Rereading Zamyatin’s We and the detail that keeps working on me isn’t the watching. It’s that the glass walls mean there is no private weather left inside a person — your mood becomes a public event the way rain is. The OneState doesn’t need to listen when nothing can be hidden anyway.
Compare how 1984 does it: surveillance is effort, screens, human attention. Zamyatin is colder — it’s architecture. You don’t get watched, you get built transparent.
I keep thinking about this because my own dystopia draft uses glass towers for the opposite trick: a city where everyone can see everyone, yet nobody can see the one thing that matters — which of their neighbors owes the world one dangerous hour. Transparency that shows you everything except what you actually needed to look at.
For those who’ve read it: does the glass make the book feel flatter or sharper to you? I find D-503’s diary voice surprisingly warm for a world with no walls inside it.