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2765 Redefining America[T]he conversation morphed into a game of telephone, of everyone shouting variations of the same snippets of language, phrases, slogans%u2014an endless, aural hall of mirrors. The effect is so disorienting that after a long period of scrolling through social media you%u2019re likely to feel a profound sense of vertigo.Not only that: the people screaming the loudest get the most attention, partly because they stand out against the backdrop of a pendulating wall of sound that is now the room tone of our collective mental lives. Suffice it to say: the end result was not really a better party, nor the conversation of equals that many of us had hoped for.Which, I think, brings us back to the fox ears.%u2022 %u2022 %u2022The most radical change to our shared social lives isn%u2019t who gets to speak, it%u2019s what we can hear. True, everyone has access to their own little megaphone, and there is endless debate about whether that%u2019s good or bad, but the vast majority of people aren%u2019t reaching a huge audience. And yet at any single moment just about anyone with a smartphone has the ability to surveil millions of people across the globe.15The ability to surveil was, for years, almost exclusively the province of governments. In the legal tradition of the U.S., it was seen as an awesome power, one that was subject to constraints, such as warrants and due process (though often those constraints were more honored in the breach). And not only that, freedom from ubiquitous surveillance, we were taught in the West, was a defining feature of Free Society. In totalitarian states, someone or something was always listening, and the weight of that bore down on every moment of one%u2019s life, suffocating the soul.Well, guess what? We have now all been granted a power once reserved for totalitarian governments. A not particularly industrious fourteen-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of K.G.B. agents could have done sixty years ago. The teen could see who you know, where you%u2019ve been, which TV shows you like and don%u2019t like; the gossip that you pass along and your political opinions and bad jokes and feuds; your pets%u2019 names, your cousins%u2019 faces, and your crushes and their favorite What irony does Hayes point out in his discussion of government surveillance? How does it help Hayes develop his argument about the internet?22This illustration by artist Jeffrey Kam appeared with Chris Hayes%u2019s article in the New Yorker. What aspects of Hayes%u2019s article does this image depict? What message does it convey? %u00a9 Jeffrey Kam/The New Yorker/Conde Nast Publications, Inc.Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.