The Plaza and the Panopticon

Teal & Turrets

It was Mother’s Day 2021, and I found myself in bed with what I thought was a choice but was really my body coming down with a sickness other than the motherhood I had contracted four years earlier.

We lived in a community nestled in a glen in the Santa Monica Mountains. During the day, the community was as quiet as a cemetery, and at night it came alive with nature sounds. It was the suburbs, our townhouse was in a planned community, and it was our first home. It sat in a development adjacent to a retired mental health facility that had later been converted into the state college. The architects of the planned community, in one of those choices that feels both clever and cursed, leaned into the original architecture of the mental institution. Our primary bedroom had one large window and then a series of narrow, turret-sized ones that always reminded me of the history of the area and the people who had once been caged there under the banners of hysteria, disorder, deviance, and whatever else society has historically used to discipline and control people who made others uncomfortable.

The room itself was modest. A king bed, two dressers, two nightstands. Furniture I had won as a contestant on The Price Is Right ten years earlier, which still makes me laugh when I think about it. It was morning, and I was tucked under a deep teal duvet while my husband wrangled our toddler and infant downstairs, giving me what was supposed to be a Mother’s Day break. That year, the kids had given me a little board book that I jokingly dubbed kid propaganda. Every page was “What Moms Like.” Moms like snuggles. Moms like taking us to the library. Moms like flowers. Moms like reading…but it was missing important pages like, undiagnosed autistic Moms like quiet. Moms like to be left alone. Moms don’t’ like being touched, but maybe I’ll write that version. My heart was full, but my body and soul were wrecked.

The infant-and-toddler years are sold to women with a kind of glowing tyranny. The days are long, but the years are short. Cherish every moment. They go so fast. And yes, they do go fast, but they also go slow in a way that feels geological when you are the one living inside them. You are in survival mode. At least I was. Every day, my eyes opened before the sun arose, and by midafternoon, I felt like a ghost moving through the house with a laundry basket. I knew enough about child development to understand the importance of stimuli, responsiveness, language, food quality, rhythm, and emotional regulation (this one was new for me), which only made me feel the weight of it all. When you know too much, you do not get to simply bumble through parenthood. You are aware at every moment of what is at stake. During this chapter of my life, I often felt completely overwhelmed and numb. 

I remember once standing at a dispensary trying to explain to a very bright twenty-something how I felt every afternoon and asking whether they had anything that might help. She looked straight at me and said, “It sounds like you’re tired.” I wanted to leap across the counter and pummel her, which is unfair because she was right. It was simply the unbearable obviousness. Of course, I was tired. I was so tired that the word itself felt like an insult, too small and too tidy to contain what I felt.

My circumstances weren't changing. Once I accepted that, I shifted into examining the time I had and what I could do for myself. Eventually, I began getting out of bed at 4am, instead of lying in bed with eyes wide open, ruminating. In those wee hours, I found some small scaffolding for myself. Tai chi. Meditation. Journaling. A little pocket of consideration before the demands of the day descended, but that spring, I was still deep in it. Having a moment, not being in a reactive mood, and checking in on how I was feeling was rare during this time.

I thought I was lying in bed because I was treating myself for Mother’s Day. It turned out I was actually getting sick. I was completely depleted; my body was shouting what I didn't want to hear. “You need to take care of yourself, and if you don’t, I’m shutting this down so you will!” I listened to my body without realizing I was doing so. I stayed under the deep teal duvet, gaslighting myself as the symptoms escalated, and decided the best thing for me to do on Mother’s Day was to stay in bed a little longer, which also meant picking up my phone and scrolling social media. 

Like so many people, I began using social platforms to narrate my life in real time. Funny observations, streams of consciousness, thoughts that flashed across my ADHD brain, and I wanted a witness. But one night, two kids and a mortgage later, after a full day, I found myself under the deep teal duvet late into the night editing a post, fussing with the language, adjusting the image, trying to make the whole thing… perfect, and I suddenly had this visceral recoil. Who is this for?

It was not an abstract philosophical question. It was practical and immediate. Is this for my extended family? For people from high school? Is this for my children, who will never be allowed access to these platforms anyway? I was going to take the photos regardless, because that is what mothers do. We document. We archive. We make evidence of love. But the act of packaging that life for public consumption for the first time seemed strange. More than strange, violating. Every time I pressed post, I felt I was compromising values I actually held about privacy, attention, and what should remain intimate.

Facebook and Instagram had promised connection, but what they delivered felt increasingly like surveillance. They connected us to one another inside a kind of digital panopticon. Everyone was watching everyone else. Everyone had receipts. Everyone had access to a running visual record of births, meals, vacations, disappointments, politics, bodies, marriages, opinions, and grief. There was no natural forgetting built into the system. The platforms remembered everything, and worse, so did the people.

I can personally attest to the fallout that spilled into real life from online interactions, especially with in-laws. One of the earliest ruptures came after we posted our birth announcement video. It was beautiful, inventive, well-produced, and full of joy. It also set off shockwaves in the extended family because kin close to us had recently experienced a second-trimester miscarriage. We had visited, sent gifts, sent food, and expressed care. But the existence of our public joy was received as a wound. Whether the cause was social media, unresolved grief, toxic family dynamics, or some grim cocktail of all, I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that it marked the beginning of the end of those relationships.

Would the fracture have happened eventually anyway? Probably. Did social media accelerate it? Absolutely.

Then there was the larger context. I had long been aware of the ugly history of media manipulation in this country. COINTELPRO. The Pentagon Papers. Operation Mockingbird. The intimate dance between intelligence agencies, propaganda, and the manufacture of public consent. If anything, social media simply democratized the architecture of influence. Not just governments and corporations, but ordinary individuals too, all of us with our little brands and our curated identities and our accidental compliance. The FBI used to send agents into the field to build files on Americans “of interest”. Now we build the files ourselves and hand them over for free. Not just to our government but also to any corporation willing to pay. We are the product that is being bought and sold, and then we are bent over to buy.

On this Mother’s Day, as I snuggled under the deep teal duvet, I reached out to another Mom from my suburban bedroom. We exchanged pleasantries, and afterwards she suggested I try TikTok. Her main argument was speed. Information moved faster there. News surfaced more quickly. You could see events unfolding almost in real time. The prior night, Patron Saint Dave Chappelle had just been nearly assaulted on stage at the Hollywood Bowl. She mentioned that when she had learned about the incident, it was circulating almost live on TikTok. The thought of being connected but still retaining privacy was intriguing. I was still active on the other platforms, but they felt unsafe as I was still bruised by continued family turmoil.

At first, I resisted. I loved the written word. I had intentionally stayed the hell out of the Twitter-sphere. I knew myself well enough to “just say no”. Privacy concerns kept me away from TikTok. Patriotic duty, or at least some scrambled and vaguely principled version of it, played a role too. I had little appetite for voluntarily downloading another machine built to steal and shape my attention.

Until that day.

I remember downloading the app, logging on, and feeling immediately transported into a landscape that did not resemble the others. It did not feel like Facebook. It did not feel like Instagram. There were no obvious ads that weekend, not the same familiar cast of people performing themselves for one another, not the exhausted choreography of acquaintances and relatives and distant former coworkers serving their digital soliloquies into the void.

TikTok felt like what I imagine a plaza in Madrid feels like to a tourist. I felt like Alice. With every swipe, I found myself falling farther down the rabbit hole, learning more about every hyper fixation I’ve ever had, as well as learning what a hyper fixation is. On the earlier platforms, I felt watched. On TikTok, I felt anonymous. It was like standing in that plaza full of motion and noise and gossip and delight, just taking in the sights, sounds, and chisme. It had the energy of discovery without the burden of biography. You did not have to know anyone’s backstory, and they did not know yours. There is a freedom in that. Autonomy, wonder, and exhilaration. The thrill of not knowing what was coming next, instead of being burdened by that uncertainty, that pushing post is going to devastate someone.

The experience also felt strangely intimate. It reminded me of the first few dates with my future husband, when someone is eager to learn your likes and dislikes, when the exchange itself feels electric because curiosity is present. The app had that quality. Video after video seemed to say, tell me more. Show me where your attention goes. Let me study the edges of your mind.

And I let it.

I spent two straight days on TikTok. Since I was already in bed and genuinely sick, I had the time. I did not necessarily lose track of it, but I surrendered to it. I remember thinking that, not having done heavy drugs myself, this must be what people mean when they describe something stronger than the low-grade buzz of Instagram or Facebook. The short-form video made the experience total. It was all-encompassing. Dopamine hit after dopamine hit with almost no effort required from me. I thought of that scene in The Matrix where Neo is handing forbidden media to the gentleman at his door and says, essentially, not to let anyone know where he got it. That is how TikTok felt. Like media that should be contraband.

What stood out to me early on were the psychology videos. People who were either actual therapists or simply affluent enough to have spent ten or twenty years in therapy were casually sharing what they had learned. I found that deeply moving. In our society, access to knowledge, healing, language for self-understanding, all of it is so aggressively gate-kept by class, education, credentials, and cost. Here was this bizarre, addictive little platform where people were just giving it away. Sharing insight. Naming patterns. Offering frameworks. Making knowledge feel communal rather than proprietary

Like most people, my interests vary wildly. Gardening. Cooking. Parenting. Politics. Art. History. Reading. Conspiracy theories. Human behavior. But on TikTok, those interests were not treated as scattered. They were clustered, mirrored back, refined, fed. The app seemed to understand that a person could care about home economics and propaganda, recipes and revolution, child development and empire, trauma and tomatoes. It did not require me to be one thing. It seemed interested in the whole unruly ecosystem.

That was the genius of it.

Facebook watched what we said. TikTok watched what we lingered on.

That is a different level of intimacy.

The earlier platforms were about identity and performance. They mapped your relationships. TikTok mapped your curiosity. It was not watching me the way Facebook watched me. It was listening. Not in some mystical sense, but in the more unsettling and measurable sense. It was studying my behavior and then feeding me back a version of myself assembled from pauses, rewatches, tiny hesitations, pupil shifts, thumb speed, whatever combination of signals the machine had access to. It was less like having an audience and more like having a listener. That distinction matters. Being watched is exhausting. Being listened to is seductive, and I was highly susceptible to seduction.

Looking back, it is painfully obvious why. I was lonely. In our suburban community, I had women around me, but the connections were not especially deep. My marriage felt lost in ways I could not yet fully articulate. My husband’s career was advancing, and I was doing everything I could to support him, but I did not feel emotionally supported in return. We moved from the beach where we lived for ten years. We left our community and the city where I was born and raised, to what I later learned to be a very conservative county. It was a culture shock. People judging you by your religion or lack thereof was not something I was used to, and the last thing I needed to pile onto this phase of life and time in history, the pandemic hit and stacked itself on top of all of that like another slab of concrete. I had an infant. A toddler. A new conservative suburban environment that made me feel like a fish in an aquarium at a restaurant. Visible and isolated at once.

I was not intellectually bored. Far from it, I was learning how to cook and meal plan, listening to a book a week, managing a home, raising babies, gardening and surviving. But I was lonely. Deeply. The earlier social platforms gave me validation from people I knew. TikTok gave me something else. It gave me a sense that I was still in conversation with the world, or at least listening. It made continuing education feel ambient and available. Perhaps more painfully, the lack of validation from friends and strangers on Facebook and Instagram shone a bright light on the lack of attention and validation inside my own marriage.

Content from the gay community began appearing in my feed. Quietly, steadily, accurately enough to make me pause. The content itself did not alarm me. What startled me was the precision. I found myself wondering whether my eyes had lingered too long on certain videos, whether some part of me had signaled interest before I consciously admitted it. The idea that the platform could pull up an unexplored or underexplored corner of my psyche and mirror it back to me was astonishing. It did not feel flattering. It felt invasive. That, I think, is the true difference between being watched and being studied.

A watcher sees what you present. A student learns your tells.

TikTok does not care primarily about who you say you are. It cares about where your attention bends when no one is grading you for it. That is why it can feel more truthful than the earlier platforms and also more dangerous. It tracks the self beneath the performed self.

Over time, the plaza began to change.

The broader cultural panic around TikTok being owned by a Chinese company intensified, and I watched people in my own life, smart people, repeat propaganda lines with a kind of Cold War rigidity that sounded eerily familiar. Then came forced sale conversations, ownership shifts, all the geopolitical theater layered over the very real question of who gets to control information. What I noticed as an ordinary user was simpler. The algorithm changed. Political content that had once streamed through in an almost alarming abundance became less visible. Certain live-streamed realities seemed to recede. Censorship or at least obvious suppression, entered the picture more visibly, and suddenly; the plaza did not feel like a plaza anymore.

It felt designed.

Not just designed in the abstract way all software is designed but designed like suburban development. Planned routes. Curated dead ends. Streets are named after the trees ripped out of the land to make room for cul-de-sacs. Paths that give the illusion of movement and comfort while quietly funneling you back into containment.

Around that time, I read Gabor Maté’s Scattered Minds, and it dealt a kind of death blow to my already fraying relationship with social media. The book intensified my grief over the amount of my screen time woven into the infant years of my children’s lives. I had spent so many hours nursing while scrolling, telling myself that it was just a harmless break, a little decompression, a way to make the monotony and depletion more bearable. Later, learning more deeply about the importance of eye contact, attunement, and the neurological architecture of early bonding, I felt gutted. As if I had been smoking cigarettes and blowing them in my babies’ faces, only the toxin was a distraction, and I had mistaken it for relief.

I’m still giving myself grace over the matter and I continue to release myself from the guilt. I did not know what I did not know. I was not failing because I lacked love. I was surviving. I didn’t have boundaries or protection that I needed. I allowed others to siphon enormous amounts of time and energy as I was navigating loneliness, postpartum depletion, a pandemic, and a digital ecosystem expertly engineered to provide the exact dopamine I needed in order to keep going. Still, somewhere inside myself, I made a vow. I would never again let a screen stand so casually between my child and me.

In the end, I do not think I was looking for TikTok at all.

I think the earlier social media platforms gave me a fake sense of community, and TikTok gave me anonymity long enough to reveal how badly I needed the real thing. It did not solve my loneliness. It exposed it. It did not give me belonging. It gave me a chemically efficient simulation of being understood, which was enough to keep me coming back but not enough to heal anything fundamental.

Maybe that is the cruel brilliance of modern platforms. They do not simply distract us from our unmet needs. They map them. They identify them. They organize our desires into categories and then sell us back a guided tour of our own hunger.

What I understand now, looking back at that Mother’s Day morning under the deep teal duvet in a room haunted by the memory of confinement, is that I was not a woman in need of better content. I was an exhausted mother of two small children, drowning quietly in a life that required more support than I was receiving. Social media, all of it, was at best a temporary lifeline that delivered dopamine. The connections were conceptualized. The care was not reciprocal. The app may have listened, but it could not love.

Walking through a plaza is better with friends.

What I thought was a plaza turned out, to be something closer to a subdivision. A set of named streets, a choreography of choices, a system of managed access and engineered surprise. And yet I do not regret seeing it for what it was, because for a brief moment it helped me identify the actual question underneath all the posting, all the scrolling, all the performance, all the craving.

What do you need right now?

If I could return to that version of myself, the woman under the deep teal duvet thinking she was indulging in rest when she was really collapsing into illness and longing, that is the question I would ask her. Not, who is this post for? Not, what is the algorithm showing me? Not, whether this app is better or worse than the others.

What do you need right now?

I think, if she had answered honestly, the answer would not have been content.

It would have been…help.

Maisha Cole Perri

Is a community advocate, muralist, and creative leader dedicated to building spaces that connect people through art, education, and shared experience. As an elected Blanchard Community Library Trustee and two-time Board President, she champions access to learning and creativity. She is leading the Santa Paula Community Garden. Maisha has always had a lot to say, writing has been her outlet since childhood, and she’s finally ready to share it. You can find her at www.maishacole.com