Big Brother is watching you is often quoted but rarely understood. However, first, I will prove that Big Brother is impossible, and second, that it is necessary.

Why is Big Brother impossible?

It is in the nature of any complex system to forget. We know this from experience, and the second law of thermodynamics also proves it. Entropy could be understood as memory loss. A system in perfect equilibrium has nothing to remember because all particles maintain unchanged relationships with each other. A system with lower entropy, with higher order, has something to forget. To forget means to balance, to enter a state of higher entropy.

So, we, as humans (complex living systems), are, by definition, subject to “memory loss” over time. This happens because neural connections weaken over time. They get weaker, and they weaken even faster when they are not used. Therefore, we don’t forget data; we “forget” connections. Data does not represent memory, and therefore knowledge; connections do!

The same rule should apply to “data” stored in the digital meta-world. Data can stay, but data without connections has no value. A system with lots of data but no connections has nothing to forget and has no knowledge. So, if there is such a thing as Big Brother, then that entity is subject to the same laws of forgetting as we all are.

But then you say: that is precisely what we should be afraid of! The power of Big Brother is to link data and acquire specific knowledge about us as we live in our parallel world. But in doing so, you make a mistake: The moment a connection becomes tangible, it changes from a connection to data. When a connection is fossilized, it becomes data. Connections can only exist as something that goes and passes away at that moment. They are not tangible. Connections cannot be petrified! Knowledge cannot be petrified. Memes cannot be petrified.

For Big Brother to be in an omnipotent position, one where “he” would have knowledge beyond any human, “he” should have a human-like subjectivity. He should be able to live in contexts that produce knowledge. The moment he is an entity interpreted by humans, all “his” contexts cease to exist as contexts, and all “he” has ceased to exist as knowledge.

So Big Brother is theoretically impossible.

Why does Big Brother exist?

The previous section offers a clue to why Big Brother exists even though it is theoretically impossible.

When we wrote that “A system with lots of data but no connections has nothing to forget and has no knowledge,” we implied that the Big Brother pictured as an entity outside us is impossible, and instead posited that Big Brother exists in us, as we are connections and no one else. We are Big Brother and nothing else.

With that, I’m deliberately contradicting J.P. Sartre’s famous quote from the play No Exit: Hell is other people (L’enfer, c’est les autres). We are enabling Big Brother by representing intersubjective connections among data. We are enlivening frozen data into living memetic systems that might behave as Big Brother or as hell.