Rage Against the Panopticon
I feel like I am slowly moving towards living in a jail called the Panopticon
1785: a jail designed so 1 guard can watch everybody
If you do not know the idea of Panopticon and want to have a care free, happy day – don’t read this essay. On the flip side, if you want to better understand how the Panopticon helps explain the world we now live in and use knowledge to find strategies to have a happier life in the future – this is your lucky day! The contradiction is simple: no pain, no gain. You may be wondering why the word “rage” in the title – well, that word accurately describes the way I felt the other day when driving in Ottawa. The well meaning traffic engineers had put up road blocks and signs allowing me to only turn right…. The only problem to get where I needed to go I had to go left! Sadly, the “f-bomb” was emitted from my lips before I could stop it and my illusions that I was a peaceful, law abiding citizen were shattered. The way I felt controlled was over whelming and so irrational that it made me not only understand, but even sympathize a bit, with the convoy of truckers who shut down Ottawa earlier this year. The feeling of being monitored and told how I had to behave to be a “good citizen” filled me with uncontrollable rage, mostly because I felt that we had entered into the nightmare of the Panopticon.
Let’s start off with explaining what the idea of the Panopticon is: it’s started off as a design for a “progressive” jail in 1785 while visiting Russia. It was the brainchild of Jeremy Bentham, a British idealist who wanted to help build a better society. Bentham was regarded as the founder of utilitarianism and a leading advocate of the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and individual legal rights. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. From the centre, the manager or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums [or factories and offices]. Just to show how much we loved this idea he famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display for all to see… and for his corpse to see all in exchange. This came to pass, and his skeleton now sits in a glass case at University College London, adorned with a wax head, waistcoat and jacket and sat on a wooden stool, staring out at students from its glass case. And now, from beyond the grave, his cadaver contains a webcam that records the movements of its spectators and broadcasts them live online, a version of the dark side of his idealism: 24/7 surveillance – his gift to all totalatian states who believe that you will be happier if you are seen by surveillance cameras wherever you go: a dark legacy if there ever was on.
Now you may ask, what does this have to do with our world today. Well, we must now jump forward in time to 1970s France, to the ideas of the brilliant French philosopher Michele Foucault. Foucault expanded the idea of the panopticon into a symbol of social control that extends into everyday life for all citizens, not just those in the prison system. He argues that social citizens always internalize authority, which is one source of power for prevailing norms and institutions. A driver, for example, might stop at a red light even when there are no other cars or police present. Even though there are not necessarily any repercussions, the police are an internalized authority- people tend to obey laws because those rules become self-imposed. Foucault saw that there were both positive and negative potentials in this internalization of authority. However, most thinkers today see mostly negative aspects to the Panopticon. There is evidence: in the 1920s that the closest thing to a panopticon prison was built – the Presidio Modelo complex in Cuba, infamous for corruption and cruelty, now abandoned.
The came the internet. Then came cell phones. Then came surveillance cameras. Then came video cameras with audio to monitor your baby to keep him/her safe… the only problem is – that baby monitor creates a Panopticon because the baby quickly figures out that he/she is being monitored and changes his/her behaviour accordingly. Yes, this is happening right now. In effect, that baby is a kind of jail, a state of surveillance that has at its root the desire to control behaviour – I repeat, this is a jail. Recently I read an article in which a baby girl old enough to be conscious of her baby monitor was acting out in ways that made it clear that she knew that she was being monitored and that it was changing her behaviour accordingly.
Here is the title from an article about this:
The Kid Surveillance Complex Locks Parents in a Trap
Minute-by-minute, footstep-by-footstep tracking of children is all too easy and enticing. But everyone’s a prisoner in the parental panopticon.
Constant vigilance, research suggests, does the opposite of increasing teen safety. A University of Central Florida study of 200 teen/parent pairs found that parents who used monitoring apps were more likely to be authoritarian, and that teens who were monitored were not just equally but more likely to be exposed to unwanted explicit content and to bullying. Another study, from the Netherlands, found that monitored teens were more secretive and less likely to ask for help. It’s no surprise that most teens, when you bother to ask them, feel that monitoring poisons a relationship.
My basic message: the Panopticon is a truly evil way for a society to control its members. The more we become aware of it and more we consciously chose not to participate in technology and systems that “are helping you” but trap you in the Panopticon the better. So, concretely, what can you do about reduce the influence of the Panopticon – probably not a lot. But you can reduce how much you allow surveillance into your life and just an importantly reduce the justified rage you feel as the technology and systems around you control more and more of your choices. Here are some ways to “get out of jail”:
- Don’t buy or use a Siri
- Turn off your location tracking on your cell phone
- Use cash as much as possible
- Change your internet browser to one like Duck Duck Go that does not store your choices
- Recognize that all technology to “help” you has a trade off, so best to be careful with any
- Say no to the internet of things
Think I am exaggerating? Read this:
In the next decade, several Internet of Things initiatives will converge to provide the technological foundation to enable our identity and movements to be monitored, tracked, recorded, and archived in such a way that they can be easily retrieved for subsequent comparison and analysis. A combination of six converging trends will usher us into a brave new world in which most devices on the street and in the home will constantly record human activity:
> Mobile phones, especially smartphones open to Wi-Fi networks
> Global Positioning System (GPS) and other location-tracking technology in mobile devices
> Ever-smaller high-resolution security cameras and web cameras
> Facial recognition, gait recognition, license plate tracking, and other personally identifiable tracking technology used in public spaces by law-enforcement agencies
> Life logging, face tagging, and photo sharing on social networks
> Surveillance systems deployed at massive scale by national intelligence agencies
Some of this surveillance will occur with our consent, some of it will take place without permission, and most of it will remain unnoticed by those observed.
By 2025, it is likely that most (or perhaps all!) of human activity in urban centers will be recorded with a degree of precision that is very difficult to imagine today. One reason this notion is hard to accept is that it reverses the experience our grandparents had during the previous century of migration from rural areas to cities. Their experience fostered the conviction that cities are zones of anonymity. Ubiquitous surveillance technology in our time will betray those convictions.
Much has been made of the intrusions into and erosion of personal privacy in the digital domain. We know that the intelligence services of many countries conduct mass-scale electronic surveillance on private communication by citizens. We know that major banks aggregate data about consumer purchase habits and sell it to marketers, big retail chains, and manufacturers. We know the Federal Communications Commission fined telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T for breaking the rules on handling consumer data. And we know that Experian has partnered with Facebook, combining the giant credit reporting agency’s information about financial records, property ownership, credit, and vehicle leases, with the social media network’s data about sexual preferences, relationship status, travel, and hobbies to provide sophisticated customer targeting. Everyone, it seems, is in a rush to vacuum up our personal data.
Several observers, notably journalist Glenn Greenwald in his TED talk “Why Privacy Matters,” have drawn the parallel to the Panopticon, an invention by a peculiar eighteenth-century social reformer named Jeremy Bentham….
What, deep down, is the Panopticon? It’s 1984 come true – it’s Big Brother. And no, I this is no conspiracy theory, just go to China and “enjoy” watching their Social Credit Score surveillance in action. Once last thing, some good news for a change: people aren’t stupid. They eventually figure out that they are being controlled and they hate it and rebel. A case in point, for complex social reasons many youth in China are now “tuning out” and doing their best to escape the rate race. It is called “To lie flat” (tang ping) and “let it rot” (bai lan). These two terms that have become rallying cries for Chinese youths exasperated by the Chinese job market as well as the larger expectations of Chinese society. Since the spring of 2021, users on Chinese social media like Douban, WeChat and Weibo have shared their own stories about how they have left behind careers and ambitions to instead embrace a minimalistic lifestyle with space for free time and self-exploration.
So, let’s join the youth in China and say no to the Panopticon, but first, say no to rage because as I learned while driving around Ottawa, all it did was get me more lost.
References
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kid-surveillance-complex-locks-parents-in-a-trap/
https://vaporizedbook.com/surveillance-society-and-the-opt-in-panopticon-3f0066877a42
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