The history of cultural anxieties surrounding surveillance technologies may be traced back even further than these examples from mainframe-era computing. A useful parallel may be drawn with the technology of television at its moment of emergence via accounts cited by Lynn Spigel (1992). Her survey of women's magazine treatments of television, Make Room for TV, includes a 1954 issue of Good Housekeeping suggesting that viewers cover their television screens at night in an "attempt to 'screen out' television's visual field, to manage vision in the home so that people could see without being seen." Spigel concludes, "The new TV eye threatens to turn back on itself, to penetrate the private window and to monitor the eroticized fantasy life of the more sadistic aspects of television technology; television now becomes an instrument of surveillance." (1992, 118)

Unlike television sets, the computer, tablet and mobile devices that have been installed in the lives and homes of most twenty-first century Americans do include the ability to reverse the gaze of the screen via cameras and microphones built into the hardware for the sake of convenience. The integration of digital devices and networks into the erotic lives of their users is well known, if only through the personal scandals of government officials whose electronic traces may readily come under scrutiny by law enforcement or intelligence agencies. It is easy to dismiss the image of naive, 1950s housewives covering their TV screens at night, but how many of us would welcome public scrutiny of all our electronic traces in digital space? In a post-Snowden age, Hollywood's once seemingly hyperbolic vision of sentient computers forcing us to stand naked before them may be rescripted as prescient warning rather than paranoid fantasy.

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