The association of surveillance with technology is longstanding and profound. For many modern people, surveillance primarily is a technological matter, of closed circuit cameras, iris and body scanners, mobile phone intercepts and vague fears of implanted microchips. Gary T. Marx notes in 2002 that the last half of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in the use of control technologies that had previously been the preserve of ‘the dystopic imagination of science fiction writers’. He includes a list of such advances:

The variety and reach of such technology, simultaneously impressive and slightly perturbing, has expanded exponentially since Marx wrote those words. Chapter 3 observed that since David Lyon's 2003 assessment of Nineteen Eighty-Four, new forms of social media and their massive everyday use by lightning-fast digital natives and plodding digital dinosaurs have transformed the possibilities of surveillance and have embedded them into the processes of daily life. The chapter on surveillance before Nineteen Eighty-Four illustrates how utopian writers and filmmakers had explored the possible impact of new and projected technology with surveillance implications, whether the enabled credit cards of Looking Backward or the identity cards of A Modern Utopia, televisual monitoring in Metropolis and Modern Times or genetic scrutiny in Brave New World.