Panopticon

With Shenzhen’s new 5G/gigapixel systems rolling out in the subway, grocery stores, cross walks, apartment entries, and even KFC’s I realize both can be true.

The essential breakthrough of panopticon was using uncertainty as a multiplier, pushing people to act in fear of surveillance far more often than they're actually surveilled. That's an accurate description of getting dog-piled for a random tweet, but it increasingly doesn't reflect modern surveillance or even sousveillance.

A government can tap webtraffic to monitor everyone who searches for privacy tools, or put up a Great Firewall with known holes and track the people who bypass it. Lately, even random individuals can automate things like finding everyone who liked a tweet they disagree with, then searching their profiles for anything that might spark outrage. Even the ubiquity of videocameras represents a change from Foucault's era, since so much that's not a problem at the time is recorded and scrutinized later.

A lot of his ideas about the psychological impact of panopticon still apply, since consequences for this sort of thing are not applied consistently. But it seems important to note that observers who used to be constrained by perception are now constrained by agency, and so can more actively select which misdeeds to react to.

The same concept for years here was used in traffic light cameras, although they're really commonplace nowadays, in the past the traffic authority only had a relatively small number of actual cameras, but the camera boxes at intersections were fixed in place. You would never know if the camera at any particular time was in there, so everyone slowed down, took their time, and behaved at those intersections regardless.

Then there are satellites orbiting overhead. Maybe not a concern for you and I, but real-time, high resolution footage of basically any location on the planet is at the fingertips of many countries' agencies. You don't know if anyone's looking at you at any time, but just knowing that up there in the sky could be hidden eyes watching is a massive deterrent if you're trying to, I dunno, secretly mobilise an army, or move piles of drugs to a secret warehouse.

The US government invested a lot of time and money designing blimps that would be equipped with sensitive radio receivers and gigapixel cameras, that can float at high altitude virtually invisible to the naked eye while powerful onboard computers use image recognition to classify and track every moving object within a city (oddly called ISIS - Integrated Sensor is Structure).

The best part is you don't need to actually build and deploy these things, or if you do you don't need total coverage, just the very shadow of a threat of being observed secretly from afar is an really economical approach to getting large masses of people to fall into line. Knowing that it's possible is enough to raise the question of whether or not it's already been done.

From a supermarket to space, the panopticon pattern is nested and stacked under, over and around us in ways that we sometimes barely even recognise or know exist. Probably not a big issue for the most part if you're not up to anything nefarious, undoubtedly in many instances it's of benefit to productivity and society at large. But sometimes governments can turn nefarious, or you get an asshole boss, and then it becomes a problem for people.

So yeah I don't think you're weird thinking that open plan offices resemble a panopticon, though to make it work the boss needs his own side entry and a way of looking out while no one can look in. Add a loudspeaker so they can yell at people on the floor if they think they're being slack, and you have a warehouse I once worked in.

I do seriously doubt many of these workplaces made a conscious decision to build a panopticon, but it's apparently a natural product of a distrusting, cunning intellect.

I propose that the modern panopticon are Facebook and Twitter, where anything you say, in any conversation and context, stays recorded forever and can be used against you at a later time- so you may damn well be very careful. And the irony of it is that the hidden guards are no one else than our collective selves.

Religion promises to surveil you all the time. This stretches far beyond any one faith: the Abrahamic God is omniscient, karma is a direct consequence of each action, Anubis measures the whole of your life by the weight of your heart. Even Santa Claus, who is absolutely a religious figure to children, "sees you when you're sleeping" and "knows when you're awake".

Panopticon relies on the threat of surveillance. You could be surveilled at any moment without knowing it, resulting in constant self-consciousness. This is the logic of security cameras and secret police. If Santa corresponds to a god, panopticon is more like Elf on a Shelf. That's not just anecdotal, it's made very clear when a kid does breaks a rule behind a closed door because "then the elf can't see me".

The claim made by religion is far bolder. You might commit or witness an unpunished crime and realize that it's possible to misbehave without judgement, but you can't sin sneakily or find an example of someone getting away with sin unpunished. However, religion's claim isn't necessarily more coercive. Panopticon threatens arbitrary judgement. You might commit a venial sin and trust that a life of piety will outweigh it, but panopticon judges you on arbitrary moments. Even a minor, widely committed crime like speeding carries some risk of a harsh punishment.

(Calvin and Hobbes, of all things, takes this on quite insightfully. Calvin theorizes Santa relies on panopticon rather than omniscience, and changes his plans accordingly: https://imgur.com/VUhe8vG.)

Social media is a panopticon, recreating patterns we used to associate with inquisitors and town gossips. (What would Mrs. Grundy say - if she happened to find out?) Mostly, no one's watching closely, and unless someone actively documents what you say it can be deleted later. But anyone tweeting an offensive joke might get cancelled, regardless of their good works, if someone happens to notice.

Data processing is, or soon will be, religion made manifest. A sufficient power can surveil everyone at once, weigh up all their deeds, and choose who to punish. And full-take storage means the end of safety; what's recorded and found blameless today can be evaluated again in 10 or 50 years under different rules. That's pretty much unprecedented, and I don't think we've grappled with the implications.

https://www.academia.edu/11274021/Cipolla_-The_Basic_Laws_of...

For the sake of discussion; One could watch new inmates like a hawk for an initial probationary period and enact disciplinary action should they reveal themselves as described.

In fact, taking the idea to its (awful) logical conclusion, randomly enacting disciplinary action in the initial period regardless of inmate behaviour would prove effective. "Beatings will continue until morale improves" I believe is the saying.

There are actually plenty of adversarial situations in which it's beneficial to give yourself a handicap in order to win. If you're playing "chicken" (where you drive cars at each other and whoever turns away first loses) you can blindfold yourself and remove the steering wheel. If you're doing Mutually Assured Destruction, you can set up an automatic retaliation system which you are unable to pause or cancel. By removing some of your options, you can effectively signal to your opponents so that they are forced to respond to your strategy.

Similarly, it can be beneficial to act "irrationally", because if your opponents are rational actors, they won't even try the strategy against you. E.g. If I know you will "irrationally" come for revenge after the fact even to your own detriment despite the fact that it won't fix anything, I might not try something against you in the first place.

they had limited resources but high enough punishment to keep the population in check