, who tells how he raped and murdered a doctor in a New York hospital in 1989; Daniel Rakowitz, who killed a female friend, cut up her body and boiled it, also in 1989; and David Garcia, a male prostitute, who describes his murder of a wheelchair-bound client in 1995.

Today, millions publish intimate details of their lives on social media, with a total lack of concern. They don’t seem worried that they are choosing to wear a virtual electronic tag, which allows the new Big Brothers to trace their movements while somewhere machines accumulate huge volumes of data on them. This novel idea of identity is probably what has encouraged thousands to enlist with police services as voluntary informants. In 2002, under the George W Bush administration, the US Department of Justice launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System, “tips” in the sense of information), which aimed to use workers whose jobs gave them access to people’s homes as informers: deliverymen, plumbers, bricklayers, locksmiths, electricians, satellite dish installers, postmen, gas engineers, gardeners, removal men, domestic staff. Hundreds agreed to contact the police if they saw anything they thought suspicious.

A requirement for “fourth-generation warfare” is moving from an informed society to a society of informers. This was the goal of the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which installed several hundred surveillance cameras at isolated and strategic locations on the Texas-Mexico border. They were connected to the Internet, allowing anyone, anywhere in the world, to watch desert areas of Texas, or the banks of the Rio Grande, without personal risk. If they saw clandestine migrants onscreen, they could report them simply by emailing the authorities. Some 30 million snitches in different countries became “volunteer informers” to the US border patrol in Texas until the scheme was suspended.

In the UK a private enterprise, Internet Eyes, launched a similar initiative in 2009, presented as a game in which any Internet user can take part. The aim is to monitor shops and streets, and detect crime. Volunteers pay a small monthly fee to join the network. Once their identity has been verified, they get access to images from four surveillance cameras through their computers. From the comfort of their own home, subscribers watch live camera feeds. If they spot a theft, an assault or suspicious behaviour, they click an alert button. This freezes the picture so that they can zoom in to check. The store manager gets a message with the captured image attached, and if he considers the alert useful, the informant collects three points. If there was no crime but he feels the alert was justified, the informant gets one point. If he feels the alert was not justified, the watcher loses points. Every month Internet Eyes offers a reward of up to £1,000 to the spy who has detected the most frauds or thefts.

In an interview with the Telegraph, the site’s creator, Tony Morgan, said: “This could turn out to be the best crime prevention weapon there’s ever been. I wanted to combine the serious business of stopping crime with the incentive of winning money. There are over four million CCTV cameras in the UK and only one in a thousand gets watched. Crimes are bound to get missed but this way people the cameras will be watched by lots of people 24 hours a day.”

Opponents of video surveillance believe Internet Eyes is dangerous, that it “impinges on private life and could be used for spying” — because it allows anyone to see the faces and behaviour of customers in stores. The site has been criticised for allowing people to spy on their neighbours, and making it possible for serious criminals to analyse stores’ routines.

Amid growing migration and xenophobia, it’s easy to imagine that the European authorities might be tempted to install cameras linked to the Internet, knowing that they could count on a legion of volunteer civilian informers. That is one of the perverse things about our control societies: they make people watched and watchers at the same time; they must spy on others, while being spied on. In a democratic context, where we believe we are living in the greatest possible freedom, we are in fact inching towards the dream of the most totalitarian societies.

Ignacio Ramonet is a former director of Le Monde diplomatique. He has just published L’Empire de la surveillance, suivi de deux entretiens avec Julian Assange et Noam Chomsky, Galilée, Paris, 2015, on which this article is based. Translated by Charles Goulden.

Copyright ©2015 Le Monde diplomatique -- used by permission of Agence Global