Whenever you search for something on Google, or like something on social media, or talk to a chatbot, some company somewhere is recording what you did. Very often, they’ll then take that data and sell it to advertisers, which is why we so often see ads on the internet that are responsive to what we’re looking for right at that moment. These systems seem to know what we want before we do.
This is surveillance capitalism, an economic system where the unilateral capturing of personal human experience is turned into behavioral data and then resold for profit. In the 2020s, surveillance capitalism is the water we all swim in; it’s so pervasive that we don’t really think about it. And it can be very convenient, but if you take a step back and consider what’s really going on, it’s a little creepy.
Weirdly, the best TV show about surveillance capitalism started way back in 2011, before the term “surveillance capitalism” was coined by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff in 2014.
Person of Interest was ahead of the curve
Tech billionaires using AI to spy on us, you say? Crazy talk
Person of Interest ran on CBS for five seasons, from 2011 to 2016. It’s a bit of a throwback to an earlier time in TV, before budgets ballooned and prestigious TV shows started producing fewer episodes per season and releasing those episodes years apart. Person of Interest released a new season every year and produced over 100 episodes by the time it was done, and it relied on solid writing and intriguing ideas rather than piles of money and special effects.
Person of Interest starts with reclusive tech billionaire named Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), who built an AI system called the Machine, which monitors people through things like cameras, emails, and financial records and then predicts their behavior. The U.S. government uses the Machine to predict terror attacks, a major going concern in post-9/11 America. However, the government does not bother to predict or prevent everyday violent crimes, deeming them “irrelevant.” Using a backdoor into the Machine, Finch resolves to do that himself. He hires former CIA operative John Reese (Jim Caviezel) to be his agent in the field. The Machine feeds them the social security numbers of “persons of interest” who are either about to commit crimes or be the victims of one, and they try to intervene. It’s like a more plausible version of the 2002 film Minority Report.
For the first seasons, Person of Interest has a case-of-the-week model, where Finch and Reese address use the Machine to stop individual crimes. But the show gets more serialized in season 3, when the government starts using a new AI system called Samaritan. Unlike the Machine, which Finch programmed with boundaries that keep it from interfering with human autonomy, Samaritan wants to reshape society by ruthlessly controlling human behavior. This conflict drives the rest of the series, which gets better and deeper and more complicated as it goes.
What Person of Interest understands about surveillance capitalism
What do Thanos and surveillance capitalism have in common?
Person of Interest is classified as a sci-fi show, but in the year 2026, there’s a lot about it that doesn’t seem very farfetched. In February, U.S. president Donald Trump banned the government from using AI products created by Anthropic, mostly because the company refused to remove safeguards on things like mass surveillance. So the government would rather use Samaritan, which has no safeguards on it, than the Machine, which does.
I’m oversimplifying a bit, but it’s not that much of an exaggeration to say that Person of Interest eventually turns into a conflict between the “good” and “bad” AIs, with the Machine and Samaritan even using human proxies to talk to each other. Rarely is the possibility of just not using AIs considered, which captures something important about surveillance capitalism: it seems inevitable.
We can talk about whether and what kind of safeguards new AI systems should have, but that we’re going to have them is a given. The best we can do is create and use AI systems that won’t threaten our livelihoods or, at the extreme end, our lives. In our world, that means that when the government refuses to engage with Anthropic because it’s too ethical, ordinary people embrace Claude rather than swearing off these kinds of systems altogether. That doesn’t seem like a realistic option at this point.
Consumer capitalism vs Person of Interest
Not everything lines up perfectly
Surveillance capitalism is mostly about private companies using data and AI systems to make money, whereas Person of Interest is more concerned with the government using those things to prevent crimes or, in the latter going, the AIs deciding for themselves whether and how much to control human behavior. But the show still evokes the feeling of living under consumer capitalism better than anything else before or since.
Also, it’s just a really entertaining series. Sure, the styling is a bit stuck in the 2010s — the interfaces for the Machine and Samaritan look a little dated and there’s a lot of intense music playing quietly in the background all the time — but the writing, directing, and acting all remain top-notch.
I almost quit this series after Episode 3 — finishing was one of my best TV decisions
“Just keeping watching until Episode X” is usually terrible advice. But it might be worth it for this show.
Further watching
Person of Interest is created by Jonathan Nolan, brother of Christopher. Nolan has a long history of being interested in this kind of subject matter; he would also go on to create Westworld, another show about AIs running amok, alongside Lisa Joy. There are plenty of mind-bending sci-fi shows out there if you’re into this sort of things.
And if not, Person of Interest should keep you busy for a while. It’s streaming on Prime Video.
- Release Date
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2011 – 2016-00-00
- Network
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CBS
- Showrunner
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Greg Plageman
- Directors
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Chris Fisher, Richard J. Lewis, Fred Toye, Jeffrey G. Hunt, Stephen Surjik, Kenneth Fink, Stephen Williams, Helen Shaver, Alrick Riley, Charles Beeson, Kate Woods, Kevin Bray, Stephen Semel, Jeff T. Thomas, Sylvain White, Alex Zakrzewski, Brad Anderson, Clark Johnson, Colin Bucksey, David Semel, Dennis Smith, Félix Enríquez Alcalá, James Whitmore Jr., Jeffrey Lee Gibson
- Writers
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Jonathan Nolan, Denise Thé, Greg Plageman, Amanda Segel, David Slack, Melissa Scrivner-Love, Dan Dietz, Sean Hennen, Lucas O’Connor, Patrick Harbinson, Michael Sopczynski, Nic Van Zeebroeck, Tony Camerino, Andy Callahan, Ray Utarnachitt, Sabir Pirzada, Ashley Gable, Amy Berg, Jacey Heldrich
