Xprize Founder: Humans Behave Better When Watched

Read that list again. Each layer already exists in some form. Stacked together, the claim is that there is no longer anywhere a person can be that is not, in principle, observable.

Diamandis appears to have been pushed toward this view after recording a podcast interview with Will Marshall, the CEO of Planet, the largest operator of Earth-observing satellites. Marshall told him bluntly: no one can hide anymore. If you build a school, we are going to see the school. If you build a data center, we are going to see the data center. Marshall framed that constant visibility as accountability for the whole world to see.

He is not alone in saying it

Diamandis comments land roughly two years after Oracle founder Larry Ellison made a near-identical argument. Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on, Ellison predicted at an Oracle event in 2024.

The throughline is the same: surveillance as a behavior-correction tool. The pitch is that if you know you might be seen, you act better. Diamandis goes further than most, addressing parents directly and warning that their kids will grow up in a world with no off the record.

The best privacy strategy is integrity, Diamandis writes, urging people to live so that being seen costs you nothing, and to fight hard for a world where the watching goes both ways.

The part the pitch skips over

The technology is real and spreading, and on that narrow point Diamandis, Ellison, and Marshall are correct. It is already hard to get through a day without being photographed by home security systems like Ring, camera-laden cars like the ones Tesla makes, or automated license plate readers from companies like Flock. Even indoors, phones feed location and behavior to ad networks and data brokers.

What the optimistic framing glosses over is who decides what good behavior is. The definitions of good or honest are in the eye of the beholder, and in this scenario the beholder is the set of powerful companies that own and operate the surveillance infrastructure. Diamandis argues that transparency is a tool, and tools do not have ethics. But tools inherit the biases of the people who build them. Who decides which behavior captured by a security camera counts as honest? That question goes unanswered.

Even Diamandis cannot resolve the core problem. He admits he has been chewing on whether people would behave well because it is the right thing to do, or only because they might be under surveillance, and he does not land on an answer.

People are not accepting it quietly

Diamandis treats pervasive surveillance as inevitable. The public reaction suggests otherwise.

• Some cities have covered their Flock cameras with trash bags after reports that the company data was being accessed by ICE, the FBI, and other law enforcement.
• Public pushback on Ring Search Party feature, which was aimed at finding lost dogs, contributed to the company canceling its own partnership with Flock.
• Meta is dealing with complaints about its Ray-Ban camera glasses and is fighting a lawsuit over privacy concerns.

None of those are fringe responses. They are ordinary people and local governments deciding the trade is not worth it.

What to watch over the next 24 to 72 hours

Expect the debate to stay loud while the post circulates. A few things worth tracking in the immediate term:

• Counter-arguments from privacy researchers and civil liberties groups responding directly to the Substack essay, since the framing is unusually blunt and makes an easy target.
• Follow-on commentary from other executives either backing Diamandis or distancing from him, the way the conversation forked after Ellison 2024 remarks.
• Renewed scrutiny of specific vendors named in the discourse, especially Flock, Ring, and Planet, as journalists revisit how their data is accessed and by whom.

The bigger fight Diamandis raises, whether the watching goes both ways or only flows up to the companies holding the cameras, will not be settled this week. But his willingness to say the quiet part plainly has put the question back on the table.

Source: TechCrunch