Back when storage was costly, surveillance meant hard choices: who’s worth a folder, who isn’t. Moore’s Law crushed that scarcity—terabytes now cost pennies, so everyone’s worth logging. The bottleneck used to be human eyes; now CCTV, body cams, and AI (30 years ahead of what you see) automate the labor. Outsource the watchers, outsource the analysts, and suddenly the panopticon scales. Cheap storage didn’t just make repression affordable—it made it automatic.