From Car Horns to Cookies: How a Traffic Jam in Los Angeles, a Forgotten French Philosopher, and a Giant Box Store in Arkansas Invented the Surveillance Economy

 


It begins—as most dystopias do—in Los Angeles.

Back in the 1950s, LA was booming. Cars were king. Suburbs were sprouting like weeds. But all those cheerful postwar commuters led to one very uncheerful problem: traffic. And not just the kind that makes you late. The kind that makes you question the point of civilization.

So city planners got clever. They started studying traffic patterns—recording speeds, bottlenecks, even driver behavior. They used sensors, maps, and primitive computers to figure out how people moved, when they moved, and why. It was the birth of what we now call behavioral analytics—though they didn’t know it yet.

Meanwhile, in France, a philosopher named Michel Foucault was quietly losing his mind—in the most brilliant way possible. Foucault argued that modern societies don’t control people by punishing them, but by watching them. Constantly. Not just in prisons, but in schools, hospitals, and yes—offices.

He called it the Panopticon effect: if you think you’re being watched, you behave. You self-discipline. And what’s cheaper than hiring a hundred guards? Getting you to police yourself.

Now, let’s take a sharp turn to... Arkansas.

There, in the town of Bentonville, a man named Sam Walton was fine-tuning a new kind of retail empire: Walmart. His secret? Relentless inventory tracking. Barcode scanners. Logistics that could predict when you’d run out of toilet paper. Walton wasn’t selling goods—he was selling data. Walmart pioneered the art of knowing what people wanted before they did.

By the early 2000s, Walmart’s real competitor wasn’t another store. It was Amazon, sitting on a gold mine of customer behavior, and powered by the same basic idea: watch, predict, control.

And now? The surveillance economy is everywhere. Every tap, click, scroll, purchase—logged, mined, optimized. Your location? Monetized. Your habits? Modeled. Your “free” social media use? That’s the product.

So:

  • LA traffic gave us behavioral modeling.

  • Foucault gave us the theory of invisible control.

  • Walmart gave us the logistics blueprint.

  • And Big Tech just plugged it all into the cloud.

Today, you live in a digital panopticon—with a discount code.

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