Today’s Digital Panopticon; Imprisoned in our Own Homes?
Imagine you have committed a bad deed, and have been condemned to prison. In a circular building, the cells which you are kept in, brick walls between each prisoner, limits outside fascination to two points: a muted light flashing from the outside world, and the brightly illuminated silhouette of a tall tower on the other side of the bars.
As a prisoner, you know there are guards roaming inside this central tower who may look in any direction and survey the actions of any of the thousands of prisoners in the prison. However, from their cells, a prisoner never knows if they are truly being watched. Jermany Bentham argues that the thought of surveillance itself is enough to create a perfectly efficient system of power; other philosophers believe the invention of the Panopticon, the perfect prison, is only the beginning of justifying the total violation of freedom and dignity.
Bentham’s Panopticon
The father of utilitarianism, Bentham had always been passionate about increasing the good and decreasing the bad. Through letters to his brother during the late 19th century, the English philosopher crafted his manifestation of the perfect manifestation of power, which he believed must be both visible and unverifiable. The circular design of the Panopticon—limiting prisoner interaction and forcing confrontation of the tower—forced prisoners to be confronted by the “Panoptic Tower” (pan- all, optic- seeing). The goal of this tower however was not to increase efficiency to surveillance, but to replace it entirely; in that the inmate may never know whether they are being watched, they must hold presumption that they must always be so. Thus, arrives a system of self-discipline, where all prisoners, fearing surveillance, self-governs to become obedient and good.
Bentham argued that a Panoptic prison system not only saves us dollars of staffing, but it outlines an applicable model of power domination. With prisoners who now “guard themselves” due to constant surveillance, such an illusion demonstrates not just how such power can be used to discipline people, but how the panoptic power is able to coerce individuals into disciplining themselves.
The Panopcticon demonstrates perfect power across four assigned principles:
Pervasiveness. The tower is able to see into every single cell, at any prisoner's action. Thus, one has no choice but to buy-into surveillance, allowing regulation to thrive.
Obscurity. The tower may see into the cells, but the prisoners can never see into the tower, nor is there any communication. Thus, they could never know when, how or why they are being watched.
The use of structural violence. The Panopticon exchanges direct violence for structural violence, eliminating the need for beating, chains, and practical coercion. (Be reminded, however, that the the idea of the tower is massively coercive in and of itself)
Profitability. In that subjugation of prisoners already exists, one is able to employ structural violence to benefit those in power. This looks like forcing prisoners to labor or instrumentalizing for gain, while the tower could be fully empty, with no guards required at all.
With these principles allowing those in power to easily maintain the upper ground, one may question if such a coercive power dynamic is legitimate. Bentham saw this as the whole point; he envisioned this new prison innovation as a model of how society is able to and SHOULD function. To maintain order in our governments and nations, especially in democratic and capitalistic societies, the population must be held accountable through the knowledge of surveillance. As implementation progresses and time continues, a nation would then go on to internalize panoptic power, and police themselves to the degree of normality.
Foucault: Violation and the State
In Bentham’s eyes, this Tyranny was a virtue, and what was even more virtuous, was that people in our modern society didn’t think of it as tyranny at all. In fact, the Panopticon’s coercive nature is what ultimately coerces individuals to take pleasure in being under constant surveillance and even complying with the state's violation of our common freedoms. There is a very evident trade-off between order and one's rights, and to Foucault, such principles wrongly violate them on several levels.
French philosopher Michel Foucault, a major critic of Bentham's Panopticon, outlines the cruelty and extremism of such an efficient technique. Seeing as the goals of such prison only goes to ensure the automatic functioning of power, he claims the contraption as instead a “cruel, ingenious cage” that should have remained merely as a mental concept.
The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. (Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison)
Foucault criticized the principles grounded in the panoptic society Bentham pushed in that it symbolized social control extending to all citizens in society, not just prison inmates. To bring coercive action upon those that never consented into it, and never did wrong, would strip people from their fundamental rights to privacy. Moreover, such panoptic illustrations are easily carried-over to regulate other environments. Using self-regulating power to force children to study, to oversee every floor of a shopping mall, to regulate all employees at their desk jobs; it would be too simple for the powerful to get more power, being easier and easier to instrumentalize almost everyone in society. Foucault argues that order constructed around a concept of self-discipline promotes a surveillance state of worry and self-exploitation; the issue is, such a state is already upon us.
Do we Live in a Digital Panopticon?
1984 by George Orwell's outlines to readers a dystopian society of totalitarianism; one where the government is always watching you, controlling you, regulating your each and every move. From posters of Big Brother, the leader of the all knowing party in power, to thought police, hidden cameras in your living room, and a TV that watches you as you eat dinner, there is no freedom in such a world. However, people don’t fear in 1984. They thrived in meritocracy, chanting propaganda through the streets, working their desk jobs, walking through life with their heads down and their mouths closed shut. An outsider would immediately point out the flaws of such a society and recognize the power of surveillance on the free will of an individual. However, no one is immune to coercion, and as we know if, I would argue that our world isn’t much different to this dystopia we fear.
With the rise of technologie, social media, and data-extraction, the idea of digital censorship and Panopticons of surveillance is present in every single country today. It is clear that countries such as China and North Korea embrace this idea of self-discipline, molding their citizens in line with eyes through each phone screen. However, acknowledge that western powers too resemble the Panopticon more than we think. With a visual but unverifiable account of power, one can never verify if the government does steal our data. Intelligence agencies across western nations are able to easily track down our every move, identify actions in accordance with our internet actively, and provide a line by line recount of our past week based on the conversations heard through our cell phones. We are able to look up at parliament hill, at the white house, where our democratic leaders stand tall and promise us protection and freedoms, while they may, in reality, be the ones violating our freedoms.
However, the Digital Panopticon we live in grounds itself can be identified in our physical lives as well. When the police ask us for our address and name, we do not hesitate in providing the exact information required for them to steal our identities and break into our house. Where offices for workers become more open and spacious, this doesn’t only create a more worker friendly environment, but a more management friendly one too. Through religion, science and statistics, as well as the capitalist nature of our lives, we are told what we have to do under a veil of freedom and autonomy. We believe we have free choice, when the reality is, what we want under the neoliberal world becomes what we are SUPPOSED to want. The self-perpetuating and everyday version of the Panopticon is so effective in drawing labor and promoting self-regulation, because it doesn’t feel like tyranny at all. Citizens are willing to trade off the security of their data so Tiktok can manifest better content for them. We now take PLEASURE in being under surveillance. It isn’t something we are concerned about, rather something we actively enjoy and self-perpetuate.
Foucault believes this is what the modern state does; it concentrates a cultural norm of self-censorship and normalizes a digital panopticon that requires individuals to step into line themselves in order to avoid pain and seek pleasure. The modern state is Betham’s worst nightmare—one where individuals cannot then differentiate pleasure from pain, cannot conceptualize what is exploitation, what is discipline, and what is freedom. Society has evolved from physical disciplinary structures of prisons and executions, to physical panopticons, to digital and societal panopticons operating from our screens and the norms created in today's world. We no longer require Big Brother to scrutinize our every move, because we’ve become Big Brother ourselves.
