I have subtitled the present video using Sans Surveillance Sans. Sans Surveillance Sans is a typeface I designed to raise questions about today’s ubiquitous surveillance and the Orwellian rhetorical figures of speech attached to it. We are living the age of Surveillance Capitalism. Yet, political leaders, government agencies, and the industrial complex shaping the surveillance apparatus, prefer to market their programmes and technologies under appealing buzzwords – while failing to address the resulting societal risks.

Exploiting ligatures in a liberal way, Sans Surveillance Sans automatically replaces oxymorons, euphemisms, and technical jargon, as they are written, with more straightforward and honest language. While traditional typeface designers use ligatures to improve the legibility of texts, here I go one step further and use ligatures to improve our ability to make sense of the world we live in.

This is how big-data becomes big surveillance. Ditto for smart anything, personalisation, data collection, and other keywords in use today. The next time you read or hear something that sounds too opaque, too innocuous, or simply too good, try typing those words in Sans Surveillance Sans, and let this typeface do the translation for you.

[SansSurveillanceSans TrueType Font available upon request.]