IN THE age of smartphones, everyone carries a camera — and increasingly, everyone acts as if they are part of a production. In Bangladesh, this technological reality has collided with the erosion of privacy, creating an unsettling new normal: security checkpoints turned into stages for public spectacle. The stars of these impromptu performances are rarely willing participants. Instead, they are motorcyclists, pedestrians and citizens unlucky enough to be stopped and filmed under the guise of routine checks.
These scenes unfold daily on the congested roads of Dhaka, where joint forces conduct searches ostensibly for public safety. But in many cases, the search is only the opening act. The real show begins when mobile phones emerge, wielded by amateur vloggers, onlookers, or even the uniformed officers themselves. These moments are quickly edited by public sentiment, uploaded online and dissected in comment sections. The process is rarely about justice. It is content.
A recent incident on June 14 exemplifies this trend. Three young men en route to Mugda Medical College Hospital were stopped for a vehicle check. They were reportedly riding a motorcycle without a silencer and, critically, were not carrying mobile phones. What followed was not a straightforward security procedure but a swarm of self-styled journalists thrusting cameras into their faces. The footage quickly went viral, and with it came a flood of online judgement. This is no longer policing in the traditional sense, it is performance.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari once remarked that we are increasingly becoming the content. That notion, once reserved for critiques of surveillance capitalism, has found disturbing expression in contemporary Bangladesh. The boundaries between citizen and subject, observer and observed, are dissolving rapidly. Surveillance has become democratised, and with it, accountability has given way to entertainment.
Such practices are not just ethically dubious — they are also illegal. Article 32 of the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to personal liberty. Filming individuals without consent, particularly in vulnerable circumstances, and then disseminating such content, is a clear violation of existing cyber laws. But legality alone is a poor defence in a society so deeply enthralled by the spectacle.
In one incident, two women stopped by officers in Hatirjheel pleaded not to be filmed, fearing the social fallout. Their requests were ignored. Their image, and by extension their dignity, became collateral in a digital drama. The cameras rolled on, indifferent to their distress. What could have remained a quiet matter of law enforcement was turned into a public shaming ritual.
This is not merely a legal issue. It is psychological harm inflicted in real time. The Stanford Prison Experiment, led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, demonstrated how easily people succumb to cruelty when roles and anonymity combine. Replace the experimental guards and prisoners with camera-wielding bystanders and stopped citizens, and a similar dynamic unfolds. When dehumanisation is socially sanctioned and incentivised by likes and shares, cruelty becomes easy to justify.
This behaviour is partly a reflection of our collective obsession with visibility. Media theorist Neil Postman warned of a society where entertainment displaces rational discourse. That moment seems to have arrived. Every interaction is potentially a viral clip; every encounter, a chance at fleeting digital fame. Even law enforcement officers now curate their online presence, filming themselves while on duty. In this context, policing is no longer about service, it is about branding.Ìý
Digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff has observed that in the age of social media, institutional credibility is often replaced by individual clout. When enforcement becomes theatre, clout takes precedence over ethics. In one especially troubling case, a man carrying a small quantity of alcohol attempted to speak with officers calmly. Instead of discretion or dialogue, he was surrounded by cameras, subjected to public scolding and left to be judged online. His guilt or innocence was secondary. What mattered was the performance.
The damage caused by this culture of exposure is profound. As researcher Brené Brown has argued, shame does not produce positive change — it diminishes our sense of agency. Public humiliation, under the pretext of accountability, often reduces individuals to caricatures of wrongdoing, stripping away the possibility of rehabilitation or understanding.
There is a deeper ethical failure at work here. Even recordings made in the name of transparency can become problematic when they treat people as a means to an end. Philosopher Immanuel Kant’s moral principle — that individuals should always be treated as ends in themselves — rings especially true. When a person’s pain becomes fodder for entertainment, we breach that principle in irreparable ways.
Professional journalists are trained to navigate these ethical dilemmas. They are bound by codes that emphasise the importance of minimising harm and upholding privacy. However, citizen livestreamers or TikTok vigilantes are guided not by ethics but by engagement metrics. In their hands, journalism morphs into something else entirely — something closer to humiliation-as-content.
This is particularly dangerous for those already on society’s margins. Women, religious and sexual minorities, the poor — these groups are disproportionately affected by public exposure. Surveillance theorist Simone Browne reminds us that surveillance systems have historically targeted the marginalised. In today’s Bangladesh, this legacy continues; only now it is facilitated by everyday citizens with smartphones.
The irony is bitter. Edward Snowden, who exposed the vast architecture of state surveillance, warned against tools that turn people into watchers of each other. Today, the very instruments he warned us about — phones, networks, platforms — are used not just by governments but by citizens themselves, against one another.
Solutions, of course, are not simple. Legal reform is essential. Clearer guidelines on consent and the limits of public filming must be established and enforced. But legislation alone will not stem the tide. What is needed just as urgently is a moral shift — a collective rethinking of how we treat one another in the public sphere.
Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, has written about how the internet has created ‘behaviour modification empires’ driven by outrage and humiliation. Resisting this culture, he argues, is a deeply human act. That resistance must begin with a conscious decision not to film every transgression, not to conflate shame with justice, and not to transform fellow citizens into objects of ridicule.
Until that cultural shift occurs, checkpoints will continue to serve less as sites of security and more as arenas of public degradation.
The implications reach far beyond bruised reputations or transient embarrassment. We risk creating a society where individuals alter their behaviour, not because of legal norms, but out of fear of being recorded and shamed. Such fear-based compliance undermines the foundations of democracy. It fosters conformity, not civic engagement.
Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that ‘hell is other people’ acquires new meaning in this context. The hell, increasingly, is a thousand cameras waiting to capture your most vulnerable moment. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of self-presentation suggests that we all behave differently depending on whether we are ‘on stage’ or ‘off stage.’ But in a world where the stage never ends, where the curtain never falls, individuality itself becomes impossible.
This shift carries long-term consequences. Children growing up in such an environment will normalise surveillance. Michel Foucault’s warning that ‘visibility is a trap’ rings more ominously than ever. His metaphor of the panopticon — a prison design where inmates are always visible to a central watchman — now manifests in the pocket-sized cameras we all carry. The watcher is no longer centralised. It is us.
What defines a just society is not its zeal in exposing its citizens but its capacity to protect and understand them. Dignity should not be the casualty of public accountability. If we are to restore a sense of empathy, we must actively resist the lure of spectacle and learn to see one another not as content but as complex, worthy human beings.
Because the gravest danger today may not be surveillance by the state. It is the surveillance we inflict on one another — unrelenting, unregulated and often unkind. And unless we confront this culture of exposure, we may soon find that society itself has become one vast checkpoint, impossible to cross without forfeiting our dignity.
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HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist and political analyst.
