The Digital Panopticon: Foucault and Internet Privacy

The Digital Panopticon: Foucault and Internet Privacy

In 1977, Michel Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish about the disciplinary mechanisms of

constant and invisible surveillance in part through an analysis of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. The

panopticon was envisioned as a circular prison, in the centre of which resided a guard tower. Along the

circumference, individuals resided in cells that were visible to the guard tower but invisible to each other.

Importantly, this guard tower was backlit, and therefore prisoners were unable to tell for certain whether

they were being watched or not at any given moment. Bentham championed the merits of the

panopticon, conceiving it as a grand tool of social progress wherein distractions would be limited and

productivity whether of the student, the worker, or the prisoner would flourish. Critically, Foucault

considered the panopticon a "compact model of the disciplinary mechanism" whereby people learn to

regulate themselves under the tyranny of total visibility. While the panopticon has 1 largely failed to

materialize architecturally, online surveillance has similarly facilitated the deterioration of privacy and the

normalizing individuation of the public by means of perpetual and invisible examination. I argue that the

digital age has ensconced us in a "digital panopticism" whereby our purchases, behaviors, thoughts,

questions, relations, images our very identities are under perpetual monitor and that such monitoring

functions as a "disciplinary mechanism" as elucidated by Foucault forty years prior.

To explain how pervasive technological surveillance in the present moment functions as a

disciplinary mechanism a

noncorporeal panopticon, if you will it

is important to fi...

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...genous categories of people based on certain aggregate inputs.

When Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, he was considering its social value through

just such a capitalist framework: the framework of productivity. Yet productivity is not the sole marker

of a flourishing society; incessant production subordinates our more human desires for privacy as well as

camaraderie and recognition, replacing them instead with pale commodified substitutes. As privacy is

increasingly undermined and disregarded as a valuable human experience, we risk being blinded by the

same shortsidedness

that seduced Bentham: the seduction of accelerated cycles of production and

consumption. It is worth asking ourselves what is sacrificed in the productive thirst of the modern

panopticon, and how we can envision alternatives to our increasingly global architecture of surveillance