Dmytro Yagunov: The Imperial Digital Panopticon: When ‘Big Brother’ Goes from Metaphor to Reality

An experiment has been launched in Moscow to exercise total control over migration flows, going far beyond traditional administration. Speaking live on TV Centre and Moscow 24 television channels, the mayor of the imperial capital, Sergei Sobyanin, effectively described a system that realises the darkest predictions of George Orwell in his immortal novel 1984. While the British writer created an artistic hyperbole of a totalitarian society where ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ modern Russia is turning this metaphor into everyday reality.

The system created is a multi-level mechanism of total monitoring that combines various control technologies:

At the border, in cooperation with the FSB, initial collection of biometric data is carried out – fingerprints, photographs, a complete biometric profile of the person. At the migration centre, the migrant’s samples are taken – a procedure that goes far beyond administrative necessity and turns a person into an object of biological cataloguing.

A special spy programme is installed’ into the migrant’s phone, which continuously tracks their movements – night and day, recording their every step and every location. This programme creates a complete digital shadow of the person, where their physical presence in the real world is instantly duplicated in the digital space of control.

Electronic cards are issued, which integrate all the collected information and are automatically verified against data from the Federal Tax Service, law enforcement agencies and other government agencies. A single digital profile is created, combining all aspects of a person’s life in a single database.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, developing Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon – an ideal prison where a single guard can observe all prisoners without being seen himself – showed how the architecture of surveillance shapes a society of discipline. The Moscow system goes further: it creates a Panopticon without walls, where surveillance becomes continuous and comprehensive. While in Bentham’s concept, prisoners could be under surveillance, which in itself forced them to behave as if they were being watched all the time, modern technologies make surveillance absolute and continuous.

The key difference: in the classic Panopticon, there was at least a theoretical possibility of avoiding the gaze of the overseer, of finding ‘grey areas’. In the digital Panopticon, such areas do not exist – GPS tracking, biometric identification and genomic databases create a system where every person becomes completely transparent to the state.

When George Orwell wrote his novel in 1948, he created a warning about a future where a totalitarian state controls every aspect of citizens’ lives through television screens, the Thought Police, and a system of continuous surveillance. The slogan ‘Big Brother is watching you’ symbolised a society where privacy is destroyed and individuality is suppressed.

The Moscow experiment demonstrates that reality can surpass even the boldest artistic imagination. Orwellian television screens seem primitive compared to smartphones with built-in spyware. The Thought Police are giving way to artificial intelligence algorithms that analyse behavioural patterns in real time. The system is not just becoming all-seeing – it is becoming predictive, capable of modelling future behaviour based on collected data.

It is particularly telling how Sobyanin presents this system – not as a necessary measure or a temporary experiment, but as an innovative achievement, a source of pride. He emphasises that ‘such an innovative and powerful system of control over migrants, which Moscow is creating, is almost unheard of in other countries’ – as if the absence of such systems in democratic countries is their shortcoming, rather than a conscious ethical choice.

This rhetoric normalises total surveillance, presenting it as technological progress rather than a threat to fundamental human rights. When the mayor of the capital openly praises a system that tracks every move a person makes day and night, we are not just witnessing a violation of rights – we are seeing a society that has lost the very concept of privacy as a value.

The history of totalitarian regimes demonstrates a universal pattern: control systems that are initially introduced for ‘special categories’ of the population — foreigners, suspects, marginalised groups — inevitably expand to all citizens. Migration control becomes a testing ground for technologies that are later applied to the population itself.

When the state creates an infrastructure of total surveillance, it does not limit itself to its initial goals. A system capable of tracking every step of a migrant can just as easily track every step of any citizen. Technology has no internal limitations – only political will determines the scope of its application.

For Ukraine, which is engaged in an existential struggle against Russian imperialism, the Moscow experiment has a double meaning. First, it demonstrates the nature of the regime we are fighting against – a system where people are turned into objects of total control, deprived of their basic rights and dignity. Second, it serves as a warning: in the process of military mobilisation and strengthening security, we must remain vigilant so as not to borrow the enemy’s methods under the pretext of necessity.

Orwell’s warning remains relevant: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And when ‘Big Brother’ moves from literary metaphor to technological reality, this vigilance becomes not just desirable – it becomes a condition for preserving human dignity in the digital age.