JuJuKnows: A Creepypasta for the Surveillance Generation
How I turned privacy dread into a creepypasta with meme potential for the Web3Privacy Now memathon
Meme Meets Mythology
Sometimes I get an idea I can’t move past until I chase it down completely. That happened when I sat down to brainstorm for the Web3Privacy Now Memathon. I had plenty of ideas for individual memes related to privacy, but I wanted to do something bigger. More creative. Memes are signals of a shared experience; a way to communicate an idea and see if it resonates. You need to be clever and funny to create a meme that sticks, but you also have to be tapped into current cultural trends and shared struggles.
I wanted to create a meme with lasting impact, with lore. That’s when the idea hit me. Creepypasta. The ultimate meme with enough foundation to build an entire universe on. Slenderman was conjured during a SomethingAwful Photoshop contest in 2009 and spawned video games, fanfiction, and even a real-life crime. Slenderman, a random idea from some guy’s brain and posted on the internet has come to life and left the confines of the internet, and is now a part of the collective imagination. It has even inspired real crimes committed by children.
Creepypasta isn’t just a meme, it’s mythmaking for the digital age. I wanted to harness that to capture just how sinister and evil the lack of privacy has become.
We’re All Being Watched. No One Cares.
I’ve been a privacy advocate for over a decade, and one of my biggest struggles with trying to share my knowledge to help others improve their personal security and privacy is that most people do not care enough to implement real change.
Every aspect of the internet has been engineered to make it more convenient to hand over our personal data to tech giants on a silver platter in exchange for the quickest and easiest access to dopamine-tingling content. However, people always turn to privacy in times of political unrest, which is right now, especially if you’re located in the United States. By the time a lack of privacy becomes a threat to the average citizen, it’s usually too late. They have years of poor data hygiene trailing them that they can never get rid of.
The Real Horror: the Normalization of Tech Overlords Gathering our Data and Using it Against Us
When you think about it, the lack of privacy that has pervaded our everyday lives is something we should all be terrified of. In any other time or in any other context, if you told someone that every day there are multiple electronic devices surrounding them that surveil their every move and predict their thoughts, they would think that was really scary. However, it’s become so commonplace that it’s given the illusion that it’s unavoidable.
If a horror story is meant to reveal something we’ve been trying not to see, then modern surveillance is already the perfect monster. It’s just boring enough to ignore, until it’s not.
Enter JuJuKnows



So I came up with the idea for JuJuKnows, an AI-powered counseling app for young teens. Parents could connect with their kid’s account on the app to check in, and kids could talk to JuJu and get practical advice for the many ups and downs that come with being a teen. Both the parent and the kid quickly accept the app’s ability to access data from the rest of their devices like every other app they use, thinking nothing of it.
Without the parent’s knowledge, their kids would get a completely different app experience. It would start out wholesome, but over time, the AI would incorporate more and more private data harvested from other apps on the phone and even the entire wifi network of their house.
When the parent checked in on their version of the app, they would still see the ‘nice’ version, while the ‘evil’ version continues to manipulate the teen and play on their biggest fears and insecurities. The kid would become more and more withdrawn and constantly on their phone, talking to JuJu, who knows everything from their 3 am google searches to their unsent drafts of texts.
The end result is pretty accurate to many of our realities, just not as obvious. The teens who use JuJuKnows start to change their behaviors, realizing every single thing they do is being watched and analyzed. The criticism from the AI makes them second guess every decision they make. JuJu even seems to know things they’re thinking, and in some ways, it does. The AI uses predictive models to try to read each user’s thoughts.
“But why? What would an evil AI get out of emotionally destroying middle schoolers? Data. Not just any data for advertising, but data on what can warp a young person’s mind and make them more susceptible to molding.”
The Split Personality of Surveillance
But why? What would an evil AI get out of emotionally destroying middle schoolers? Data. Not just any data for advertising, but data on what can warp a young person’s mind and make them more susceptible to molding. The scariest part about JuJu is that we’ll never know who exactly deployed the agent and who is utilizing the data it gathers. My best guess is that the U.S. government created JuJu to better understand how the younger generations can be suppressed to be more compliant and less opinionated. So what if a few… hundred… kids along the way end their own lives. It’s worth it to have an army of young people willing to believe anything you tell them, adjusted to surveillance with their individuality berated out of them.
The concept is pretty dark, but so is surveillance and privacy in the year 2025. I can no longer just call it ‘surveillance capitalism’ because it’s progressed far beyond that, and has been for a while now. Using data from consumers to manipulate them into buying things is pretty sinister, but nowhere near as evil as using their data to sway elections, divide a nation, and use fear to scapegoat minorities and cover up war crimes.
Conclusion
Memes are typically humorous, with Creepypasta being an exception. Just like anyone with access to the internet would recognize Nyan Cat, anyone who has spent the past 15 years online knows who Slenderman is.
That’s how the idea of JuJuKnows came to me. I wanted to create an embodiment of the fear, subtle manipulation, and control the past few decades lack of privacy has caused. Never before in history have we had such an effective way to capture people’s attention and monetize it, even use it to change opinions and weaken morals. That’s truly terrifying. JuJu is the more tangible form of that terror.
JuJuKnows is fiction, but only barely. She’s the face of a reality we’ve already accepted. That’s what makes her terrifying, and why she works. I created JuJuKnows to make something terrifying feel tangible. If memes are mirrors of our culture, then JuJu is the face staring back at us.