Increased sousveillance structurally selects for docility and polarization.

In college it felt like every class I took included the lens of game theory, evolutionary biology, or the panopticon.

But sousveillance turns out to be weirder and stronger.

Sousveillance: everyone now has a high-quality camera on them at all times that can also shoot video... and they also have social networks to distribute it instantly to potentially billions of people.

If you see something you think is a transgression--of a law, or of your tribe's norms--you can video it and upload it and distribute it.

People know this, which means they become more docile, less willing to take actions that might be used as transgressions.

But the ability to sousveil is also used in anger.

People cherry pick the transgressions that confirm what their tribe already believes, producing a never ending stream of confirming evidence, no matter the ground truth.

In a cacophony of information, you can choose which subset to pay attention to.

Our brains make the implicit assumption that what we see (a subset) is a random / representative subset.

But when it's been curated by humans with a bias it absorbs the bias of the curators.

For swarm sifting sorts of social, that bias can be massive even if each individual action doesn't feel that biased.