The Briefcase in the Middle of the Carpet
A 1980s lesson on digital surveillance, AI, and trust
Peter Diamandis, a well-known American tech entrepreneur, believes that human beings behave better when they know they are being watched. The idea sounds sensible. The problem lies in what comes next: who gets the power to watch everyone else? An old waiting room in a 1980s doctor’s office helps explain the difference.
In the 1980s, I worked as a pharmaceutical sales rep. I spent my days visiting hospitals and doctors’ offices, carrying a briefcase full of giveaways: pens, lighters, notepads, the small offerings that were part of the trade back then.
The briefcase was not light. And I liked going out for coffee without it.
Whenever I wanted to leave a waiting room, I had two options. I could ask someone at the front desk to keep the briefcase (a receptionist, an assistant, a specific person with a name and a face). Or I could do what I ended up doing many times: I would set it down in the middle of the waiting room carpet, out of everyone’s way but in plain sight, and calmly walk out.
I almost always chose the Persian rug, and the giveaways never went missing: my briefcase was untouchable.
At first glance, this “abandonment” might look like carelessness. It wasn’t. It was a calculation, though I could not yet have explained it in these terms. If I handed the briefcase to someone at the front desk, I would be creating a single guardian. One person became responsible for it. If something went missing, suspicion would fall on that person. There was a single point of trust, but also a single point of failure.
On the carpet, the logic was different.
I was not trusting any person in particular. I was trusting the situation. The briefcase sat exposed in the middle of the room, surrounded by seated, bored people waiting for their appointment. Anyone who wanted to take it would have to do so in front of everyone. For a handful of pens and lighters, they would have to accept the cost of being seen.
Security did not come from hiding. It came from exposure.
No one had been appointed guard. And so, in a way, everyone was.
Only many years later did I realize that this small scene contained a much larger problem: how do you protect something without handing it to a central guardian? How do you create trust without putting everything in someone’s hands?
In that waiting room, the answer was simple: transparency among equals.
The new gospel of surveillance
Nearly forty years later, the same question returns at the planetary scale.
Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE and one of the best-known figures of American techno-optimism, recently wrote that we are heading toward a world blanketed in sensors: cameras, phones, drones, satellites, autonomous cars, robots, home devices, and artificial-intelligence systems capable of interpreting it all.
Soon, he says, there will be a trillion sensors spread across space, the air, our cities, our homes, and our roads. Everything will be seen, recorded, measured, and analyzed.
His conclusion is simple: this can be a good thing, because humans behave better when they know they are being watched.
Within days, the international tech press came down on him. TechCrunch summed up his essay as “Big Brother, but good” and paired him with Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, who had promised, back in 2024, that citizens would behave at their best because everything would be recorded and reported. Shortly afterward, on his own podcast, Diamandis acknowledged the storm of criticism and stood by every word.
The phrase is seductive. And I know all too well that it holds part of the truth.
People who know they are being seen tend to hold themselves in check. My untouchable briefcase on the carpet (Persian or not) showed as much. Plenty of studies on police body cameras point in the same direction. Visibility changes behavior.
But the decisive question is not whether observation changes behavior.
It does.
The decisive question is another one: who watches?
The carpet and the counter
In the waiting room, observation was horizontal. Everyone saw everyone. Whoever eyed my briefcase was seen by the others in turn. There was no command center. There was no archive. There was no one with special power over the rest.
Trust grew out of the configuration itself.
In the world Diamandis imagines, the risk is the opposite. Observation can turn vertical. A center sees everyone, but no one truly sees the center. The images are stored, indexed, searchable, and cross-referenced with other data. What is collected today for safety can serve tomorrow for political control, tax pressure, commercial surveillance, or social punishment.
The difference is enormous.
On the carpet, everyone watches everyone.
At the counter, someone watches the others.
In the waiting room, observation produced trust without an owner. In the sensor city, observation can produce obedience to an owner.
This is where the discussion stops being technological and becomes constitutional. It is not just a matter of having good cameras, good drones, or good algorithms. It is a matter of who controls the infrastructure, and who controls whoever controls it.
The promise is not enough
Diamandis himself sees part of the problem. He writes that transparency only builds trust when it points both ways. He is right.
If citizens are watched, power must be watchable. If the street is transparent to the state, the state must be transparent to the street. If everything we do leaves a trace, then what the authorities do with those traces must leave a trace as well.
But stating the principle is not enough.
Saying “transparency must point both ways” is well-intentioned. It is not yet an architecture.
The problem with modern societies is not a lack of promises. It is an excess of systems that run on promises. We are promised that the data will be used well. The cameras are only for safety. That the drones will not peer into our homes. The algorithms will be audited. That no one will abuse any of it.
Maybe.
But a free society cannot rest on the good behavior of those in charge. It needs technical, legal, and institutional rules that make abuse difficult, visible, and punishable.
The right question is always this one: if this technology fell into the hands of an authoritarian government, would it still work well?
If the answer is yes, there is cause for alarm.
A room full of people watching one another is of little use to a dictatorship. But a centralized network of cameras, sensors, databases, and artificial intelligence serves one perfectly.
In fact, it serves a dictatorship better than it serves a democracy.
The capture test
There is a simple test for telling good architectures from dangerous ones: the capture test.
An architecture passes the test if, once captured by an authoritarian power, it ceases to function. It fails if it keeps working (or works even better).
The briefcase on the carpet passes the test. Its power came precisely from the absence of a center. If someone tried to turn that mutual vigilance into one directed from the counter, the logic would vanish.
The sensor city fails. Because it can be captured by whoever controls the sensors, servers, algorithms, and access. And once captured, it becomes even more effective.
That is why the phrase “humans behave better when they’re being watched” is insufficient. It is missing the main variable.
Watched by whom?
By their equals?
Or by an invisible authority?
The carpet at the planetary scale
It was here that, many years later, technology gave a name to what I had seen in that waiting room.
Blockchain technology, in its most open and decentralized form, set out to solve this problem precisely: how do you create trust among strangers who do not know each other and are not in the same room?
In the waiting room, trust came from physical co-presence. People were there; they saw each other, recognized each other, could feel shame, and could be confronted.
On the internet, that disappears. Participants are dispersed, anonymous, or pseudonymous; they do not see each other and may never cross paths.
When I first read Satoshi Nakamoto’s proposal, I did not see a financial novelty. I saw the carpet, and the trust that communal observation had woven into it.
Perhaps that is why I never managed to look at blockchain the way the markets did: an asset, a fad, a bet. From early on, I read it as a question of civilization. Because what was at stake there was not the price of anything. It was the old waiting-room question, now at planetary scale: who keeps, who verifies, who watches whom.
The scene from the eighties had not taught me the technology, but it had left the template ready in my mind: counter or carpet. When the technology arrived, I already knew what to look for.
The solution, published in 2008, replaced physical vigilance with an architecture of public verification: a shared ledger, replicated by many participants, whose rules depend not on the word of a central guardian but on cryptography, incentives, and distributed validation.
In plain terms, instead of handing the briefcase to the counter, the idea was to lay it on a worldwide digital carpet. A global cryptographic tapestry on which the many can verify what no single guardian should control.
But there is a trap.
The word “blockchain” does not solve everything. There are also centralized blockchains: controlled by a few, with rules that whoever is in charge can rewrite, and with access granted on conditions. In that case, we are no longer looking at the carpet. We are looking at the counter, industrialized.
The same technology can serve two opposite architectures.
It can distribute trust.
Or it can concentrate control.
It can create transparency among equals.
Or it can create surveillance with infinite memory.
The new waiting rooms
So the underlying question is not whether observation improves behavior. It does. Diamandis knows it from studies. I learned it from a briefcase.
The question is: who watches the watcher?
In the waiting room, the answer was: everyone.
In the sensor city, the answer can be: no one.”
And this choice is showing up in more and more areas of our lives.
It shows up in our cities when someone decides who controls the footage from drones, cameras, and recognition systems.
It shows up in digital identity when someone decides whether proving who we are requires handing over our face, our iris, or our biometric data to a central guardian.
It shows up in the debate over the digital euro, when the choice is between a euro programmed by the authorities and a neutral euro, programmable by each citizen on their own terms.
It shows up in social networks when someone decides whether the truth will be verified by open communities or by closed centers.
It shows up in artificial intelligence, when someone decides whether the systems that analyze society will be auditable by citizens or controlled only by companies and states.
In every one of these new waiting rooms, the choice is the same one I made, without knowing it, in my early twenties: counter or carpet.
Hand the briefcase to a central guardian, or set it down in a visible space where everyone watches and is watched.
The difference looks small. It is not.
It is the difference between trust and submission.
Between transparency and surveillance.
Between an adult society and a society kept permanently in childhood by those who say, “behave yourselves, because we are watching.”
Back then, I got it right without quite knowing why.
Today, we no longer have that excuse.