>But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments – and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans ...
It's interesting to note that the argument made in this post is exactly what Deleuze said two decades after Foucault [1], that the mechanisms of "discipline" are moving outside of enclosed spaces because of the ever-longer trails of data that we leave everywhere.