With Hide and Seek, the game is finite—once everyone is found the game stops. The rules are simple, the seeker is singular and the play space is bounded. But what would happen if the game never ended? If each hiding spot discovered generated two more? When there is no winner, does the game become its own purpose?

This essay starts from a simple observation: hide and seek is no longer hide and seek. It became a permanent Whac-a-Mole several decades ago. In the arcade game, moles appear randomly from their holes which must be struck, knowing that we cannot hit them all. We do not win, we do not lose, the game continues. That is its function.

The same structural logic links surveillance and opacity. Each infrastructure of vision generates counter-infrastructures of concealment, which in turn generate reinforced surveillance, ad infinitum.

The pattern was already legible in the 1990s. The difference with 2026 is not the logic but its scale: the game is now established everywhere, all the time, mediated by algorithms that never sleep, across regimes ranging from the authoritarian to the commercial passing through the bureaucratic. To understand how we got here, I return to two texts I describe as “prophetic,” published in 1988 on two different continents, in two opposing technological contexts: the France of the Minitel, a centralised network controlled by the state, and the United States in full expansion of the personal computer and the first civilian networks. These two prophecies today do not clash but co-construct one another.

Two Prophecies, One Game

In 1988, the French architect and war theorist Paul Virilio published La Machine de vision.¹ The idea was to develop a history that would begin with the telescope and pass through the cinematographic apparatus up to nascent computer vision. Humanity having progressively delegated the act of seeing to devices of its own making, it would have reached a point of no return. Photography steals instantaneity from the eye. Cinema steals movement from it. Video surveillance steals vigilance itself.² What emerges is not an augmented human gaze but its replacement, a permanent, tireless, and total technical vision.³

That same year, Timothy C. May, a retired Intel physicist based in the United States, distributed The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.⁴ His prophecy is Virilio’s inverse. Where Virilio sees the inexorable rise of total vision arriving, May announces the advent of technical opacity. Cryptographic tools, public-key encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, encrypted packet rerouting. According to him, all of this would, within a decade, render individuals invisible to state and commercial surveillance alike. For May, opacity is not only a technical feature but also a political condition.⁵ Anonymity reverses the balance of power, transparency serves control.

Seeing these two texts one might believe in a contradiction: while one predicts total surveillance, the other predicts that nothing could be surveilled. But this reading makes us miss what actually happened. Both prophecies were realised simultaneously, each because of the other. Virilio’s vision machine did not defeat May's cryptographic opacity. May’s tools did not dismantle Virilio’s surveillance apparatus. Instead, they fed one another. This co-production is the interminable Whac-a-Mole. It is not a war between two camps but a cycle in which each player’s move calls forth and legitimises the participation of the other.

The Hammer and the Mole

To understand how this cycle became institutionalised, we must look at it historically. Fifteen years before the Snowden affair⁶ there was an event too rarely discussed in public debate: the ECHELON network.⁷

ECHELON was a global signals intelligence system assembled by the Five Eyes alliance (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). This system intercepted electronic communications on a planetary scale (emails, telephone calls, satellite transmissions). The existence of this program was first revealed by journalist Duncan Campbell in 1988. It would not be officially confirmed until 2001, through an investigation by the European Parliament.

The question ECHELON poses is not whether mass surveillance exists—it does. But why did its exposure change nothing? Part of the answer lies in infrastructure. The internet was not designed for opacity. Its foundational protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP) were built for openness and sharing, not for anonymity. As communications migrated from telephone wires to datacenters connected by a handful of undersea cables, the geometry of interception transformed radically. ECHELON intercepted hundreds of satellite communications, its successors intercept millions of simultaneous connections. Metadata alone (sender, recipient, duration, frequency) reveals behavioral maps of great quality, without ever reading message content.

Yet ECHELON’s exposure did not end mass surveillance. It simply triggered the Whac-a-Mole cycle. Phil Zimmermann, an American software engineer and cryptography activist, developed PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in the early 1990s, offering public-key encryption to civilian users for the first time.⁸ The Cypherpunk movement, of which May was one of the founding theorists alongside Eric Hughes,⁹ organised around the principle that cryptographic tools were not merely defensive instruments but political acts. Each revelation of surveillance generated a corresponding wave of tools (PGP, Tor, end-to-end encryption, secure messaging protocols). And in turn, each of these tools generated new surveillance methodologies designed to circumvent them.

This is the Whac-a-Mole in its purest form. The moles are surveilled individuals and communities. The hammer, the apparatus of vision in constant evolution.¹⁰ Those who hold the hammer are governments and their technical agencies—the NSA, GCHQ, and their equivalents across the Five Eyes alliance. But when the existence of the hammer is revealed, roles briefly invert. Counter-tools proliferate, the hammer loses its effect, the moles regroup. Until the next generation of hammer arrives.

These two phases are not sealed from one another, and their relationship has never been fixed. Governments have always collided with the technical infrastructures of their time. The Clipper Chip is an early illustration: in 1993, the Clinton administration attempted to impose on telecommunications companies a microprocessor—developed by the NSA—embedding a government backdoor. Industry resisted. The project was abandoned by 1996. What the government failed to impose through technology, it would accomplish through law.

Monetising Both Sides of the Game

If the first phase of the Whac-a-Mole is governmental, the second, inaugurated in 2001, is commercial. The shift is decisive, and it did not come from a leak or a manifesto but from a business decision.

In the early 2000s, Google confronted a question without precedent in economic history. What is the commodity of the digital economy? Answer from Larry Page, co-founder and then-CEO of Google, and his colleagues: behavioral experience itself. Google’s revenue tripled or quadrupled within two or three years. A new economic logic had emerged. The surveillance of attention as a mechanism of profit.¹¹

From that moment on, surveillance no longer imposes itself, it sells itself. The infinite scroll is not an accident, it is a calibrated implementation designed to maximise compulsive return.¹² Social networks began to be designed not to serve users, but to extract their behavioral data as a continuous revenue stream. The critical difference from ECHELON: visibility is no longer imposed. It is desired, produced, and offered voluntarily, with enthusiasm by the surveilled subject.

This is where May’s prophecy undergoes a transformation. The fear generated by ECHELON, Snowden, and WikiLeaks created a market: that of VPNs. Repackaged as privacy protection tools and sold by subscription, they do not liberate from surveillance, they displace it. Instead of trusting your internet service provider, you trust a third party who can just as easily see the entirety of your traffic. Many free VPNs explicitly monetise the data they were supposed to protect, reselling it to data brokers or marketing agencies.

Bitcoin illustrates this irony in its most accomplished form. Published on October 31, 2008 by an author hiding behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin White Paper describes a peer-to-peer electronic payment system, without trusted third parties or centralised institutions, a direct implementation of May's vision, as interpreted by the cypherpunk movement.¹³ Three decades later, Bitcoin has become a regulated speculative asset, listed on exchanges, integrated into institutional portfolios and monitored by financial authorities worldwide. But it is the blockchain itself that constitutes the most revealing irony. This ledger, supposedly guaranteeing anonymity, is in reality public, permanent and fully traceable. Each transaction is inscribed forever, readable by anyone with the right analytical tools. Private companies specialising in digital forensics, foremost among them Chainalysis, whose contracts with US federal agencies exceed several tens of millions of dollars, have made this ledger an instrument of retroactive surveillance on a global scale.¹⁴ The tool of radical opacity has become its own opposite: a total, tireless memory that no one can erase.

Surveillance and protection markets are structurally interdependent. A problem solved is a budget eliminated. Each scandal, each leak, each attack relaunches the cycle.

Who Holds the Hammer?

The Whac-a-Mole metaphor carries a risk: one might think that anyone can seize the hammer at some point. This is false. The game is not equally accessible to all players.

In authoritarian regimes, using Tor, a VPN or end-to-end encryption can constitute grounds for arrest. The tool of resistance becomes evidence of suspicious intent. Virilio’s prophecy fulfills itself in its purest form precisely where May’s is most impotent. The vision machine operates without friction, opacity costs everything.

In liberal democracies, the dynamic is even more paradoxical. Protection tools are legal, authorised, and in principle accessible. Yet their adoption remains low, not because people are indifferent to their data, but because they express concern while continuing to share everything. This situation is not irrational. Protection requires time, money, and technical literacy unevenly distributed across the population.

Some groups are more exposed: undocumented migrants, racialised minorities, activists, journalists, and precarious workers. These groups access the digital only through shared devices or public connections. For them, exposure is not a choice, it is an imposed condition. And it is not a bug of the system. It is a feature.

The permanent transparency of some calibrates the algorithms that surveil others. It provides training data, behavioral baselines, and detection models.

Virilio describes a law, May a possibility. A law fulfills itself. A possibility can remain in a corner.

These decisions now belong to entities that have never had to justify taking them.

States that legislate in the name of security, and platforms that monetise in the name of service.

Subverting the Game

If the Whac-a-Mole is interminable, if the game is profitable, if the rules are written by actors who have no interest in making them legible, what can be done?

Two artworks can serve as starting points for a response, which do not oppose each other, in the same way that Virilio and May do not.

Julian Oliver’s Transparency Grenade (2012) proposes stealing the hammer.¹⁵ The device is formally simple: a transparent replica of a Russian F1 grenade, containing a mini-computer and an antenna. Once detonated, it intercepts local network traffic, captures data circulating in the space (emails, documents, metadata) and publishes it instantly to a public server. It returns the logic of surveillance directly upon itself. Capture, extract, expose.

Oliver describes the piece as a response to institutional opacity: “The lack of transparency of corporations and governments has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, but our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform. The Transparency Grenade is an emblematic remedy for these frustrations.”¹⁶

The form of the grenade is a gesture: it demonstrates that surveillance tools are not monopolies. They can be miniaturised, inverted, democratised. Stealing the hammer does not mean winning the game. It means making visible that the game exists, that its rules are not natural and that they can be turned.

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File by Hito Steyerl (2013) chooses a different strategy: becoming the mole.¹⁷ The work takes the form of a video tutorial deploying the visual grammar of the institutional film and the YouTube tutorial. With impassive seriousness, it enumerates methods for disappearing from contemporary vision systems. Hide inside a pixel, become a resolution, exist in a blind spot, dissolve into a green calibration zone.

One quickly notices that Steyerl’s pedagogy is a trap. Each method proposed is either absurd, inaccessible, or already obsolete. The work does not teach disappearance, it performs its impossibility. The didactic form is a lure, and the lure is the critique. The piece oscillates between derision, political revelation, and poetic resistance. It teaches us nothing about how to hide. It teaches us who decides what counts as visible.

These two works propose no solutions. They do something more precise: they expose the rules of a game that exists only because no one knows them.

Where the whistleblower informs and the journalist documents, the artist makes apprehensible. An abstract infrastructure becomes an object one can hold in the hand, or a pin one can pull.

The Game Has No End, But It Has Rules

In 2026, we live the realisation of both 1988 prophecies. The vision machine operates at a scale and granularity that Virilio could only sketch. May’s cryptographic opacity exists, technically, legally, commercially. And it remains structurally inaccessible to those who need it most.

The central thesis of this essay can here be stated in its clearest form. Contemporary power does not need victory. It needs the game to continue. Surveillance legitimises protection, protection legitimises surveillance. And the market profits from both.

This is not a dysfunction of the system, it is its operating principle. The Whac-a-Mole is not a war between two camps. It is an economy.

Power does not need to prohibit opacity. It only needs to make it technically difficult, economically costly, socially suspect, and legally fragile. Each additional level of protection requires growing effort, and that effort is itself behavioral data. Who is trying to hide? How? With what resources?

Resistance becomes a signal, invisibility an index. To try to hide is already to be seen.

What Virilio and May did not anticipate together is that their two visions would not cancel each other out, they would mutually monetise one another. The question is no longer who wins. It is who can afford to keep playing.

When the seeker’s gaze turns back upon itself, it does not discover an answer. It discovers that it has always already been seen.

Footnotes

1. Paul Virilio, La Machine de vision, Paris: Galilée, 1988. ↑

2. Ibid. On the progressive delegation of the gaze to the machine as substitution rather than augmentation of the human gaze. ↑

3. Ibid. On “synthetic vision” and the automation of perception without human presence. ↑

4. Timothy C. May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, distributed at Crypto ‘88 conference, Santa Barbara, 1988. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html, accessed April 14, 2026. ↑

5. Ibid. May compares cryptography to the printing press. ↑

6. Edward Snowden, former NSA contractor, leaked classified documents in June 2013 revealing the existence of several mass surveillance programs operated by the United States government, including PRISM—which collected data from major internet companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple—and XKeyscore, a search tool enabling real-time surveillance of internet activity. The leaks were first published by The Guardian and The Washington Post. See Glenn Greenwald, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily,” The Guardian, June 5, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order, accessed May 20, 2026. ↑

7. Parlement européen, Rapport sur l'existence d'un système d'interception mondial des communications privées et économiques (système d'interception ECHELON), Rapporteur: Gerhard Schmid, PE 305.391, May 18, 2001. On the first public revelation, see Duncan Campbell, “Somebody’s Listening,” New Statesman, August 12, 1988. ↑

8. Phil Zimmermann, “Why I Wrote PGP,” 1991, updated 1999. https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/index.html, accessed April 14, 2026. ↑

9. Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html, accessed April 14, 2026. ↑

10. Ibid. On the distinction between extensive and intensive time, and surveillance as “instantaneous projection of the future.” ↑

11. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. See in particular chapter three, “The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus.” ↑

12. “Skinner’s Reinforcement Theory of Motivation: Shaping Behavior Through Consequences,” NeuroLaunch, December 7, 2024. https://neurolaunch.com/skinners-reinforcement-theory-of-motivation/, accessed May 20, 2026. ↑

13. Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, October 31, 2008. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, accessed April 14, 2026. ↑

14. Danny Nelson, “Inside Chainalysis’ Multimillion-Dollar Relationship With the US Government,” CoinDesk, February 10, 2020. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/02/10/inside-chainalysis-multimillion-dollar-relationship-with-the-us-government, accessed April 14, 2026. ↑

15. Julian Oliver, Transparency Grenade, 2012–2014. https://julianoliver.com/projects/transparency-grenade/, accessed April 14, 2026. ↑

16. Ibid. ↑

17. Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013. Produced for the 55th Venice Biennale. https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-51651, accessed April 14, 2026. ↑