The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.
Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly.
Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.