ICCA and Surveillance Anxiety
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: ICCA: Identity Constructed Communication ArchitectureVolume V: Psychology, Autonomy & Digital HabitusPaper: ICCA and Surveillance AnxietySurveillance anxiety is the psychological condition produced when individuals sense, infer, or imagine that their digital environment observes, records, correlates, and judges their behaviour. Unlike fear, surveillance anxiety does not require understanding. It emerges from the possibility of surveillance, not its proof. People impose irrational limits on their own behaviour, curtail creativity, suppress authenticity, and avoid harmless expression because they fear being flagged, misinterpreted, or judged by opaque systems. Surveillance anxiety is both felt and inferred: felt as tension, caution, and emotional fatigue; inferred as imagined consequences, misread intentions, and disproportionate self‑restraint. ICCA eliminates identity visibility, behavioural metadata, continuity, correlation, inference, and prediction. Trustless systems dissolve surveillance anxiety by removing the observer and eliminating the informational surfaces that make self‑limiting behaviour possible. This paper examines the origins of surveillance anxiety, the irrational limits it produces, and how ICCA restores autonomy by making surveillance impossible.
Source: Figshare
Author: Karl A L Smith
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204529264